The Wolfe characters who lack a roman à clef provenance, the more generic figures in his page-turning plot, have washed away with time. By contrast, Hallberg often dispenses with the dictates of journalism to burrow into the psychic and familial underpinnings of his characters in a Franzenesque, if not Dickensian, manner.

On a different note, what do you make of this season’s super-computer plot. “The Monolith,” the first episode when the IBM appeared, was full of thematically obvious, man versus machine talk. Is there more to it than an extended 2001: A Space Odyssey homage? Is Weiner trying to make a technophobic, Franzen-esque point?

In fairness, maybe these writers do know the Internet (in as much as it can be known) better than Eggers, who has a Franzen-esque distaste for Twitter.

Everything about the book is big, including its Franzenesque length.

"Even if I were writing fiction it wouldn’t be a straight down the line Franzenesque novel, which I’m utterly incapable of writing, though I’m perfectly capable of admiring," he says.

While I was offline, I read Mark Costello's fine new novel, Big If, which is a Jonathan Franzen-esque family tale that orbits around the Secret Service and a New Hampshire Presidential primary.