It's the amorous to-ing and fro-ing of the main three and their families that is the most successful element of Freedom, although Franzen does attempt to insert a "plot" into Walter's involvement with an eco-project to save a bird, the cerulean warbler, and with Walter's son's scam selling rubbish to the Pentagon. Compared with the subtlety of his characterisation, Franzen's playing with the machinations of big business and government is a little clumsy. He strays from a world of completely believable, recognizable individuals into the caricatures of satire. The dealings with the American military are less gripping than Walter's war with his neighbours over their trespassing cats.

I'd hazard a guess that if Franzen votes, it won't be for the Republicans. (The gap in the market is just so vast, surely there is a high-profile career waiting for an American novelist willing to pen the George-W-was-absolutely-right novel?) Franzen's left-wing sympathies are very obvious, but he is quite willing to pillory the shortcomings of Democratic do-gooders and campaigners of all sorts. Walter Berglund is an intriguing mixture of the ridiculous and the admirable. Most readers will sympathise with him, when towards the end of the novel he remarks: "I'm still trying to figure out how to live."

I have to admit that I've never been a fan of Paul Auster, and his latest novel Sunset Park has done nothing to dispel my lack of enthusiasm. He evidently suffers from the delusion that forsaking the use of quotation marks in dialogue makes his prose more artistic or serious. This might have been the case in, say, 1913, but really now all it means is that your book is harder to read and if you're Paul Auster you're pushing your luck already.

Some people start a squat in Brooklyn (Sunset Park). They get kicked out. That's pretty much it for story. Like Franzen, Auster flexes his state-of-the-nation muscles. The lynchpin, Miles Heller, has a job in Florida clearing repossessed houses before a liaison with an only-just underage girl forces him to scarper north. Like Freedom, the book is almost exclusively concerned with the bonds between the characters (though there is also a lot about the faits divers of baseball, which may not be that appealing to British readers).

Unlike Franzen, Auster doesn't fully animate his characters. Sunset Park isn't excruciatingly boring or terrible, there's a dutiful, experienced competence, yet somehow Auster's characters remain that, just characters, emanations of Auster's mind. Alice Bergstrom, for example, works for American PEN, and this allows Auster to draw generously on its website to elaborate on its activities. You can't complain about a name-check being given to a put-upon individual like the Chinese intellectual Liu Xiaobo (this was before he won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize), but when a novelist finds himself paraphrasing American PEN press releases, something's gone wrong with the creative process.