#GAReads | Gone Boys
Author Jennifer Egan. Photo credit: Hreinn Gudlaugsson [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
“Gone Boys”:
If Franzen shot the starter pistol of the fiction of the aughts with The Corrections, Freedom would come to look like a bookend. Goodbye to all that. Five years after Freedom, Franzen’s next novel, Purity, sold only about a quarter as many copies. Where once a passel of middle-ish-aged men — Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Chabon, the rest of the Jonathans (Lethem, Safran Foer) — dominated the scene with their big, important distillations of the world, the voices that now stand out, the ones that drive the conversation around fiction, largely belong to women.