While working on “The Corrections” a quarter-century ago, Franzen began to feel crushed by “the burden of news-bringing” that the socially aware novelist shoulders.

The author’s customary craft succeeded only in giving it a kind of carpentered entropy the overall production felt improbable to the point of risibility. Secret blood ties existed among its characters, but the book was missing the usual Franzen hearth and heart. “ Purity” (2015) was a weaker and darker novel, a lurch into thriller territory that involved a long-covered-up Cold War-era murder, loose nuclear weapons and a WikiLeaks-like project in a Bolivian river valley.

(The holidays are no small matter in Franzen’s books.) Like a latter-day George Eliot, Franzen can light up large thematic skies but also keep his eye on the sparrow - or, in “ Freedom” (2010), the cerulean warbler, a symbol of environmental fragility that soldiers through its seasonal migrations while the tormented Berglund family, buffeted by everything from construction noise to the Iraq war, continue their flights away from and back toward one another.Ī decade earlier, in “ The Corrections” (2001), the first of Franzen’s novels to reach a large audience, the vividly individualized Lamberts were credibly ensnared by Big Pharma, looming tech addiction and puritanical academe, as they fought a more personal battle with a father’s Parkinson’s disease and coped with a mother’s campaign to get everyone home for Christmas. Ample but intimate, each over 500 pages, the books brim with global and political preoccupations even as their primary power derives from the alternating currents of family devotion and repulsion. The replete works of Jonathan Franzen now include six novels.

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