He does it with stylish, sophisticated storytelling.
“… gorgeously crafted … The Lincoln Highway deftly shifts between first- and third-person narration … Towles binds the novel with compassion and scrupulous detail: his America brims with outcasts scrambling over scraps from the Emerald City, con artists behind the curtain, the innocents they exploit … Examining the dynamics of race, class and gender, Towles draws a line between the social maladies of then and now, connecting the yearnings of his characters with our own volatile era. Oh William! explores William and Lucy’s relationship, past and present, with impressive nuance and subtlety … You needn’t have read Strout’s previous books about Lucy Barton to appreciate this one-though, chances are, you’ll want to … Being privy to the innermost thoughts of Lucy Barton-and, more to the point, deep inside a book by Strout-makes readers feel safe. What Strout is trying to get at here-how the past is never truly past, the lasting effects of trauma, and the importance of trying to understand other people despite their essential mystery and unknowability-is neither as straightforward nor as simple as at first appears. “… a novel-cum-fictional memoir, a form that beautifully showcases this character’s tremendous heart and limpid voice … Lucy’s determination to tell her personal story honestly and without embellishment evokes Hemingway, but also highlights fiction’s special access to emotional truths … A memoir, fictional or otherwise, is only as interesting as its central character, and Lucy Barton could easily hold our attention through many more books. This time that bog is shot through with intimations of light.” The character who cracks this novel fully open-she’s one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction-is Marion, Russ’s wife … The Franzen-shaped hole in our reading lives is like a bog that floods at roughly eight-year intervals. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations … Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events-a car wreck, rape, suicide attempts, adultery, drug deals, arson-that arrive only slowly, as if revealed in sunlight creeping steadily across a lawn … Franzen threads these stories, and their tributaries, so adeptly and so calmly that at moments he can seem to be on high-altitude, nearly Updikean autopilot. Crossroads is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. “ mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker.
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