Reading List

Authors Like Jonathan Franzen

In September 2001 Oprah Winfrey chose The Corrections for her book club. Jonathan Franzen said publicly that he was uneasy about the selection, and Winfrey withdrew her invitation to appear on her show; the novel, about Alfred and Enid Lambert of St. Jude, an ageing Midwestern couple who want their three grown children home for one last Christmas, went on to win the National Book Award. Franzen was born in 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois, grew up in Webster Groves outside St. Louis, studied in Munich and Berlin, and is a serious birdwatcher. In 2010 Time put him on its cover as “Great American Novelist”. Crossroads (2021), about a pastor’s family in a Chicago suburb in 1971, opened a planned trilogy. The ten writers below share his ground: families, money, faith and the novel of a whole society.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Family novels · The social novel · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Jonathan Franzen, start with Paula Fox, whose Desperate Characters he championed and helped bring back into print. For the family in decline at full length, read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and for a contemporary Midwestern family saga, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. The list also includes William Gaddis, the difficult novelist Franzen argued with in print.

10 authors like Jonathan Franzen

01
Unhappy in its own way

Leo Tolstoy

Russian · War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878)

Tolstoy was born in 1828 on his family’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, and died in 1910 at the railway station of Astapovo, days after leaving home at the age of 82. Anna Karenina, which opens by saying that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, sets a married woman’s affair beside the courtship and farming life of Levin.

The model for the novel Franzen keeps writing: several members of a family followed in parallel, each with a full inner life, against the moral arguments of an era. In Freedom Patty Berglund reads War and Peace and recognises her own triangle in it. Tolstoy ends in judgement and faith; Franzen in an uneasy truce.

— Lisanne
02
The family in decline

Thomas Mann

German · Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924)

Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875 and died in Zurich in 1955. Buddenbrooks, his first novel, follows four generations of a Lübeck merchant family as its business and its health give way; it was singled out when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. He left Germany in 1933 and spent the war years in the United States.

Franzen studied in Germany, speaks fluent German and has translated German writers, and The Corrections reads like a Buddenbrooks for the American Midwest: a family whose decline is told through money, illness and the children’s attempts to escape. Mann is more ironic and more patient with ideas.

— Lisanne

Every book by Thomas Mann →

03
The novel he championed

Paula Fox

American · Desperate Characters (1970), The Widow’s Children (1976), Borrowed Finery (2001)

Fox was born in New York City in 1923 and died there in 2017. Desperate Characters follows a childless Brooklyn couple over a few days after the wife is bitten by a stray cat; it was filmed with Shirley MacLaine in 1971. She also won the Newbery Medal for the children’s novel The Slave Dancer. Her adult novels had fallen out of print when Franzen championed them and saw them reissued.

The small, exact social novel Franzen held up as a model: a marriage, a city and a class anxiety compressed into one domestic wound. Read Desperate Characters to see, in under two hundred pages, the kind of unhappiness the Lamberts take nearly six hundred to unfold.

— Lisanne
04
The difficult novelist he argued with

William Gaddis

American · The Recognitions (1955), J R (1975), A Frolic of His Own (1994)

Gaddis was born in New York in 1922 and died in 1998. The Recognitions, a vast novel about forgery in art and religion, was largely ignored on publication; J R, told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue, about an eleven-year-old who builds a business empire from a school payphone, won the National Book Award, as did A Frolic of His Own, a comedy of lawsuits.

The writer whose work argues with Franzen’s. In his 2002 New Yorker essay “Mr. Difficult”, Franzen praised The Recognitions, admitted he had got only halfway through J R, and used Gaddis to set out his case for fiction that keeps a contract with its readers. Read Gaddis to see the road Franzen chose not to take.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Gaddis →

05
Systems and dread

Don DeLillo

American · White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Underworld (1997)

DeLillo was born in the Bronx in 1936. White Noise, which won the National Book Award, follows a professor of Hitler studies and his family through a toxic “airborne event”; Libra imagines the life of Lee Harvey Oswald; Underworld moves through America’s Cold War decades from a baseball game in 1951.

Franzen’s first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, with their conspiracies and corporate power, are the closest he came to DeLillo’s mode. DeLillo stays with systems, media and dread; from The Corrections on, Franzen turned towards the family and the inner life.

— Lisanne

Every book by Don DeLillo →

06
Grown children at the table

Anne Tyler

American · Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988)

Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941, spent part of her childhood in a Quaker community in North Carolina, and has set most of her novels in Baltimore. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows the three grown children of a mother whose husband walked out on the family; Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989.

Tyler and Franzen both write the grown children of a difficult parent, gathered round a table for a family meal that never becomes the reunion anyone wanted. Tyler is gentler and funnier and leaves politics alone, which makes her the softer way into the same material.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Tyler →

07
Another Midwestern family

Jeffrey Eugenides

American · The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), The Marriage Plot (2011)

Eugenides was born in Detroit in 1960. The Virgin Suicides is narrated by the neighbourhood boys who watched the five Lisbon sisters of Grosse Pointe; Middlesex, the story of an intersex narrator and three generations of a Greek-American family in Detroit, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The Marriage Plot follows three Brown University graduates in the early 1980s.

The contemporary closest to Franzen in ambition: born a year apart, both from the Midwest, both writing big family novels that carry decades of American history, and Middlesex came out a year after The Corrections. Eugenides is more playful with myth and narration.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jeffrey Eugenides →

08
The social novel in London

Zadie Smith

British · White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2005), The Fraud (2023)

Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. White Teeth, about two families in Willesden across several decades, was published when she was 24 and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. On Beauty, about two rival academic families, won the Orange Prize; The Fraud is a historical novel built around a Victorian court case.

Smith shares Franzen’s faith in the comic social novel that follows families through politics, race and class, and like him she writes essays arguing about what the novel is for. She brings what his books mostly lack: a multicultural city and a lighter touch.

— Lisanne

Every book by Zadie Smith →

09
The other way to write 2010

Jennifer Egan

American · A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Manhattan Beach (2017), The Candy House (2022)

Egan was born in Chicago in 1962. A Visit from the Goon Squad, linked stories about a record producer, his assistant and the people around them over several decades, including a chapter told as a PowerPoint presentation, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. The Candy House returns to its characters in a world where memories can be shared.

Goon Squad and Freedom appeared the same year and cover the same decades, but Egan breaks her story into fragments where Franzen keeps faith with the long realist novel. Reading them side by side shows two answers to how fiction should hold an era.

— Lisanne
10
Small-town families, compressed

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Tell Me Everything (2024)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956. Olive Kitteridge, linked stories about a retired schoolteacher in a small Maine town, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009; My Name Is Lucy Barton is a daughter’s account of her mother’s visit to her hospital bed. Her characters recur from book to book, and Tell Me Everything brings Olive and Lucy together.

Strout writes Franzen’s subject, families who cannot say what they feel, at a fraction of his length. Olive Kitteridge is as difficult and as sympathetic as Enid Lambert, and Strout suits readers who love Franzen’s characters more than his social panorama.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

Where to start if you loved Jonathan Franzen

If you loved The Corrections, read Thomas Mann.

Buddenbrooks: a family’s decline told through money, illness and the children’s escapes.

If you loved Freedom, read Tolstoy.

Anna Karenina, the adultery novel behind Franzen’s triangle; Patty herself reads War and Peace.

If you want it short, read Paula Fox.

Desperate Characters: one marriage, a few days in Brooklyn, one cat bite.

If you want the opposite approach, read Jennifer Egan.

A Visit from the Goon Squad: the same decades as Freedom, broken into fragments.

If you have not read Franzen yet, start with The Corrections.

Then Freedom; read Crossroads next if you want to be ready for the second volume of his trilogy.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jonathan Franzen

Who writes like Jonathan Franzen?

Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith and Anne Tyler write comparable family novels, and Elizabeth Strout writes the same unspoken family tensions at shorter length. Behind them stand Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, and Paula Fox, whose Desperate Characters Franzen championed.

What should I read after The Corrections?

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) for a family in decline, Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) for grown children around a difficult parent, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002) for a Midwestern family across generations.

Does Jonathan Franzen have a new book?

Not yet. His most recent novel is Crossroads (2021), the first volume of a planned trilogy called A Key to All Mythologies. The second volume has no announced title or publication date.

Which Franzen book should I read first?

The Corrections (2001) is the usual starting point, and Freedom (2010) is its natural follow-up. Crossroads (2021), set in 1971, begins his trilogy.

Is Franzen like DeLillo?

His first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, share DeLillo’s interest in conspiracy and corporate power. From The Corrections on, Franzen moved towards family and character, which is where the two part.

Why did Oprah and Franzen fall out?

In 2001 Oprah Winfrey chose The Corrections for her book club; Franzen said publicly that he was uneasy about the selection, and Winfrey withdrew her invitation to appear on her show. She chose his next novel, Freedom, for her book club in 2010.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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