I’ve come to regard this as Franzen’s Jewish Problem: Denise’s overrelished Judeophilia in The Corrections, blatantly counterpointed with her mother Enid’s overrelished Judeophobia; the depiction in Freedom of Jewish neocons rallying around the Iraq War, and its ridiculous portrayal of a New York diamond-district salesman dealing rings while wearing phylacteries—which the religious wear only during prayer; and the way this book treats Kraus’s Jüdische Selbsthaß (Jewish self-hate) by the trick of letting Reitter sort it out, and the way it treats the Holocaust, by letting Kehlmann apostrophize it, leaving Franzen himself free to pontificate about Israel/Palestine with a sophistication that would barely pass muster on a local network affiliate, let alone on CNN. But I’m prepared to forgive him all this, as readers have to forgive Franzen everything, only because no one can ever hate him as much as he already hates himself. Franzen must know that he will never receive any review as cruel as the ones that, with each book and media appearance, he gives himself. It’s his awareness of all this, and his inability to restrain himself from betraying that awareness, that puts America’s foremost novelist in contention to become the world’s foremost Jewish novelist tout court—the inheritor of the crown of feathers. If only he were funnier, or cared a bit more about sex.