Franzen’s Dickensian ambitions do not stop there: the mother, Anabel, is a fully fledged Miss Havisham and there are, to boot, no shortage of far-fetched coincidences and shamelessly melodramatic plot twists as Pip tries to unravel the mystery of her disputed parentage. Purity calls herself Pip and the great expectations placed upon her are a recurrent theme. Purity Tyler is making a duty telephone call to the latest of the author’s maternal monsters who, we learn, has saddled her daughter not only with that name, but also the lifetime of unrealistic demands it represents. This novel opens, reassuringly, with one of those pitch-perfect mother and child conversations that are a Franzen signature tune. His protagonists are always in hock to the unintended consequences of past actions and the life into which they were born an anxiety that becomes symptomatic of a wider sense of American disquiet. It is hard to read any of his books without the echo of Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse somewhere in the background. He consistently rejects the American dream of individuals as authors of their own destiny, however much his characters aspire to it. His primary emotional landscape as a writer is that of the frustrations of duty, the refusal of the past to go away and, above all, of guilt at the impossibility of living up to parental or romantic ideals. Franzen remains a wonderful satirical observer of the minutiae of middle American life, in particular as expressed in the complexity of familial relationships. That redeeming humour also casts a light over every tribulation here. Similar ludic qualities tempered the anger of Franzen’s second major book, Freedom, almost 10 years in the writing – anger directed against the forced polarities of George W Bush’s America.
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