What do you think of the phrase "Franzenfreude"?

I think in German it literally means "joy in Franzen." But I'm no stranger to literary envy and am in no position to deplore it in others.

There's been discussion in the Salon Reading Club about which character in "Freedom" most represents you. Which one is it?

All four characters draw equally on my experience of life, though I admit to having a particular fondness for the youngest of them.

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Is that stupid? Quite! Except there's a caveat. The phenomenon referred to by "Franzenfreude" -- the idea that the highbrow book world reserves its highest praise and most fawning attention for the works of men -- is absolutely true. It just happens that Jonathan Franzen is a terrible poster boy for that problem.

Franzen writes gorgeous women. Fleshed-out, interesting, three-dimensional, vivid women, women with brains. He writes for them, too, and perhaps most important of all, he reads them. When, at a Brooklyn Book Festival panel, someone asked him what he was reading, he replied, "Edith Wharton." To the follow-up question of what should we, his audience, be reading, he listed several books, all by female authors, including the "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," of which, up to that point, I hadn't even heard. (Then I read it. It was good!)

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This is not, however, as much Walter's story as it is his wife Patty's. One of the great ironies of the Oprah Book Club scandal of 2001 is how devoted Franzen actually is to creating complex female characters. "Freedom," I would argue, is written very much for women readers, much more than "The Corrections" ever was (so I'm not surprised that  Oprah has picked it for the her next Book Club), and much more for those readers than it is for the critics who are falling all over themselves to praise it (and I'm not bucking that trend). 

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As always, I'll toss a few topics out in this introduction, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments. Now's your last chance to get in any questions you may have for Jonathan Franzen. He'll being answering them next week.

I'm a little ambivalent about the ending of "Freedom." While it was definitely satisfying to see Walter and Patty reunited, part of me thinks it's not very realistic. But perhaps that's the point; if those characters had done what most divorced couples do and kept moving on to new lives, they'd be exercising the American-style freedom about which Franzen is clearly so ambivalent. He doesn't really show us how they manage to patch things up, which I find a bit mysterious, but I assume that it has something to do with both of them (but especially Patty) wanting to make right what they'd gotten so terribly wrong. Walter got the chance to fall apart (formerly Patty's job) and Patty got to rescue him. (And poor Lalitha got a bird sanctuary named after her.)

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Naturally, these unrealistic modern Achilles types must have some "likable" flaw, which is almost worse. It leads to the aesthetic of "quirkiness," which has brought such success to Jonathan Safran Foer and Wes Anderson (probably the two masters of the modern safe-quirk genre).

I might point out that "The Corrections" was in some sense a morality tale, the classic American story of trying to get all the kids home for one last Christmas with the family. Well, not all literature has to be dangerous or extremely challenging, but frankly when I think of most modern American "literary" books, the epithet "cowardly" comes to mind. Paul Auster is a good example of an obviously talented (or even very talented) writer who simply can't break free of certain strictures. All of his books have good sections and the prose overall is enviable, but the end result is unsatisfying.

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As before, I'm going to start the discussion with a few questions and observations, but, as always, feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just try to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after "Enough Already," so you don't spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven't gotten to Page 382 yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. Finally, if you have questions for Jonathan Franzen himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll be interviewing him at the end of the month.

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He was gone soon after.

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I'm going to kick off the discussion with a few questions and observations, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just remember to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after Page 187, so you don't spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven't gotten to Page 187 yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. (Personally, I'm not the kind of reader who minds being tipped off to future plot points, so if you're like me, dive in.) And remember, if you have questions for Jonathan Franzen himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll be interviewing him at the end.

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Over the course of the past month, we've also been collecting your questions for Cronin -- about, among other things, his fascination with the end of the world, President Obama and the meaning of the word "wicking." Here are his answers.

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As before, I'm going to start the discussion with a few questions and observations, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Fortunately, we no longer have to guard against spoilers and can discuss what will be a revelation for many -- this is just the first book in a project series (probably a trilogy). Remember, if you haven't finished the book yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. Once again, if you have questions for Justin Cronin himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll shortly be forwarding them directly to him. Can we agree that we're free to ask him about anything in "The Passage," and Salon will put a spoiler alert on the interview to warn off the uninitiated?

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What makes "The Passage" different from "Buffy" is that the TV show ultimately imagined a soul as something material that was transported wholesale out of a body once a person became a vampire. With two notable exceptions, you could not simultaneously be a vampire and have a soul. The novel seems to represent the soul as something perhaps more nebulous. Why do the virals return home? Why was infected Arlo staring at Dora and not eating her? Do the virals retain a trace of their humanity?

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Players would have to worry about the battery level for the night lights, earthquakes, dreams, daylight. So many things, and the book provides many weapons. I can just see it now, going to the library and meeting a swarm of flyers. Pick your weapon and the prize is finding the hidden supply of fancy guns. Well, actually the prize is surviving.

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As before, I'm going to start the discussion with a few questions and observations, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just remember to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after Page 494 so you don't spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven't gotten to Page 494 yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. Finally, if you have questions for Justin Cronin himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll be interviewing him at the end of the month.

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I happened to start the book while hanging out with my nine year old son during our official "offline" hour. Just for family fun I started by reading the first few pages aloud to him, which very much seem to be written for a precocious child.

We've read a lot of big books together. "Harry Potter" of course, and "His Dark Materials." Like Cronin's daughter, my son is a voracious reader and read all seven "Harry Potter" books in two months when he was eight.

I'm well into part 1. And realized pretty soon that this might not be the best book for a 9 year old. Even if he's going on 10. But last night during offline hour I had to wrestle it away from him. And I have a feeling this might become a regular occurrence.

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Part of the fun of "The Passage" is that, unlike, say, the vulnerable boy in "The Road," the hope represented by Amy is not simply her innocence and youth. She can talk to the animals, man! Not to complain; I liked the zoo scene. You never know if dark, grouchy Cormac McCarthy will off the kid, but Cronin makes the reader a promise with Amy. I don't think that promise undercuts Wolgast's internal struggle. It just lets you know, whew, Hollywood is ultimately in charge of this one. (I strongly doubt Amy is a red herring. Spielberg will direct.) I agree the best scene is the carnival.

Obviously "The Road" has deeper themes and will likely stay with the reader longer. But Cronin makes a story of how we got there, which McCarthy leaves dark. And it's an interesting, believable yarn. Cronin does a good job of projecting our paranoid security state into the future. I liked the progression of ever more secret inner circles suggested by Richards, with the government trying to evade its own security for more secret purposes as the agents flee with Amy.

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Of time, Grey realizes that:

"He’d thought it was one thing but it was actually another. It wasn’t a line but a circle, and even more; it was a circle made of circles made of circles, each lying on top of the other, so that every moment was next to every other moment, all at once." (Chapter Thirteen)

As I read, I find myself wondering about this idea of time in terms of plot and its implication for the clairvoyance some characters seem to possess. But mostly, I see this passage as a kind of blueprint for reading the novel with its many characters and story lines.

It is not surprising that death would be ubiquitous in an apocalyptic novel but Cronin compellingly blends ordinary death with the extraordinary. Wolgast discovers a primal knowledge of death: "To die, his body told him. To die. That is why we live, to die" (Chapter 17). Carter’s last fully human thought is his realization that "it is good to die," an epiphany so strong that "when he thought this, for a second he was Anthony again. It was good to die. There was a lightness in it, a letting go, like love" (Chapter Twelve). Clearly, the message is that it is human to die and death gives us our humanity.

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I'm going to kick off the discussion with a few questions and observations, but please feel free to take the conversation wherever you like in the comments thread. Just remember to restrain yourselves from discussing anything that happens after Page 246 so you don't spoil the story for everybody else. And it should go without saying that if you haven't gotten to Page 246 yet and don't want to be spoiled, then don't read any further. (Personally, I'm not the kind of reader who minds being tipped off to future plot points, so if you're like me, dive in.) And remember, if you have questions for Justin Cronin himself, don't forget to post them, since we'll be interviewing him at the end.

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Cronin has previously published two conventional literary novels and won a PEN/Hemingway award for one of them. This means that he writes quietly refined sentences and can incise all the finer details of character that make a fictional person seem like someone you'd actually know instead of merely a representative Cop or Scientist or Lawyer. "The Passage" begins a little like a Raymond Carver story, describing how the novel's enigmatic central figure, Amy Harper Bellafonte, came to be. She's the product of a brief liaison between a traveling salesman and a waitress in an Iowa diner known to locals as "the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself."

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