Two excellent and similar novels came out in the US in the summer of 2010: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman. Both are ambitious books that examine America before and after 9/11, and both are comic family stories modelled on great 19th-century fiction – Franzen invokes Tolstoy, while Goodman structures her book loosely around Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Both books' protagonists are obsessed with environmental preservation. In Freedom, Walter Berglund protects songbirds. In The Cookbook Collector - which comes out in the UK this week - Jessamine Bach saves redwood trees. In both, a second character struggles with aesthetics: Freedom's Richard Katz (a musician) and The Cookbook Collector's George Friedman (an antiquarian) both make long speeches about the commodification of beauty. And in both books, there's a young man who gets into bad W Bush-related business: in Freedom war profiteering, in The Cookbook Collector government surveillance. Both are loose, baggy novels, big canvases that the writers attack with gusto. Both are addictive reading. Both books were well received.

Reviewers called The Cookbook Collector "a feast of love" that "makes us care;" they called it "enchanting and sensuous", and "flush with warmth and colour". Critics were divided over Freedom, but those who liked it raved. They called it "a masterpiece of American fiction", "an indelible portrait of our times", and, "the Great American Novel". But while Franzen's was sold as the latter (that's what Esquire called it), The Cookbook Collector was (I guess) just another good book by Allegra Goodman.

Why the big gap in reception? Partly, I'm sure, it has to do with the genders of the authors. It's as impossible to imagine Goodman on the cover of Time Magazine as it is to imagine Jonathan Franzen getting called "warm and sensuous". There's a subtext to the praise of The Cookbook Collector; it's Allegra writes like a girl. But the difference is also in the books themselves, in the way they approach their readers and their subjects.

Franzen's book swaggers out, demanding the response it achieved. Its title, its 561 pages, and its sweep all proclaim it a Major Novel. Freedom is a terrific performance, but sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who's talking very loudly. It mentions War and Peace so many times you'd have to be a dolt not to get the Tolstoyan ambitions. As Charles Baxter wrote in The New York Review of Books, "Freedom's ambition is to be the sort of novel that sums up an age and that gets everything into it ... The author all but comes out and says so." Meanwhile, for all its ambition, The Cookbook Collector comes on modestly. As Ron Charles said in The Washington Post: "Goodman is a fantastically fluid writer, and yet for all her skill, she's a humble, transparent one." The Cookbook Collector's elegance is part of what made her book invisible to a broad public, while Franzen's roar is part of what made his a smash.

When people have sex in Freedom, heads bang on walls. In The Cookbook Collector it's a finger on the chest and then fade out. There are great flights of imagination in The Cookbook Collector – like the scene where George stumbles upon a collection of 17th-century manuscripts in the cabinets and ovens of a musty kitchen: "For a moment, he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size." But there's nothing in The Cookbook Collector like the scene in Freedom where a husband goes through his toilet for the wedding ring he has ingested: "He poked one of the softer turds with a fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown. " Goodman glides through her fiction, while with Franzen it's always a triple lutz with a camel spin.

Twenty years ago, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay in which he worried that his generation of post-modernists had fallen into a trap, an irony he called "televisual," with the TV gaze of "the girl who's dancing with you but who would rather be dancing with someone else". Allegra Goodman is in no danger of falling into this ironic trap. Her fiction exists in a stable, meaningful world. Meanwhile Franzen's whole career is a struggle to get out of it.

You feel the struggle all through Freedom. Franzen is dancing with you, sure, and with Walter Berglund also, and Franzen's moves are wild and Tony Manero dazzling – but his characters exist somewhere beneath the glory of his prose. His book is not so much addressed to the intimate reader, it's addressed to judges and crowds.

Wallace had problems with televisual irony, but he did note how well it sells, and half a year after its release, The Cookbook Collector is hard to find at your local bookstore in the states. Meanwhile, Freedom sits on the bestseller list. That's some kind of triumph.

• This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in The Millions