In his 2002 essay “Handling the Media, Surviving The Corrections: Jonathan Franzen and the Fate of the Author,” Christopher Ribbat traces Jonathan Franzen's commercial and critical success to the fact that his fiction finds an “especially comfortable middle position” between the textual games of the postmodern, “Pynchonesque” novel, on the one hand, and the direct simplicity of neorealism, on the other. Central to this so-called “comfortable middle position” is a certain emotional import or charge, which, according to Ribbat, is markedly present in the work of generational peers such as David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey Eugenides. In response to Ribbat, who is notably one of the earliest academics to make specific note of Franzen's work, Robert McLaughlin also identifies an “aesthetic sea change” crystallizing in American literature since the late 1980s, one which was notably led by Franzen, and which was ultimately motivated by the “desire to reconnect language to the social sphere” and to “reenergize literature's social mission” as well as its ability to “intervene in the social world.”Footnote ¹

To this end, Franzen's fictional work avowedly represents the “inclusive social novel” by way of raising certain socially symbolic concerns and aspirations typically associated with the classic realist novel. His novelist work, in other words, solicits a series of questions which are central to the understanding not only of modern-day American fiction, but also of contemporary culture in the US and elsewhere. Yet despite the wider social significance of Franzen's fiction, there is little noteworthy or in-depth scholarship dedicated to his work in its entirety. Seeking to remedy this significant gap, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation analyses each of Franzen's five novels chronologically, beginning with The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), through to The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010) and finally Purity (2015). Hidalga interrogates the various formal and ideological perspectives animating Franzen's fictional oeuvre in relation to pressing social issues, including the viability of the novel as a form of mass entertainment today; the cultural and political status of the socially engaged writer, and more specifically of the white straight novelist in the face of the perceived compartmentalization of American culture; the possibility of exerting effective political critique in the age of capitalism; the alleged exhaustion of postmodernist fiction; and the pertinence – or mere feasibility – of an updated realist social novel in our postmodern times; as well as the practicability, or even conceivability, of truly transformative political action in our age.

Critically central to Hidalga's incisive interpretation of Franzen's fiction is the concept of salvation; which, he effectively argues, is typical of the socially redemptive and personally reconciliatory Romance narrative. From the outset, Hidalga is hence aware that, if the concept of realism and, likewise, romance are going to be pivotal in the analysis of Franzen's novels, he must attempt to restore to them at least part of their complexity and historicity, as well as their social and political implications. Throughout his introduction, the author thus makes very telling and effective reference to a variety of Marxist critics in order to contour the cultural connotations of Franzen's literary evolution towards realism and romance. He critically engages with the likes of Erich Auerbach, György Lukács, Peter Brooks and Fredric Jameson, who altogether support and legitimize this approach to Franzen's work through the “salvational or redemptive” lens of realism, romance and community.Footnote ²

Romance becomes, then, the fundamental premise for Hidalga's detailed and critical analyses of Franzen's fiction across the main body of this book. Such an approach to Franzen's work – that is, through the lens of a full concept of romance and, in turn, realism – of course generates a more considerate and complicated account of the writer than anything that has preceded it. It is, all in all, a reading that does not lend itself easily to the application of generalizing labels. Hidalga's rather innovate stylistic interpretation and discussion of Franzen's fiction thereby effectually represent a productive move in terms of how we might appreciate the cultural context from which Franzen's literary effort can best be understood.