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2024 reads, #70. DID NOT FINISH. Back at the start of this millennium, I was as big a fan of Jonathan Franzen as they came, a master of Late Postmodernism who wrote one of the all-time greatest Late Postmodernist novels, 2001’s The Corrections, a churlish and pessimistic book that nonetheless engendered so much lasting goodwill that even nine years later, no less than the President of the United States was caught begging a bookstore while on vacation to please sell him an early copy of Franzen’s next novel, Freedom. (How much goodwill did it engender? So much that Franzen became the first artist in history to , and even she had him back on the show when Freedom came out.) But as I spent this week reading Franzen’s unpleasant newest novel, 2021’s Crossroads, which made such a non-existent dent in the public zeitgeist that I didn’t even bother reading it until three years later, I suddenly realized that the thing that made Franzen such an unstoppable force 25 years ago is now the exact same thing that’s made his career collapse, which is that he’s so thoroughly a product of Postmodernism that it’s impossible for him to write any other kind of story, which is a huge problem in a world where Postmodernism was replaced an entire generation ago by the cultural movement that superseded it.

Society hasn’t yet given this cultural movement a name, even though it’s almost 25 years old at this point, ever since Postmodernism died the exact moment the planes smashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001; in my own writing, I’ve been alternatively calling it “Sincereism� and “Wokeism,� although I suppose you can call it whatever you want. Whatever the case, like all artistic movements in history, it’s largely defined as a rebellion against what came before it; so while Postmodernism was all about cool irony and self-hating cruelty, Sincereism is about earnest eagerness and plainly-understood emotions being worn on one’s sleeve, a world full of happy little dancing TikTokkers that has no room anymore for mean-spirited stories about families of academic leftist intellectuals who are generally pieces of shit, and who spend most of the story’s page count being awful pricks to each other and the world at large.

That’s unfortunate for Franzen, because that’s seemingly the only kind of book he knows how to write, and 20 percent into Crossroads I realized that this is essentially a cookie-cutter copy of both The Corrections and Freedom, yet another Tolstoy ripoff about gently miserable families of middle-class liberals, full of “quirky� people who do “quirky� things for no particular reason at all related to the story being told, merely because “quirky� was hot during Postmodernism and so “all quirky all the time� shall these stories be. And while I’m not a member of the Wokes myself, certainly I too now find my patience for this kind of story dangerously thin, which is why I quit this book before even getting a quarter of the way in; and that’s because Franzen’s PoMo blueprint was eventually so popular and so pervasive that it essentially birthed an entire wing of indie-movie type at the end of the Postmodernist era. Whether or not you know it, pretty much every movie around the year 2000 that’s predicated on a quirky family full of precociously quirky people (the older or the younger the quirky character, the better), living quirky lives full of quirky moments, is essentially a direct ripoff of Franzen or one of his literary contemporaries, whether that’s Little Miss Sunshine or Napoleon Dynamite or The Squid and the Whale or Captain Fantastic or pretty much the entire career of Wes Anderson, yet another poster child for Late Postmodernism whose work isn’t holding up nearly as well here a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

Like most everyone else, I eventually grew tired of and then completely burned out on these uber-quirky stories about mean-spirited families; but it wasn’t until trying and then giving up on Crossroads this week that I realized that Franzen is the proverbial tree of life that all these movies come from, and that this thus means that I’ve become completely burned out on Franzen’s work too. It all reminds me of something I regularly come across in my hobby as a rare-book collector, which is that the start of every new cultural movement is filled with the last projects of the now elderly members of the previous movement -- for one good example, all those stuffy, barely readable final novels by the titans of Modernism that came out at the beginning of the Postmodernist era in the late 1960s, all those Thornton Wilders and Sherwood Andersons who were still cranking out their delicate character dramas well into their seventies -- which had their fans among the similarly aging academics of that previous era, and even would regularly win literary awards, but that were roundly ignored by the current generation of young people, and then completely fell into forgotten obscurity just a year or two after they came out to no fanfare and no sales. (And note that this doesn’t automatically have to be the case -- just a couple of weeks ago, in fact, I was talking about how the latest novel by Bret Easton Ellis, once just as much a poster child for Late Postmodernism as Franzen, really impressively embraces all the hallmarks of the Sincereist era in a way I didn’t think Ellis had in him.)

I’m still a fan of Late Postmodernism as now a historical moment that no longer exists, but it turns out that even I as a snotty little dyed-in-the-wool Generation Xer can now no longer stand brand-new novels written in a Late Postmodernist style; and so that leaves Crossroads out in the cold for me, to say nothing of the other two books in this proposed trilogy that’s still to come (in which we watch the current churlish, mean-spirited teenaged children in this 1970s family eventually grow up and become churlish, mean-spirited adults to an entire new generation of churlish, mean-spirited teens in the 1990s, then presumably eventually even these teens becoming the parents of yet another generation of churlish, mean-spirited teens in our own 2020s times). Just describing that wears me the fuck out, much less the concept of reading another half a million words devoted to it (for those who don’t know, Crossroads is infamously a 200,000-word novel, or in other words even longer than the first three Harry Potter novels put together), so I suspect that I’m done in my life with Franzen for good. If you too found yourself dragging your feet while reading this book, and thinking things to yourself like, “Yeah, but why does everyone have to be so freaking mean to each other?�, might I humbly suggest that perhaps you too are getting burned out on Postmodernism as well, a fact that seemingly everyone but Franzen himself seems to understand at this point.