Preaching to the converted

Jonathan Franzen is a pessimist with a capacity for quiet joy. In a revealing passage in this collection of essays, reviews and speeches he writes of his fellow novelist Alice Munro: ‘She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion’. Explaining this, he apes the General Confession in a church service. Reading Munro makes him reflect ‘about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death’.

The stealthy theme of Farther Away is Franzen’s secularised religiosity. He honours obscure priests of his faith — forgotten novelists such as James Purdy, Paula Fox and Sloan Wilson — and gives exegeses of lesser known tracts (Dostoevsky’s The Gambler is discussed in four shining pages). Moreover, Franzen’s ornithological enthusiasms — his celebrations of the natural world and indictments of environmental despoliation — insistently recall Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘God’s Grandeur’.