PositiveHarpers\"... nobody in Crossroads—nobody in any of Franzen’s novels, as far as I can tell—sees art as a means of transcendence. Nor does Franzen himself attempt to instill in his readers the feeling of connection to something above or beyond everyday reality, even when depicting people who seek such connection. While he gives us tight close-ups of his characters’ crucial experiences—whether beatific or miserific—he always maintains a modicum of distance, just sufficient for compassionate irony. We watch closely, but we do not participate. One way to think about this is as Franzen’s allowance for a range of readerly responses ... By the Seventies, mainstream American Christianity was striving, and failing, to incorporate the forces that instead would overcome it. Franzen’s description of the youth group insightfully depicts this dissolution: Crossroads still exists by the end of the book, but one suspects that it isn’t long for this world ... What if [Franzen\'s] determination to reject the complexities of Status narratives entails a failure to represent the forces really at work in shaping our lives? I enjoyed Crossroads quite a lot, and look forward to the next installment in the series; but my fear is that Franzen will write a very long and ambitious trilogy that is disabled, by its very narrative method, from achieving what its author wants to achieve.
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Ed. by Huw Lewis-Jones
RaveThe Weekly StandardIt gathers intelligently charming meditations from writers and festoons them with map after map after map after map of imaginary, and sometimes non-imaginary, lands. (Only after several days of staring at the beautifully reproduced images did I force myself to read the words, but I am glad I finally did.) I am so enamored of this book ... \'Mapmaking is often like this. It’s a daily process of managing mischief—overcoming dangers, problems, half-truths, illusions, deadlines and distractions—and tiptoeing along the edges of the known while also opening up new realms for adventure.\' This happens to be a very neat description also of the images in The Writer’s Map and their complex relationship to the stories that they emerge from or that emerge from them.
Abby Smith Rumsey
MixedThe Wall Street Journal[Rumsey's] book is a thoughtful, often elegant meditation on memory ... Only late in the book does Ms. Rumsey turn toward the future of memory, and these passages strike me as the most interesting, but also the most frustrating: Ms. Rumsey clearly identifies the threats that most endanger our faculty of memory—chief among them distraction and technology-induced amnesia—but says she believes we will successfully address those threats. She doesn’t explain why she is confident.
George Cotkin
PanThe Wall Street JournalMuch of Mr. Cotkin’s book is a re-narration of the more dramatic—the more excessive—events in the lives and works of these figures...It is not clear, though, whether Mr. Cotkin has managed to come up with a significantly new interpretation of what he calls, following Susan Sontag, 'the New Sensibility.'
