“My explicitly stated goal,” Franzen writes of himself in 1980s Berlin, “was to save the American novel—from social one-dimensionality, from critical preoccupation with the prison-house of language, from the off-putting avant-gardism of Pynchon and his kind.” Apparently, he stayed inside and smoked cigarettes and typed for twelve hours a day, and it was in reading this autobiographical stretch—in breaks from my own smoking and typing—that I came to recognize a landsman. It seemed that we were both involved in Bildung, or “cultivation,” the German-Jewish discipline that shaped my grandparents, from Cologne, and the method by which German Jewry sought to become not just accepted by an adopted homeland, but to embody its quintessence. I realized that Franzen—perhaps more than any other American novelist, and certainly more than anyone else ever raised in the Congregational Church in the Midwest—felt like a guest fighting to be loved by a host culture, yet conscious that such love can never be fought for, and that the struggle was in equal parts futile and imaginary. He let his origins oppress him, just enough for him to know how to oppress himself in the event that America didn’t exile him, or have him executed.