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I wont start with Franzen, because nobody needs that.
So lets just start with the women.
Who knew that could still happen?
In the years since,Goon Squadhas sold 875,000 copies,a bonanza for literary fiction.
The same year asGoon Squad,Jonathan FranzensFreedomwas also steamrolling its way across the literary landscape.
It was a finalist for the L.A.TimesBook Prize and the NBCC Award, the prizes thatGoon Squadtook home.
Critics argued over its place in the canon above or belowThe Corrections?
Goodbye to all that.
Five years afterFreedom, Franzens next novel,Purity, sold only about a quarter as many copies.
Its a collection only in the sense that the 2010s were an era.
Mostly its marked by a refusal to cater to any one notion of what makes a classic.
That, and the fact that we paid it loads of money and attention.
(Call her the Foer of the 2010s.
Yes, there were certainly men whose work made giant ripples.
Anthony Doerrs Pulitzer PrizewinningAll the Light We Cannot Seespent a gobsmacking 130 weeks on the New YorkTimesbestseller list.
Anthony Marras 2013 Chechen war novelA Constellation of Vital Phenomenawas a personal favorite of mine.
Whitehead landed on the cover ofTime, the first author after Franzen to do so.
Sally Rooney led a millennial revolution in realist storytelling with just two novels.
Maybe the times have actually changed.
Brilliant female novelists were thought of an anomalies, lone wolves, genre-specialists.
A Patricia Highsmith here, a Muriel Spark there.
Never were enough of them admitted past the gates to constitute a pack.
Women, it was implied, worked in dioramas while men produced life-size sets.
Whether by accident or design, this state of affairs favors disparate voices, female and non-white.
Post-2010, there is no queen of the castle, no equivalent to that circle of Jonathans.
Because who wants to blend in, anyway?
They want more Rachels and Hilarys and Jesmyns and Sallys, and definitely a Jennifer.
