He didn’t write it for his mother, who he says “became a full, amazing person in the last years of her life,” exactly, but he’s taken a significant departure with it-keeping an eye on the sort of story she might have enjoyed by taking a kinder tack toward his characters. His upcoming novel, Crossroads, is meant to be different. Crossroads is very much an event. The anger he’s long harbored, manifested in everything from his self-admitted road rage to his vocal hatred of social media, informed his five previous novels, from his 1988 debut, The Twenty-Seventh City, to 2015’s Purity, he says. Jonathan Franzen, With Mom in Mind, Softens His Edge The bestselling novelist talks about his latest book, ‘Crossroads,’ and taking a more compassionate stance toward his charactersand. I enjoyed Crossroads quite a lot, and look forward to the next installment in the series but my fear is that Franzen will write a very long and ambitious.

A homemaker who died of cancer in 1999, his mother, Irene, continues to be influential in the author’s life. “You must have observed the person carefully and you must have identified what’s likely to hurt the most, and then there’s the rhetorical challenge of delivering the painful blow without having your fingerprints on it,” he says. The guitar-strumming Tanner is mellow people still joke that this tape will. “It requires a high level of subtlety,” says the 62-year-old novelist from his home in Santa Cruz, California. Jonathan Franzen first read Paula Foxs novel Desperate Characters (1970) twenty-one years after it was published, at a time when he was losing confidence. In Crossroads, without overdoing things, he has nicely textured the last, confused years of the Age of Aquarius. Jonathan Franzen’s mother knew how to wound him in just the right way.

Franzen crossroads review