Families disrupted
Tolstoy's dictum that "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is played out in each of these fine novels. The dysfunctional family in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections mirrors the dysfunctions of the wider society. In this, his third novel, Franzen pulls off a hat trick, successfully combining domestic drama (à la John Updike), black comedy (à la Philip Roth) and postmodern satire (à la William Gaddis)--with just a hint of Thomas Pynchon's social paranoia.
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