Books: Great Expectations

Here's how you know you have written one of the year's most anticipated novels. In the spring your publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, distributes 3,500 advance copies to reviewers and booksellers. Each comes with a note from your celebrated editor, Jonathan Galassi, the head of Farrar, Straus, who calls your book one of the best that his house, also home to Tom Wolfe, Scott Turow and the poet Seamus Heaney, has issued in 15 years. Next there's a movie deal from the producer Scott Rudin, whose credits include Wonder Boys and A Civil Action. Then you get a dust-jacket photo lit in a way that turns your facial bones into Alpine escarpments. You also get a good-size spread--this one--in TIME, the magazine your late father always wanted to see you in. And in that story you get a sentence he would have loved: The Corrections is one of the great books of the year.

A tragicomic ensemble story about a combustible family, The Corrections ($26; 568 pages) has the absorbing treacheries of married life, the comic squalors of cruise-ship travel and the shenanigans of global capitalism. It also has language that builds in powerful, rolling strides. And it has characters, the separately unraveling Lamberts, who get very deeply under your skin. So who can blame the amiable and soft-spoken author, Jonathan Franzen, if he sounds a little cheeky these days? "You can get a million people to read your book in this country," he says. "It's not a tiny audience for fiction. It's not chamber music."

But even while he says this you can see the doubts digging tunnels under his composure. Because this, after all, is the same Jonathan Franzen who nine years ago was almost ready to call it quits as a fiction writer, figuring that not only was he at the end of his rope but so was the novel in general. When his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, he was just 29. The intricate tale of a vengeful woman hired from Bombay to become police chief of St. Louis, Mo., it got good reviews and decent sales for a first novel but never made a dent in the national conversation.

Four years later, the same benign neglect greeted his next book, Strong Motion, about toxic subterfuges carried out by a Boston chemical firm. "Sixty reviews in a vacuum," as he later put it. Franzen began to wonder if literary fiction were going the way of the lyric poem, a deluxe specimen of cultural product enjoyed only by the happy few. When, he asked himself, was the last time an ambitious novel achieved the name recognition of Portnoy's Complaint, to say nothing of Catch-22?

It didn't help that Franzen had produced both books while living a writer's life of discipline and isolation, one that made him feel out of touch with the wider world. After he graduated from Swarthmore in 1981 with a degree in German, he and his wife Valerie Cornell, also an aspiring novelist, had lived in the Boston suburb of Somerville. For years, their days were devoted to writing, their nights to reading. On weekends he worked at Harvard's geology department, tracking earthquakes. By 1994 his marriage had fallen apart.