"Many versions of American pastoral, going back through the nineteenth century, have sought to create a protected space from which technological progress was simply excluded: one thinks of Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories set in rural Maine, for example. But both Franzen and Wallace reject such a notion of retreat and attempt instead to render a more complex version of contemporary life, one that opens up crevices in the monolithic structures of corporate America and confronts the question of personal authenticity even within a global framework of displacement and irony."
— Article from 2007 by Paul Giles that came from a time when Franzen wasn’t such an almighty dick.
