When the next Alfred Kazin arrives to chronicle this era in American fiction, an era that I suspect will be seen to stretch roughly from 1990 to 2030, he or she is likely to puzzle long and hard over how Jonathan Franzen could loom so tall in his novels yet seem so shriveled in his nonfiction.

Whether he’s writing about birding, reading, media, the Internet, the American novel, his past as an angry young man or his present as a misanthrope trying to learn to relax the tendons in his neck, Mr. Franzen lumbers rather than strides. In part, this is because he’s a solipsist and a declinist, a neo-Luddite in inclination if not in name, and things are habitually going to hell all around him.

I live for misanthropes, but, unlike the matchless ones, Mr. Franzen derives (and delivers) little pleasure from the cherry bombs he lights and rolls toward your ankles. Perhaps he is smiling inwardly. As he observed in “Freedom,” his excellent recent novel, “There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.”

Mr. Franzen’s new book, “The Kraus Project,” is a hybrid beast. Partly, it’s a work of scholarship. The author offers his translations of a series of essays by the largely forgotten Viennese journalist and satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936).