Jonathan Franzen's work is marked, in Stephen Burn's view, by a “double vision,” and the same is true of Burn's new study. Not only is this the first monograph on Franzen's emergent oeuvre, it is also a major intervention in the nascent critical field of “post-postmodern” literature. In an excellent opening chapter on “American Fiction at the Millennium,” Burn offers an eloquent defense of this ugly phrase to describe a key strand of contemporary fiction, and places Franzen alongside Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace as his three main exemplars of post-postmodern literature. Burn constructs a lineage from the work of the postmodernists (of whom he makes many new and valuable observations) to their generational successors. While allowing for different emphases among his three main writers, particularly in how they handle the legacy of metafictional self-reference, he delivers a convincing account of the concerns and stylistic traits they share, and how these reveal “an implicit dialogue” (30), and a “degree of overlap and separation” (17), with their postmodernist heritage.

The following four chapters focus primarily on Franzen. The first covers his early life, juvenalia, and minor scientific writings, and Burn does trojan archival work here, providing an indispensable bibliographical resource for future scholars. Inevitably, given the virgin territory he is working in, there is sometimes a sense of Burn striving to get in every bit of his research, so the ratio of detail to insight is lower here than elsewhere in the study. Burn really comes into his own when it comes to the fiction, which is discussed in the final three chapters, each dealing with one of Franzen's novels. Franzen's “double vision,” the “underlying principles” of his work, are “division and its flipside, synthesis” (31), and it is through this lens, in addition to the engagement with postmodernism, that Burn primarily explores Franzen's texts. Among other qualities, this approach offers a valuable counterweight to the critical tendency to read Franzen's essays as the keys to his fiction. For Burn there is a crucial distinction between the forms: “In his essays, Franzen frequently expresses his divided feelings about a subject, or presents an opposition, but he nearly always reaches some kind of resolution by the end of the essay … But within his novels such oppositions are never resolved with this kind of ease” (48–49).

Burn concentrates, therefore, on elucidating the formal aspects of the fiction, and demonstrates them to be more complex and tightly worked than previous critics have recognized. He has an admirable eye for aligning technical details with larger themes, and many an offbeat observation (of a hidden anagram, for instance, or a typographical nuance) opens up an unexpectedly rich reading. Burn's larger critical arguments are often striking too: particularly interesting is his exploration of Franzen's use of “temporal form” – “a radical fusion of formalist and contentist impulses” (80) – which he contrasts with Joseph Frank's conception of the “spatial form” that characterizes modernist (and, Burn claims, postmodernist) literature.

Unsurprisingly, Burn spends most time and space on The Corrections, the novel to which Franzen most owes his current fame. His argument here is that previous critics have not appreciated the book's careful narrative construction and the challenges it offers to conventional ways of understanding literary character in particular. Given that Franzen's novel was heralded by many as a return to character in contemporary writing, Burn's intervention here is significant, and his section on “Fictions of the Self” is probably the most valuable piece of Corrections criticism yet. His larger argument about the influence of postmodernism upon Franzen is also strongest in this chapter, with DeLillo and Gaddis explored as the novel's direct precursors. The chapter, and book, ends with a powerful reiteration of the post-postmodernist framework, and Burn's placement of Franzen within this framework will offer a crucial and unavoidable reference point for all who follow in his critical wake. Matching close reading with literary-historical breadth, Burn has exploited a large range of scholarly methods and techniques, and in doing so has created an impressively twenty-first-century critical study of a twenty-first-century author.