It’s like he puts spools of plot in his character’s heads which dynamically display who they are. For example, when as a reader I try to pull up who Patty is, I visualize her athletic performance, brazen and gifted, and her most important relationships, which are with her coaches who are a gulf below her family in social class. When I call her mother Joyce to mind, I think Brooklyn accent that she is trying to hide, that’s one reason her voice can quiver. I think of her rise out of the mediocrity of a mere middle class life, her political talent, her liberal cant, her advantageous marriage, her “artistic” other children who are everything that eldest daughter Patty is not.

Continue reading Jonathan Franzen’s Agreeable