Book review: The End of the End of the Earth, by Jonathan Franzen

I tend of think of Jonathan Franzen as being younger than he is. This may be partly because he has written only five novels. All the same, it’s a surprise to think that he will be 60 next year. His novels are good, serious and very readable in the sturdy, American middlebrow tradition of writers like Sinclair Lewis, John P Marquand and James Gould Cozzens. Franzen himself is an old-style WASP, “raised,” he writes, “with a Midwestern horror of yakking about myself.” Happily he has overcome the horror. As an essayist published in the New Yorker he has become accustomed to yakking about himself, and doing so agreeably.