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“... deluded. A moral view of humanity simply offers less accurate models for predicting behaviour. Jonathan Franzen has praised the book for staking out ‘territory which, until his arrival, you would never have guessed it was vital to read about’. Orwell wrote that ‘Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them always in ...”

“... facts, dwelling distractingly on the lifestyles of the rich at the expense of their inner life. Jonathan Franzen does something similar in The Corrections, where the thoughts of an investment banker are rendered in the voice of a disaffected New York fiction writer. Jennings, on the other hand, actually worked as a speechwriter for two large downtown ...”

“... as an unearthly, glistening iceberg, pure and whole, the plague can be beautiful. The cruise ship, Jonathan Franzen told the Paris Review in 2010, is ‘emblematic of our time’. I doubted this, despite the witty reportage of David Foster Wallace’s essay on their ‘nearly lethal comforts’ and the high artistry of ...”

“... Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just crack one of his bleeping books! Try ...”

“... low, Larson admits an unexpected visitor: a rat who offers him a Faustian bargain in the voice of Jonathan Franzen. It’s an immensely enjoyable story: King is at his best writing about the creative process, and seems energised by the preposterousness of his titular rat. Like ‘Mr Harrigan’s Phone’, ‘Rat’ is focused and efficient, goofy and ...”

“... references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or ...”

“... at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then Jonathan Franzen, at the time (1991) something of a desperate character himself, came across that novel on a shelf at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in upstate New York. When Franzen later wrote an impassioned plea for the ...”

“... to warn of a ‘leakage of waste water’ from the local power plant. Like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and many other young novelists, Moody yokes together a number of apparently disparate elements: an intimacy with the politics of popular culture, a fascination with bizarre, paranoid visions, a feel for family detail. He may be the most ...”

“... work. And yet, almost miraculously, it isn’t either of those things, because Meloy (unlike, say, Jonathan Franzen) has such a sure handle on what to leave out. Her style is impressively unshowy: it’s not even showily unshowy, not seeing the need to draw attention to its pared-down restraint. The New Yorker left her off its fanfare-y list this summer ...”

“... Marcus is a writer in an antique mode: the modern. Even those writers of his cohort, such as Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, who publicly cursed the prophets Gaddis, Barthelme, Barth and Coover, forsaking the structural feints and syntactical feats of the 1960s and 1970s, would be mauled by the millennium, by a bearish market more interested ...”

“... but boneheaded online left. She avoids the rote caricatures of Middle American conservatism that Jonathan Franzen used in Freedom. She rejects the easy idea that responsibility for Trump lies with Facebook or social justice warriors. She reminds us of the destructive socioeconomic path the country has followed since Reagan. Her narrator wonders if the ...”

“... control pills.)The naughtiest thought I had while reading was that the novel recalls the work of Jonathan Franzen. Among young writers online, this is more controversial than any sex thing you can come up with. But less au courant readers will find the careful rendering of emotional detail, and sweeping narrative arc, comfortingly familiar from other ...”

“... posture towards the laity. ‘The writer leads, he doesn’t follow,’ he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen in 1995. ‘The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously … A reduced ...”

“... of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be topical, to dramatise ...”

“... She writes about and redeems ordinary life, ordinary people – ‘people people people’, as Jonathan Franzen puts it. Ordinary people turn out to live in a rural corner of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort. Occasionally ...”