The Rise of the “New Depression” in Jonathan Franzen’s Harper’s essay and in The Corrections

In his 1996 essay “Perchance to Dream. In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” Franzen makes a public call for highbrow novels to rise to the challenges posed by the ‘therapeutic’ culture of the late twentieth century. As he explains, this culture is characterized by the tendency to pathologize psychological or emotional problems, which come to be regarded solely as symptoms to be treated with an instantaneous biochemical remedy. This phenomenon has induced an over-reliance on new-generation antidepressants. Such circumstances, I argue, are cleverly parodied in Franzen’s third novel The Corrections.