Jonathan Franzen, 'A Dickens for our Times'?

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, just published his evaluation of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which he called "a masterpiece of American fiction." He went on to say, "The family romance is as old as the English-language novel itself -- indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become Franzen's particular subject, as it is no one else's today."

Ahem.

Allegra Goodman
Alice Hoffman
Barbara Kingsolver
Jhumpa Lahiri
Claire Messud
Sue Miller
Alice Munro
Mona Simpson
Elizabeth Strout

So when he says "no one else," I guess what he really means is "no one else who is white, male, and fully groomed by the literary establishment for inclusion in the canon." How else to explain why none of the families in the books by these female authors strike Mr. Tanenhaus as "microcosms" of America? He goes on to compare Franzen's work to "the novels of Dickens and Tolstoy, Bellow and Mann. Like those giants, Franzen attended to the quiet drama of the interior life and also recorded its fraught transactions with the public world."

When I read The Corrections, I had to wonder whether it would have received such accolades if it had been written by a woman, and now I find myself asking the same question of Freedom. Is Franzen truly doing something better or more ambitious than any of the authors listed here? More importantly, what authors would you add to this list, women who write about the American middle-class family with enough realism to act as a kind of time-capsule for future generations and centuries?