## Metadata - Full Title: The Last Great American Novel - Category: #articles - URL: https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-last-great-american-novel - Saved: 2026-10-04 ## Highlights > Eleven days before two Boeing 767s piloted by Al Qaeda terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center, killing 2,606 people, the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, its offices less than two miles away, released Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a 568-page doorstopper that was its author’s grand attempt at social realism. Twenty-five years on, the book, written in an America on the verge of being transformed, remains connected with the twisted iron and pulverized concrete of September 11, seemingly anticipated by its second sentence: “You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.” ^h27564666 > While the September 11 novel by the “other” literary Jonathan (Safran Foer), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2003), tends toward the maudlin and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) toward the overly cerebral, The Corrections felt exact precisely because it was not actually about September 11. Michiko Kakutani’s review in the New York Times came out on September 4 and was largely positive (comparing Franzen to Thomas Mann), though it leavened praise with the charge of its being “self-indulgent and long-winded.” (Franzen, never one to measure his words, later called the critic the “stupidest person in New York City.”) ^h27564667