THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

It has very little to do with democracy or the will of the people. In recent years Franzen has become recognized for his purveyance of opinions on everything from social networking services such as Twitter ("the ultimate irresponsible medium") and the proliferation of e-books ("just not permanent enough") to the disintegration of Europe ("The people making the decisions in Europe are bankers. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction.

His most recent novel Freedom (2010) led to a controversial appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections a sprawling satirical family drama drew widespread critical acclaim earned Franzen a National Book Award was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a shortlisting for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.