'' THE SISTERS '' : BOOK REVIEW

' THE SISTERS. ' BY Jonas Hassen Khemiri : '' Jonathan Franzen should be slaughtered ! '' a minor character suggests in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's quiet major new novel, '' The Sisters.''

'' Five hundred kronor says you haven't read Franzen,'' his friend replies, which - meouch!

Franzen's '' The Corrections '' came out right before 9/11 and was 568 pages : one of the last big honking literary blockbusters, with its Norman Rockwellish cover. 

'' The Sisters, '' which is 638 pages and is also familial themed, probably won't make the same noise,  with the Great Shortening of the American attention span.

By one gawps nonetheless at its breadth and ambition. It's a transitional tour de force that squeezes and expands time like an accordian, or pair of lungs.

The modernists famously wrote novels that covered a 24-hour span. [Happy Dalloway Day to those who celebrate.] Khemiri did this too with '' I Call My Brothers,'' a short book about a Stockholm man's reactions to a terrorist bombing that he adapted into a play.

He divides '' The Sisters,'' his sixth novel and his first written originally in English, into seven sections covering diminishing time spans, from the entire year of 2000, starting with a Y2K party in Stockholm filled with '' quasi creative boring middle-class people,'' to a mere minute of 2035, when someone important dies in New York.

As in ''King Lear,'' Chekhov's '' Three Sisters,'' '' The Brady Bunch,'' '' Hannah and her Sisters'' and all those 1940s singing groups, there are three sisters here, the Mikkolas, and they take a while to come into focus.

To Sum : '' A mash-up of fiction and the daily grind.''

The World Students Society thanks Alexandra Jacobs.