Jonathan
Franzen, Interviewed by Stephen J. Burn
The Art of
Fiction No. 207
Jonathan Franzen’s fiction bears the mark of a Midwest
upbringing, his books preoccupied with quiet lives nurtured there and broken
apart by contact with the rest of the world. But four long novels into an
unusually public career, Franzen now moves about the country quite a bit,
living most of the year in New York, where he writes in an office overlooking
busy 125th Street, and some of it in a leafy community on the outskirts of
Santa Cruz, where I met him just a few days before his most recent novel, Freedom,
was released.
The scale of Freedom’s
rapturous reception isn’t yet evident on the morning of our first conversation,
though the book has already been called “the novel of the century,” and its
author has just become the first writer in a decade to appear on the cover of Time magazine; a visit to the White House
is soon to come. At the same time, two popular female novelists have been
arguing, via Twitter, that Franzen owes his stature to the prejudices and
gender asymmetries of book reviewing, and there are hints, too, that a broader
backlash is brewing. (In London a few weeks later, he’ll have his glasses
stolen by pranksters at a book party.) As we drive through the morning fog,
Franzen recounts both sides to me as if he has no vested interest in either
position—his stance is that of a detached, and slightly amused, observer.
Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959, in
Western Springs, Illinois, and raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis.
The youngest of three children, Franzen grew up in a home dominated by
pragmatic parents—
his father an engineer, his mother a homemaker—who saw little value in the arts and who encouraged him to occupy himself instead with more practical subjects. A fascination with the sciences hangs over much of Franzen’s early writing, composed before his arrival at Swarthmore College. One unpublished story describes a visit from Pythagoras. An early play about Isaac Newton was championed by a physics teacher at Webster Groves High School.
his father an engineer, his mother a homemaker—who saw little value in the arts and who encouraged him to occupy himself instead with more practical subjects. A fascination with the sciences hangs over much of Franzen’s early writing, composed before his arrival at Swarthmore College. One unpublished story describes a visit from Pythagoras. An early play about Isaac Newton was championed by a physics teacher at Webster Groves High School.
Franzen describes his first book, The
Twenty-Seventh City (1988),
as a sci-fi novel that is all fi and no sci—a
concept-driven omnibus fiction in which a group of influential and politically
ambitious Indians, led by the former police commissioner of Bombay, infiltrate
the bureaucracy of an unspectacular Midwestern town and terrorize its
residents. The Twenty-Seventh City is set in his native St. Louis, but
Franzen wrote the majority of the novel while employed as a research assistant
at Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where he
worked crunching data on seismic activity. This experience would enrich his
second novel, Strong Motion (1992), an intimate depiction of a
Massachusetts family whose emotional and economic lives are disrupted by a series
of unexpected earthquakes in the Boston area.
Strong Motion signaled the start of a turbulent decade for Franzen,
as he suffered personal losses—the death of his father; divorce from Valerie
Cornell, his wife of fourteen years—and struggled to come to terms with the
purpose of writing fiction after his first two novels won critical praise but
dishearteningly few readers. Those struggles were the subject of much of the
searching nonfiction he wrote during the nineties, and his midcareer
masterpiece The Corrections (2001) was the outcome. The expansive
saga of a disjointed Midwestern family, The Corrections won the National Book Award and the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and introduced Franzen, then a relatively
obscure author of ambitious fiction, to the broad audience of readers he had
long been seeking—a broader audience than any literary novelist of his
generation.
The following interview took place over
two days in an office borrowed from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Situated amid redwoods on the mountain rim above Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay,
the office would have offered an ocean view, but a makeshift arrangement of
towels, bedsheets, and pillows had been engineered to block out the combined
dangers of light and distraction. Improvised window treatments aside, Franzen
prefers his work space to resemble Renée Seitchek’s house in Strong
Motion—a “bare, clean place.” Aside from a laptop, the only
personal items in the room were six books, arranged in a single pile: a study
of William Faulkner, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and
four works by John Steinbeck.
Jonathan Franzen
INTERVIEWER
Have you matured as a writer?
FRANZEN
When The Twenty-Seventh City was being misunderstood, and when Strong
Motion was failing to
find an audience, I assumed that the problem was not the writer but the wicked
world. By the time I was working on Freedom, though, I could see
that some of the contemporaneous criticisms of those books had probably been
valid—that the first really was overdefended and inexplicably angry, and that
the politics and thriller plotting (and, again, the inexplicable anger) of the
second really were sometimes obtrusive. The writer’s life is a life of
revisions, and I came to think that what needed revision were my own earlier
books.
One of the great problems for the novelist
who persists is the shortage of material. We all solve the problem in different
ways; some people do voluminous research on nineteenth-century Peru. The
literature I’m interested in and want to produce is about taking the cover off
our superficial lives and delving into the hot stuff underneath. After The
Corrections I found
myself thinking, What is my hot material? My Midwestern childhood, my parents,
their marriage, my own marriage—I’d already written two books about this stuff,
but I’d been younger and scared and less skilled when I wrote them. So one of
the many programs in Freedom was to revisit the old material and do
a better job.
INTERVIEWER
Better how?
FRANZEN
I understand better how much of writing a
novel is about self-examination, self-transformation. I spend vastly more time
nowadays trying to figure out what’s stopping me from doing the work, trying to
figure out how I can become the person who can do the work, investigating the
shame and fear: the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or
condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm. That kind of self-analysis was
entirely absent with The Twenty-Seventh City, and
almost entirely absent with Strong Motion. It became
necessary for the first time with The Corrections. And it
became the central project with Freedom—so much so that the
actual writing of pages was almost like a treat I was given after doing the
real work.
INTERVIEWER
There was a nine-year interlude between
those two novels.
FRANZEN
The Corrections cast a shadow. The methods I’d developed for it—the
hypervivid characters, the interlocking-novellas structure, the leitmotifs and
extended metaphors—I felt I’d exploited as far as they could be exploited. But
that didn’t stop me from trying to write a Corrections-like book for
several years and imagining that simply changing the structure or writing in
the first person could spare me the work of becoming a different kind of
writer. You always reach for the easy solution before you, in defeat, submit to
the more difficult solution.
There certainly was no shortage of content
by the middle of the last decade. The country was in the toilet, we’d become an
international embarrassment, and those materialistic master languages that I’d
mocked in The Corrections were becoming only more masterful. And
I still had my own deep autobiographical material, which I’d employed in
well-masked form in the first two novels. Eventually I realized that the only
way forward was to go backward and engage again with certain very much
unresolved moments in my earlier life. And that’s what the project then became:
to invent characters enough unlike me to bear the weight of my material without
collapsing into characters too much like me.
INTERVIEWER
Your first publication was a collaborative
play called The Fig Connection, which you
wrote in high school. What
interested you about drama?
FRANZEN
I’m that oddity of a writer who had a good
high-school experience, and I did a lot of acting in various plays. Theater for
me was mainly a way of having fun in groups, as opposed to pairing off into
couples who necked all night in a back seat. It was a kind of prolonged
innocence. I wasn’t particularly in love with the theater, and the plays that
my friends and I wrote weren’t literary. We were just making stuff up for fun.
Until I was twenty-one, I had no concept of literature, really.
INTERVIEWER
Had your childhood
been innocent, too?
FRANZEN
I always seemed to be the last person to
find out about things that everybody else knew. I was literally still playing
with building blocks, albeit artistically and with friends, during my senior
year in high school.
INTERVIEWER
Was your writing encouraged at home?
FRANZEN
Mostly not, no. I hate the word creative,
but it’s not a bad description of my personality type, and there was no place
for that in my parents’ house. They considered art of all kinds, including
creative writing, frivolous. Art was something I could do in my free time, and
if I could get school credit for it, so much the better. But it was actively
discouraged as a serious pursuit. My parents were dismayed and perplexed and
angry when my older brother Tom stopped studying architecture and majored in
film, and when he went to the Art Institute in Chicago and got an M.F.A. Tom
was the only working artist I knew, and I idolized him and wanted to be like
him, rather than like my parents. But I’d seen the grief he’d gotten from them,
so I kept my own plans secret for as long as possible.
My dad, although he didn’t get a good
formal education, was tremendously smart and curious. He read to me every night
throughout my early childhood, always my dad, not my mom. Having grown up
bathed nightly in his strong opinions, I became a fairly opinionated person
myself and was happy to be able to keep him company. He read Time magazine cover to cover every
week, and we talked about whatever was going on in the world. So, strangely,
there was a lot of intellectual discussion in that otherwise unintellectual
house. But there were no literary books on my parents’ shelves. I had no
category for what I wanted to do, and this was the great excitement of writing The
Fig Connection, seeing how well it worked as a student drama, and
then, wonder of wonders, getting it published. This was the moment when a world
of possibility opened up: I remember thinking, I’m actually good at writing—and
isn’t this fun?
INTERVIEWER
It sounds like fun was an important part
of your early writing.
FRANZEN
Fun is still an important part of writing.
I want to bring pleasure with everything I write. Intellectual pleasure,
emotional pleasure, linguistic pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. I have in my mind
five hundred examples of novels that have given me pleasure, and I try to do
work that gives back some of what those five hundred books have given me. The
epigraph ofStrong Motion is taken from Isaac Bashevis Singer,
who is very simpatico in this regard. His Nobel speech, in which he asserts
that the storyteller’s primary responsibility is to entertain, made a deep
impression on me.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel burdened by that obligation to
entertain?
FRANZEN
More motivated than burdened. It’s hard to
feel burdened by the knowledge that pleasure-seeking people are actually
looking forward to my next book. For the first half of my career, though, I had
a very poor sense of who these people might be. Some snarky person in England
once accused me of writing the Harper’s essay “Why Bother?” as market
research.
INTERVIEWER
How did you feel about that?
FRANZEN
Well, in a narrow sense, he was absolutely
right. When your first two novels haven’t found much of an audience, it makes
sense to stop and try to figure out who might read a literary novel nowadays, and
why they might be doing it.
And finding an audience has unquestionably
changed the way I write. If there’s a different feel to Freedom than to The
Corrections, it’s not unrelated to having met however many thousand
readers on various book tours. These are the people who are reading books,
caring about books, and bothering to come out on a rainy Tuesday night to hear
somebody read aloud, as to a child, and then standing for half an hour waiting
to get a scribble on the title page of a book they’ve spent money for. These
people are my friends. I’m one of them myself. I once stood in a long signing line
to get five seconds with William Gaddis, just so I could tell him how great I
thought The Recognitions was. Not everything in the world needs
to be laughed angrily at, you realize. There turn out to be more emotions
available to a working writer than I might have guessed earlier on. And one of
them might be love—love and gratitude.
I got a lot of attention as a kid because
everyone else in the house was so much older than me. It was probably too much
attention—that can be a burden—but one result is that I like attention. I just
like attention, I do! But it’s counterbalanced by a need and craving to be
alone most of the time. This is one reason I’ve found being a writer a very
suitable profession. You have the possibility of great bursts of satisfying attention,
and then you’re left alone.
INTERVIEWER
When did you begin to think of yourself as
a writer?
FRANZEN
I had a notion of myself as a writerly
person by the time I got to college, which meant that there were two things I
could do: I could go out for the newspaper, and I could send things to the
college literary magazines. I did both. But I hated being a journalist, because
I was too shy to do interviews. I once got my friend Tom Hjelm and me in
trouble by making him do an interview with the vice president of the college,
as part of a news story I was writing, and then twisting the vice president’s
words to make him look bad. In many ways, Hjelm was the toughest critic I ever
had. He was an E. B. White worshiper, and he loved to ridicule my worst
sentences. We read each other’s papers, too—there was a mutual-apprenticeship
quality to our friendship.
INTERVIEWER
Was there a similar quality to your
reading?
FRANZEN
It slowly became more serious in the
course of four years of college. I’d read a lot as a kid—eight hours a day all
summer, some summers—but it was mostly mysteries and popular science and
science fiction. Then, because I went to college as a prospective physics
major, I took only one class in English literature during my first three years,
a survey of the modern English novel. Predictably, I was most smitten with Iris
Murdoch. I was eighteen, and A Severed Head seemed to me a profound and important
book.
The one writer I completely couldn’t stand
was D. H. Lawrence.
I wanted to kill him for having inflicted Sons and Lovers on me. Much later, I went back and read the book
again, or read half of it, because I felt that the Joey and Patty material in Freedom had some kinship with the
Morels. And I could see why I’d hated it when I was eighteen: It hit way too
close to home. But frankly I still found it kind of unbearable. I wanted to say
to Lawrence, No, you have not found a way not to make Mrs. Morel’s
sexualized engulfment of her son icky and excruciating. In a way, it’s great
and heroic that Lawrence was willing to write such an excruciating book, to lay
it all out there. But for me the book also became a shining example of how not
to approach this radioactive material—a reminder of the pressing need to find a
structure and a tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough to make
it fun.
My real problem with the survey class was
that I was too young for it. Like most eighteen-year-olds, I didn’t have enough
experience to understand what the stakes even were in adult literature. Because
I hadn’t grown up in a household that placed any value on culture, literature
was just a game to me, and writing was just a craft that I hoped to make a
living with someday. I wrote whatever the newspaper editors assigned me to
write and worked on my sentences.
INTERVIEWER
Do you recall any pieces in particular?
FRANZEN
The piece I had the most fun with was a
fall campus-fashion preview. I wrote it as a joke, in very ornate prose.
INTERVIEWER
There are several fashion articles in the
archive.
FRANZEN
Several articles? Good Lord. I was having
a bad time at school. Those fashion pieces probably came out of a wish to
antagonize.
INTERVIEWER
A bad time?
FRANZEN
I had bad dorm rooms, and I’d landed in a
nerdy situation as a prospective physics major. There were very few cute girls,
and those few had no interest in me. My only significant ambition was to get
laid, and I was failing spectacularly at it, for reasons now obvious to me but
completely invisible at the time. I thought about transferring to a different
school, but then I realized that if I majored in German I could go to Europe
for a year, and that things might be better there.
Things were not better there, at least not
girlwise. But I came back to the States less outrageously immature. And every
once in a while a person’s life feels like a novel, and the eight weeks in the
middle of my last year of college were a time like that. Everything came
together quickly, all the stuff that had been latent suddenly crystallized, and
I felt transformed in the space of eight weeks. I became a human being. By the
end of that January, I was having sex with the person I would end up married to
for fourteen years, and I’d become a determined, focused writer who wanted to
do nothing but write ambitious novels.
INTERVIEWER
What had happened?
FRANZEN
I wrote about it in The
Discomfort Zone—my discovery, as Rilke puts it in The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, that I had an interior life I’d
previously known nothing about. It had to do with reading Rilke and Kafka and
the other modern German prose writers, and it had to do with my brother Tom. It
had to do with having been away from my family for so long—with coming back and
suddenly being able to see them in the framework that the German moderns had
given me. It had to do with falling in love.
INTERVIEWER
What about your brother?
FRANZEN
I was in deep emulation of Tom, who had
begun as a still photographer and then moved into avant-garde film. I admired
Tom’s equipment, as it were. Right before I’d gone to Germany, I’d worked for
him as a laborer in Chicago and had made enough money to buy a little Olympus,
the smallest SLR on the market, which I took to Europe and tried to do art
photography with. I wanted to take odd pictures, especially ones of the
industrial areas, again in emulation of Tom, who had an urban-industrial
aesthetic.
But I always had an uneasy relationship
with pictures. I could never figure out what I was trying to do with
photography. Landscape photography in particular: Oh, it’s a pretty sunset. Oh,
that’s a pretty rock formation. Who the fuck cares? I’d come to associate it
with what I perceived as my mother’s obsession with appearances—her dictating
what I wore to school, her constant fussing with the decoration of our house,
her shame about having kids who were different from her friends’ kids, the
general barrenness of worrying so much about surfaces. A persistent fantasy I
had throughout my late teens and twenties was that I was being followed with a
camera, and that people who hadn’t respected me enough, girls who hadn’t wanted
me, would see where I was now and be impressed. It was an awful reverie,
because I could feel, even as I was having it, that it was an inheritance of
that obsession with surfaces.
In the spring of my junior year in Europe,
Tom had come over and traveled with me, and when we were in Milan his movie
camera was stolen. By the following Christmas, it was clear that he wasn’t
going to get a new one. He’d given up filmmaking, and I now had the burden and
the opportunity to be the family artist. And, specifically, to be a writer,
given my disenchantment with images.
INTERVIEWER
Is that obsession with appearances still a
concern to you?
FRANZEN
Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer.
The craving for an audience, coupled with the shame of exposing yourself to
it. This is stuff that I was always tormented by and have been working through
as recently as in Freedom.
But I had all the clues I needed in
Germany, in Nietzsche: “Everything that is deep loves the mask.” The
Twenty-Seventh City is
one big mask. And the long-term ambition for all my work has been to find
better and better masks—to find the means to make visible and feelable the
unsayable things inside me.
INTERVIEWER
How did you accomplish it?
FRANZEN
I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write
a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely
smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer. To write about what was
really going on in me with respect to my parents, with respect to my wife, with
respect to my sense of self, with respect to my masculinity—there was just no
way I could bring that to the surface. I’d tried writing about it directly in
short stories before I got going with The Twenty-Seventh City, and
I just hadn’t had the chops to get at it, didn’t have enough distance on it,
didn’t understand it well enough. So I put on the mask of a middle-aged
postmodern writer.
Looking back now, I see a twenty-five-year-old with a very
compromised sense of masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer
of libido to the brain—this was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation
and going with what I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most
people. It had been drummed into me by my dad: “You are smarter than most
people.” He felt himself to be smarter than most people, probably rightly so.
He felt that it had taken him too long to figure this out, and he said to me,
many times, “Don’t make the mistake I made.” So I set a lot of store in being
brainy. And satire was particularly appealing, because, first, it was funny,
and I always liked to be funny, and, second, you didn’t have to take responsibility
for generating your own faith, your own core beliefs. You could simply expose
the mendacity and falseness of others. It was a way for the baby of his
family—who’d been surrounded, as a kid, by three powerful male presences—to
exercise some kind of mastery and cut other people down to size. And, no less
important, it was a way to ignore the maternal side of the equation. During
those amazing winter weeks of 1980 and 1981, my mother had literally been made
sick, seriously ill, by news about the sex life of one of my brothers. I’d seen
firsthand that the mere expression of overt masculine sexuality could put a
woman in the hospital! So it’s really no wonder that intellect presented itself
as a safer alternative in The Twenty-Seventh City.
In the later books, as I began to put the
worst of my own Sons and Lovers psychodramas behind me, I reached for
different kinds of masks. The reason it took so long to do Freedomwas
that the masks not only had to be extremely lifelike but also had to be
invented out of whole cloth, because, again, after much trying and failing, I’d
seen that there was no way I could write directly about certain central parts
of my own experience, my experience with my mom and my experience in my
marriage. What made direct revelation impossible was partly my sense of shame
and partly a wish to protect third parties, but it was mostly because the
material was so hot that it deformed
the writing whenever I came at it directly. And so, layer by layer, I built up
the masks. Like with papier-mâché, strip after strip, molding ever more
lifelike features, in order to perform the otherwise unperformable personal
drama.
INTERVIEWER
The mask is a way to convey truth, rather
than to conceal it.
FRANZEN
Yes. But also recognizing, crucially, that
the amorphous, unconscious, naked soul is a horror. The most terrifying scene
in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge is the one in which Malte, as a
boy, starts putting on party masks from a trunk in his family’s attic, one
after another, until finally one of them takes control of him. He sees his
masked self in the mirror and goes momentarily insane with terror that there is
no him, there’s only the mask. Years later, as an adult, walking around in
Paris, he sees a woman on a park bench who puts her face in her hands and then
looks up with a naked face, a horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her
hands. Malte is essentially the story of a young
writer working through a fear of masks to a recognition of their necessity.
Rilke anticipated the postmodern insight
that there is no personality, there are just these various intersecting fields:
that personality is socially constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically
constructed, constructed by upbringing. Where the postmoderns go wrong is in
positing a nullity behind all that. It’s not a nullity, it’s something raw and
frightening and bottomless. It’s what Murakami goes looking for in the well in The
Wind-up Bird Chronicle. To ignore it is to deny your humanity.
INTERVIEWER
The development of the American writer
today most typically takes place within the university, in creative-writing
programs. Did you consider that route?
FRANZEN
I got married instead to a tough reader
with great taste. We had our own little round-the-clock M.F.A. program. This
phase of our marriage went on for about six years, which is three times longer
than the usual program. Plus, we didn’t have to deal with all the stupid
responses to writing that workshops generate.
We did actually apply to some programs one
year, in hopes of getting a university to support us financially, and we were
both accepted at Brown. But the money Brown offered wasn’t good enough. In
hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t go, because it might have smoothed some kinks out
of the work that were better not smoothed out. As a journalist, I’m always
striving to become more professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain
an amateur.
INTERVIEWER
Did you devise another kind of program for
yourselves? Did you go to readings?
FRANZEN
No, we didn’t want to be around other
writers. In some semiconscious way, we recognized that we weren’t good yet, and
we needed to protect ourselves from depressing exposure to people who’d already
gotten to be good.
INTERVIEWER
What books were you reading in those
years?
FRANZEN
Everything. I read fiction four or five
hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians,
the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long
reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense
of all the ways a story could be made.
But the primal books for me remained the
ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980:Malte, Berlin
Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and,
above all, The Trial. In each of these
books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial
arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially
constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we
think of as “our life.” And there’s something else underneath it, which was
represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this
awful truth, this maskless self, underlying everything. And what was striking
about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in
blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way
defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that
character into confrontation with what’s underneath. This was very
straightforwardly and explicitly the program with The
Twenty-Seventh City, to take the well-defended Probst and strip
away and strip away.
INTERVIEWER
And you saw Martin Probst as a parallel to
Joseph K.?
FRANZEN
Yes, in my own vulgar reading of Kafka, I
did. Suddenly one day, for no reason, there were a bunch of Indians in St.
Louis, and they were conspiring to ruin Probst’s life.
INTERVIEWER
I recall reading that you labored over the
beginning of The Twenty-Seventh City—wrote
and rewrote it—and then wrote the final stages—
FRANZEN
Most of the book.
INTERVIEWER
Most of the book, quite quickly.
FRANZEN
I’d started by working for months and
months on the first chapter, which was about Probst walking his dog and thinking
with culpably extreme satisfaction about his accomplishments. I poured
countless hours into very purple sentences describing the beauty of the light
in Webster Groves, my hometown, on a late weekday afternoon. It was a chapter
that ended with the death of the dog. It was terribly overwritten.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by overwritten?
FRANZEN
Trying to do too much with a sentence. I
was very much still under the spell of the Germans. You can do things in German
with sentence structure that are less advisable in English—pack in all sorts of
syntactical elements before the final verb. I was playing with language and
with the possibilities of sound, although not so much with alliteration. I’d
readRabbit, Run at a certain point and spent a couple
of weeks being highly alliterative before coming to my senses and realizing
that not only was my alliteration bad, Updike’s was, too.
I was doing a lot of punning, though. I
was very attached at that young age to pure linguistic play, and blissfully
unaware of how it might all read. I thought the concept of my book, the
unfolding of a conspiracy, ought to be strong enough to drag the reader through
any amount of linguistic playfulness.
I was reaching; I was writing about stuff
I didn’t really know anything about and trying to incorporate every scrap of
information and interesting observation I’d ever had. I would write as many
pages as I could in a day. I once wrote seventeen pages in a day. And those
seventeen pages are in the finished book. When I got rolling, my determination
to get the book done and have it be good and get it published was so strong
that I had limitless energy. The finished manuscript was thirteen hundred
pages. I was twenty-five.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said you were writing eight hours a
day.
FRANZEN
I could do ten sometimes.
INTERVIEWER
Even when things weren’t working?
FRANZEN
I didn’t have the experience of things not
working. I didn’t know enough to know when something wasn’t all that good. The
chapters just came clattering out.
INTERVIEWER
I’m struck by the number of dream
sequences in The Twenty-Seventh
City.
FRANZEN
More and more, I think of novel writing as
a kind of deliberate dreaming. John Gardner described novels as “vivid,
continuous dreams,” and though I’m not sure Gardner ever wrote a particularly
excellent novel, he was right about the notion of the dream. A notion
reinforced by my feeling that all of Kafka’s fiction reads like transcribed
dreams.
Most of the dreams in The Twenty-Seventh City were dreams I’d had myself. I wanted
their uncanniness because I was trying to write an uncanny book. A book about
making strange a familiar place. And the fastest route to uncanniness is to
fall asleep and have a dream in which everything is at once familiar and
strange. That was the feel I was after in that book: What kind of weird,
surreal world have I fallen into here, in the most boring of Midwestern cities?
If the dreams are falling away in the
later books, I’d like to think it’s because I’m getting better at making the
book itself the dream. As I become more comfortable with accessing the primary
psychic stuff inside me, and finding adequate dramatic vehicles for it, the
need for the literal dream probably diminishes.
INTERVIEWER
How did you compose the book?
FRANZEN
I typed The Twenty-Seventh
City on a Silver Reed
typewriter. Then I set the book aside for nearly a year while I tried to find
an agent. In hindsight, the responses of the top-drawer agents I’d sent it to
seem remarkably gracious, although I didn’t experience them that way at the
time. Gloria Loomis told me on the phone, with a little laugh, “I’ll get back
to you when I’ve read the second—box.”
That’s when I did a translation of Spring
Awakening, and I was working on some short stories again, with no
more success than before. When I struck out with the agents, I called up the
only writer I had any personal connection to, Hugh Nissenson, the novelist, and
he proceeded to froth at the mouth for an hour about how stupid and corrupt the
publishing industry was, and how lazy certain well-known writers were—it was somewhat
embittered frothing. Then he asked me, “How long is the book?” And I told him,
and he said, “I’m not going to read your book, but I can tell you right now
it’s two times too long. You’ve got to go back and cut it by half.” Then he
said, “Is there a lot of sex in it? There’s gotta be a lot of sex in it.”
It was a wonderful gift. I set down the
phone and picked up the manuscript, which I hadn’t looked at in eight months,
and I said, “My God, there’s two hundred pages that I can cut in half an hour.”
I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connection between my needs as a
reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had never made before. That in
fact I was not interested in punishing the reader, because I didn’t enjoy being
punished myself. If I wanted the book to be read, it needed to move, and so I
had to make the cuts to make it move.
INTERVIEWER
David Foster Wallace wrote to you in the
summer of 1988, after reading The Twenty-Seventh City.
FRANZEN
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
When did you meet?
FRANZEN
I don’t think we succeeded in meeting
until 1990. I was away in Europe for a year, and he flaked on our first two
appointments to meet, for reasons that became clearer later. It’s a telltale
sign of a substance problem when people don’t show up.
INTERVIEWER
Was this your first friendship with
another writer?
FRANZEN
Well, apart from my wife, yes. Around the
same time, I also got to know Bill Vollmann, who was living in New York then.
INTERVIEWER
And what difference did this make?
FRANZEN
It’s all bound up in the story of my
marriage, which I really would prefer not to get into here. But, briefly put,
it was a very hermetic marriage, and simply to be in conversation with other
people who I thought were doing good work—and also to get their take on my
marital situation—was huge. Soon after that, I got to know David Means, too. So
right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer
friends, as opposed to none. And because I was entering a period of radical doubt
about the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredible blessing to
talk with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and talented, who were
dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that you and Wallace
corresponded about fiction less than people might expect.
FRANZEN
At a certain point, you get to be good
enough friends that you pick up the phone rather than writing a letter. The
letter-writing phase is sort of a “feeling out each other’s position” phase. I
came into those conversations with a feeling of an unattractively extreme rage
against literary theory and the politicization of academic English departments.
It was related to my growing antagonism toward a status model of the novel—the
idea that a novel’s highest achievement is to be read and studied by scholars.
And yet my own attempts to connect with a larger audience had so far failed.
Dave was very comfortable in the academy, but he himself was going through
experiences that were making clear that there was more to life than producing
interesting texts that a small number of very smart readers might engage with.
His own life was in crisis, and he was coming into new material, his authentic
personal material, and so he, too, welcomed a conversation about how to move
beyond pure intellectual play into realms of, for want of a better word,
emotional significance. The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached
was the notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers
to connect across time and distance. The formulation had slightly different
meanings for the two of us, but it was the bridge we eventually found to
connect his view to my view.
INTERVIEWER
And the difference?
FRANZEN
I took the notion, finally, as a call to
arms to continue trying to write books that ordinary people, nonprofessionals,
could connect with. I think that Dave, up to the time when he stopped writing,
was still struggling with his distrust of the part of himself that wanted to
please people.
I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our
friendship was haunted by a competition between the writer who was pursuing art
for art’s sake and the writer who was trying to be out in the world. The
art-for-art’s-sake writer gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books
written about his or her work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public
attention and money. Like I say, I perceived this as a competition, but I don’t
know for a fact that Dave perceived it that way. There’s some evidence that he
did, but he was a troubled person and was tormented by the possibility of
people misperceiving him. His instinct was to keep people at a distance and let
the work speak for itself, and I do know that he enjoyed the status he’d
attained. He might have denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously true
things at different moments. He came from an academic family, and the fact that
lots of books were being written about his work really was gratifying to him.
In the way that sibling competition works, I’ve consistently maintained a
position of not caring about that stuff. And Dave’s level of purely linguistic
achievement was turf that I knew better than to try to compete on.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first come across DeLillo?
FRANZEN
I remember a Christmas visit to my wife’s
family during which she gave me Players. I remember reading
it on the train back up to Boston and having one of the purest aesthetic
responses I’ve ever had. I’d finally found somebody who
was putting on the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic that I’d been looking for in film and photographs and had found expressed in music, particularly by Talking Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it on the page and writing like a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You must write better. Here, see, it can be done. I find it remarkable that people don’t talk more about Players. In certain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.
was putting on the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic that I’d been looking for in film and photographs and had found expressed in music, particularly by Talking Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it on the page and writing like a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You must write better. Here, see, it can be done. I find it remarkable that people don’t talk more about Players. In certain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.
INTERVIEWER
What did you find so attractive about him?
FRANZEN
It came as no surprise when I learned,
later, that he sometimes composed books with one paragraph on each page,
starting a new page after only a few sentences. His paragraphs really do have a
stand-alone quality. It was through reading him that I came to see pages as
collections of individual sentences. For a young writer, in particular, the
terrors of the paragraph become more manageable when you see it as a system of
sentences. I also started to see all the junk DNA that had cluttered my
paragraphs before then, and that I’d been unaware of.
INTERVIEWER
DeLillo’s sentences seem to involve
intimate connections between individual words, even letters—a visual
patterning.
FRANZEN
Yes. In my own work, I can see his visual
influence in the dinner-table scene in The Corrections that I wrote immediately after
reading Underworld. But I don’t think
my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder letters—c ’s and p’s.
I think of him as being more into l ’s and a’s
and i ’s.
INTERVIEWER
C ’s and p’s?
FRANZEN
I kept seeing a plate of food with beet
greens and liver and rutabaga—intense purple green, intense orange, rich rusty
brown—and feeling a wish to write sentences that were juicy and sensuous.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean the sound, too?
FRANZEN
No, the way they looked, the roundness of b’s
and g ’s,
the juiciness. That’s almost the last time I remember thinking about the words
that way. Nowadays I have almost the opposite aesthetic—I’m looking for
transparency.
INTERVIEWER
And when did you discover Pynchon?
FRANZEN
I’d come up with the plot of The
Twenty-Seventh City when
I was a college sophomore, in a playwriting workshop, and our instructor had
told me I’d better take a look at Pynchon. I finally got around to it after I
graduated and went back to Germany. I took Gravity’s Rainbow along in mass-market paperback, and
it utterly consumed me. It was like getting the flu to read that book. It was
like I was fighting off some very aggressive infection. I started writing
Pynchonian letters to my then-fiancée,
and I think it’s significant that she hated those letters and made her hatred
of them known, and that I steered away from that voice—because of our
relationship, because of an intense relationship with a woman. Which now seems
to me emblematic: You could either play with the boys like that, and relegate
women to minor and substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you
could try to have a full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that
kind of boy writing, however brilliant and masterful, was necessarily
subordinate. It’s worth noting that at this point in my life, I feel much more
indebted to various female writers—Alice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery
O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Paula Fox, to name a few—than I do to Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
What about the letters was Pynchonian?
FRANZEN
The tangly sentences, the overfullness of
them, and a kind of dirty explicitness. A hipster jadedness. “Seen it all, done
it all, don’t mean shit.” Like the dark side of R. Crumb.
And yet Pynchon’s enterprise in that
book—creating an immensely complex world in which conspiracy is the organizing
principle—was something I internalized and tried to build on. I saw that I
might be able to go beyond the unseen conspiracy to a seen conspiracy, inhabited by complicated
characters with whom we might, moreover, sympathize. To turn the whole notion
of the victim of conspiracy inside out and make the victim himself a
problematic figure and the conspirators perhaps well justified. That was my
best shot, as a twenty-three-year-old, at dealing with my brief but
life-threatening infection with Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
And that infection did not last to your
later novels?
FRANZEN
No. Even in my first book, I found a
better model in Coover. He had some of the same satiric and encyclopedic
ambitions as Pynchon, but he was working at the level of characters and their
relationships to one another, and I just gravitated to that.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve described your first two books as
“systems novels.”
FRANZEN
I had an idea of the social novel that I
didn’t realize was already outmoded. I rather naively believed that, if I could
capture the way large systems work, readers would understand their place in
those systems better and make better political decisions. I’d taken real
delight in the books of the previous generation that had revealed these kinds
of systems to me. In The Twenty-Seventh City, the
systems were city and county government and regional economics. And there were
various systems in Strong Motion, most notably
the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making
sense in the world.
This conception of the novel, I think,
came out of my engagement with science fiction, which is all about concepts.
You have a cool idea: What if we could travel back in time? What if in the
future there’s only one sex? And then the characters come into being to make
that story happen. Going into my first two books, I did have several characters
firmly stuck in my head, but many of the smaller characters were invented to
serve the systems. Whereas, in my last two novels, the systems are there to
serve the characters. There are lingering elements of the old method in The
Corrections—I’d been fascinated, for example, by my parents’
stories of cruises and, like Dave Wallace, I saw the cruise ship as somehow
emblematic of our time. But my priorities have mostly flipped.
INTERVIEWER
How did you begin to write Strong
Motion?
FRANZEN
A bunch of things had happened. My first
book had been published, and my wife and I had fled to Europe; things were
getting hard in the marriage. And, perhaps not coincidentally, I’d fallen under
the spell of religious writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor and Dostoyevsky.
My wife and I began touring cathedrals and looking at medieval sculpture and
Romanesque churches. Wise Blood, The
Brothers Karamazov, and the cathedral at Chartres are all examples
of religious art, which is neither just religion nor just art; it’s a special
category, a special binding of the aesthetic and the devotional. O’Connor and
Dostoyevsky venture intensely into the extremes of human psychology, but always
with serious moral purpose. Because of the difficulties in my marriage, I was
attracted to their search for moral purpose in emotional extremity. I imagined
static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent
scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral
truths at each other. I had the title Strong Motion very early on.
INTERVIEWER
When had you become interested in
earthquakes?
FRANZEN
I’d been a research assistant in
seismology—this was the excellent job that had funded the writing of The
Twenty-Seventh City—and so I knew a lot about it, including the
fact that human beings can cause earthquakes by pumping liquids underground.
There are very few bridges between the geologic scale and the human scale,
between the large forces of nature and the small forces of the heart, and I
recognized early on that the phenomenon of humanly induced seismicity was kind
of a gold mine literarily.
But Strong Motion is mainly a novel about an intense
love affair. It spins outward from there to encompass an alternative Boston in
which earthquakes are occurring. By that point in my life, relationships, for
want of a better word, had presented themselves as being of undeniable primary importance.
The conflict in my marriage could no longer be ignored.
INTERVIEWER
And that found its way into the novel?
FRANZEN
Strong Motion was a novel written by a person to whom things were
happening as he wrote it. It was a third party in the relationship. My wife’s
own second novel was a fourth party. We brought these two extra figures into
the house, so as to have much longer and more complicated discussions and
fights. But I honestly have a poor recollection of how I wrote that book. It
was a bad time, and we were traveling a lot—running, really—attempting
geographic solutions to non-geographic problems.
One of the lines from The
Trial that has always
stayed with me is, approximately, “He had so much important, urgent work to do
at the office, and he was losing so much time to his trial. Precisely now, when
he needed to devote all his wits and strength and attention to his career, he
instead had to worry about his trial.” When I think about my own trajectory as
a writer, it’s in those terms. I began with an ambitious wish to be a writer of
a certain stature, and to be mentioned in the company of such and such, and to
produce a certain kind of masterful book that engages with contemporary culture
and all that. I wanted to get on with the serious business of being an
ambitious writer, but there was this damn trial welling up from within. It was
certainly true in Strong Motion, when things were getting hard in the
marriage, and it became all the more true in The Corrections: Precisely
then, when I needed to focus all of my attention on writing a novel, my parents
were falling apart. If you suffer with that for enough years, it eventually
dawns on you that, in fact, you’ve misconstrued the real work of being a
novelist.
INTERVIEWER
You once described The
Corrections as an
attack on the novel’s enemies, as an argument for the novel.
FRANZEN
The enemy I had in mind was materialism.
The fear out of which that book was written was that the new materialism of the
brain, which has given us drugs to change our personalities, and the
materialism of consumer culture, which provides endless distractions and
encourages the endless pursuit of more goods, were both antithetical to the
project of literature, which is to connect with that which is unchanging and
unchangeable, the tragic dimension of life.
INTERVIEWER
Patty describes the responsibility of
parents to raise children who recognize reality.
FRANZEN
I am indeed interested in self-deception.
Realist fiction presupposes that the author has access to the truth. It implies
a superiority of the author to his or her comically blundering characters. The
Corrections was
written as a comedy, a somewhat angry comedy, and so the self-deception model
worked perfectly. Self-deception is funny, and the writer gets to aggressively
inflict painful knowledge on one character after another.
In Freedom, the recurrent
metaphor is sleepwalking.
Not that you’re deceiving yourself—you’re simply asleep, you’re not paying
attention, you’re in some sort of dream state. The
Corrections was
preoccupied with the unreal, willfully self-deceptive worlds we make for
ourselves to live in. You know, enchantment has a positive connotation, but
even in fairy tales it’s not a good thing, usually. When you’re under
enchantment, you’re lost to the world. And the realist writer can play a useful
and entertaining role in violently breaking the spell. But something about the
position this puts the writer in, as a possessor of truth, as an
epistemological enforcer, has come to make me uncomfortable. I’ve become more
interested in joining the characters in their dream, and experiencing it with
them, and less interested in the mere fact that it’s a dream.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was your first effort to build a novel around Andy
Aberant, but eventually you excised him, as you would later from Freedom.
FRANZEN
Yes, Andy of the undead has now failed
twice to make the cut. He was a self-consciously morally compromised character,
first as a Securities and Exchange Commission attorney, later as the operator of
a bogus land trust. In The Corrections I imagined him involving himself in a
family that was really, really shut down, and coming to have a relationship
with each member of the family, helping them achieve what they couldn’t achieve
themselves. I’m always looking for ways to see things through fresh eyes, and
it seemed to me potentially interesting to observe a family from the
perspective of
an essentially adopted son—“self-adopted in adulthood” was the notion. It was akin to observing the Probsts through the eyes and ears of those eavesdropping Indians.
an essentially adopted son—“self-adopted in adulthood” was the notion. It was akin to observing the Probsts through the eyes and ears of those eavesdropping Indians.
INTERVIEWER
In an early section, published in Granta,
you say that Andy came into the world needing people to believe that he knew
everything.
FRANZEN
One of the reasons Andy never worked is
that he was too much like me, at least the depressive side of me. I get
depressed when I’m failing to get a novel going, and Andy seems to come along
as the voice of my depressive, hyperintellectual distance from my own life. If
he’d ever been able to rise to the level of parody, he might have worked as a
character.
But those Lamberts just kept getting
larger and larger. Alfred and Enid were always Alfred and Enid, their voices
were taken from life. My parents were not Alfred and Enid, but on bad days they
could sound like them. Chip and Gary and Denise had been floating around in my
mind, in different avatars, for some years, with different occupations and in
different situations. Figuring out how to gather these five characters into
some believable semblance of a family took several very unpleasant years of
false starts and note taking.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was the first book you wrote entirely on a computer.
FRANZEN
In terms of process, the one small
difference between a typewriter and a computer is that a computer makes it
easier to find fragments you’ve written and then forgotten about. When you work
at a book for as long as I do, you end up doing a lot of assemblage from
scavenged materials. And with a computer you’re more likely, on a slow morning,
to drift over to another file folder and open up something old. Chunks of text
travel with you, rather than getting buried in a drawer or stored in some
remote, inaccessible location.
One afternoon in 1995 I wrote six or eight
pages about the gerontocracy of St. Jude, based on some Midwestern houses that
I happened to know well. I’d just finished reading the manuscript of Infinite
Jest. I’d been trying for several years to launch a grotesquely
overplotted novel about Philadelphia and prisons, and reading a good friend’s
amazing manuscript roused me from my dogmatic slumbers, so to speak. Around the
same time, I was also working on a short story about a person living in New
York, trying to have a life, trying to make contact with women, and impeded by
the fact that his father
was sleeping in an enormous blue chair in his living room. I couldn’t figure
out where to go with the story, so I set it aside. But a few months later, when
I desperately needed something to read at a Paris Review–sponsored event
with David Means, I searched my computer and found these two chunks of writing
that I could put together and read. Donald Antrim and Jeff Eugenides, whom I
hardly knew, but who subsequently became good friends, came up afterward and
said, “That was really good.” The Paris Review went on to publish that chunk, and it
became something I wanted to use in the novel, too.
INTERVIEWER
And it went smoothly after that?
FRANZEN
No. Then came further bad years, trying to
make that ridiculous, overplotted monster work. It was finally another friend’s
work that roused me; I read the manuscript ofUnderworld on a Mexican vacation. I came
home from that vacation and set aside the still-monstrous plot and plunged
into the cruise-ship chapter and had an experience very similar to Alfred’s in
that chapter. I’d intended to write a simple, quick narrative about cruise-ship
hilarities, and I fell through the surface of the present action into a long,
long flashback. I was writing about an “ordinary” evening with the
Lamberts—basically just a small drama of Chip’s refusal to eat his food. But
DeLillo’s method in the recycling chapter of Underworld, where various
lines of thought are crisply sorted into alternating paragraphs in the same way
that his main character is sorting his household trash, had attuned me to how
much suspense and foreboding you can create simply by deploying paragraph
breaks. In my case, I was sorting the family’s four points of view by
paragraph.
The writing process for that flashback was
different from any process before or since, and it really changed my idea of
what I was doing as a novelist. I’d quit cigarettes a month earlier, and as a
result I was drinking tons of coffee. I’d get up in the morning and drink so
much coffee that I made myself almost sick. Then I’d have to lie down and take
a hard nap, which I could suddenly do because I was in better contact with my
natural body rhythms. Instead of having a cigarette when I was feeling sleepy,
why not just lie down and sleep? For the first time in my life, I could take these
wonderful, intense twenty-minute naps. But then, because I was so loaded up
with caffeine, I would come surging back up to the surface and go straight to
the desk and write a page. And that was it for the day.
INTERVIEWER
Just one page?
FRANZEN
A page was enough, by then. If you read
the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point
where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997
were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks
of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about
something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the
exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of
American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real
revelation.
INTERVIEWER
How did you conceive of the structure of
the book?
FRANZEN
I was very aware of how time would be
handled. Once I’d finally figured out that a large novel could be constructed
out of multiple short novels, each of them building to a crisis in which the
main character can no longer escape reality, I had an opportunity to play with
time management—how far back into the past to plunge after the opening section,
how to parcel out the gradual return toward the present, where to situate the
meeting of the backstory with the present story. I sketched out in pencil how
the chronology would work in each of the five novellas, and I was pleased to
have a different structure for each of them. I also liked the way the graphs
looked: A horizontal line, representing the present action, was interrupted by
chunks of backstory which would rise at various slopes like something
surfacing. Like a missile rising up out of the past to intersect with a plane
flying horizontally in the present.
INTERVIEWER
Both of your first two novels end with
motion, with important issues still open, and that seems to offer an
interesting contrast to the endings of your last two novels, which in certain
ways are more tightly resolved.
FRANZEN
I can see that lack of resolution now as a
young writer’s move. You find that you have talent as a novelist, you
understand a lot more about the world than many other people your age do, and
yet you haven’t lived enough—certainly I hadn’t—to really have something to
say. Everything is still guessed at, every conclusion is provisional. And this
came to be my gripe with the postmodern aversion to closure. It’s like, Grow up
already! Take some responsibility for your narrative! I’m not looking for the meaning, but I am looking for ameaning,
and you’re denying me a vital element of making sense of any story, which is
its ending! Aversion to closure can be refreshing at certain historical
moments, when ossified cultural narratives need to be challenged. But it loses
its subversive bite in a culture that celebrates eternal adolescence. It
becomes part of the problem.
INTERVIEWER
Where were you writing The
Corrections?
FRANZEN
I built an office up in Harlem in 1997. It
had a huge south-facing window looking directly at 125th Street, which is one
of the noisier streets of New York. I knew I had to block out the light,
because the space was so intensely bright, but I also built a second window for
sound protection.
Working without cigarettes had made me
much more prone to distraction. Cigarettes had always been the way I’d snapped
myself to attention. Cigarettes had made me smart, and smart had been the
organizing principle for a couple of books. Smart had been the locus of my
manhood, but it was no longer getting me anywhere. I’d quit because I’d decided
that they were getting in the way of feeling. Without cigarettes, though, I was
so easily irritated by even moderately bright light or moderate noise that I
immediately became dependent on earplugs. They became a kind of a cigarette
replacement, as did a darkened room. And that’s been the scene ever since.
INTERVIEWER
Despite the silence, music often features
in your books.
FRANZEN
I’m more envious of music than of any
other art form—the way a song can take your head over and make you feel so
intensely and so immediately. It’s like snorting the powder, it goes straight
to your brain.
Each of my books has had a set of songs
associated with it. There’s always rock and roll in the mix, but the most
important music for The Corrections was probably Petrushka,
the Stravinsky ballet. Petrushka corresponded not only to the feeling I
was after but to the structure, too, the relation of tonally disparate parts to
an ultimately unified whole. I also kept coming back to Steve Reich’s Music
for 18 Musicians as a
model for the kind of metaphoric layering and interconnection I was after.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections is full of references to the brain, but in Freedom the whole language of brain chemistry
and brain architecture barely registers.
FRANZEN
Well, you know, new times, new enemies. Freedom was conceived and eventually written
in a decade where language was under as concerted an assault as we’ve seen in
my lifetime. The propaganda of the Bush administration, its appropriation of
words like freedom for cynical short-term political gain,
was a clear and present danger. This was also the decade that brought us
YouTube and universal cell-phone ownership and Facebook and Twitter. Which is
to say: brought us a whole new world of busyness and distraction. So the
defense of the novel moved to different fronts. Let’s take one of those
buzzwords, freedom, and try to restore
it to its problematic glory. Let’s redouble our efforts to write a book with a
narrative strong enough to pull you into a place where you can feel and think
in ways that are difficult when you’re distracted and busy and electronically
bombarded. The impulse to defend the novel, to defend the turf, is stronger
than ever. But the foes change with the times.
INTERVIEWER
Did you conceive Freedom initially as a political novel?
FRANZEN
Yes, I spent several years looking for
some interesting way into our national political narrative, some Washingtonian
wrinkle that hadn’t been explored to death in other media. But I couldn’t find
that wrinkle, and, frankly, I was also never able to get past my immediate
partisan anger to the more open-minded place where truthful novels are written.
I was making the same mistake I always seem to make initially, trying to write
from the top down. I always have to learn the hard way to begin with character.
INTERVIEWER
When did you begin to see the shape of the
book?
FRANZEN
Only near the end. As late as seven months
before I handed it in, I had in mind a completely different form for the book.
I thought it was going to be a novel of documents. My perennial refrain when
I’m working is “I don’t know what the book is about! I don’t have a story!”
Really only when the last couple of chapters come into focus does that refrain
cease.
In the spring of 2007, after five years of
periodic failure with the book, I’d made enough progress that I could have a
very strong drink with my editor and sketch out a love-triangle story with a
Patty-like character at its center. He said, “That sounds like a great, funny
short novel, I’ll give you a contract for it.” So we wrote up a contract with a
delivery date of ten months later, because I was still intending to write about
politics and wanted the book out before the 2008 elections. I went to Berlin,
to breathe the good old German literary air, and I tried to use the isolation
and the deadline pressure to get some chapters banged out. But the characters
weren’t there yet. I came back home and flagellated myself all summer, but the
characters still weren’t there. Eventually I reached a point of such despair
that I decided to take a year off.
INTERVIEWER
And you did take a year off?
FRANZEN
Well, nearly. I put five solid months into
a New Yorker piece
on the environmental situation in China. I also researched a second piece, a
medium-term longitudinal study of twenty-two-year-olds arriving in New York
City, fresh out of college. I ultimately decided not to write that one, out of
kindness to my subjects, who were wonderful kids and said far more to a New
Yorker reporter than
they should have.
That piece grew out of my coming to terms
with not having had children, my sense that I was getting old before my time,
that I’d lost a vital connection with youth and thus with hope and possibility.
The China piece came out of a question that Dave and I talked about constantly:
How can we keep sitting in our rooms and struggling with fiction when there is
so much wrong with the world? During the summer after I signed the book
contract, my sense of duty became utterly oppressive. So much bad stuff was
happening in the country—and happening to wild birds around the world!—that I
felt I just couldn’t keep wasting months. I had to go out and do something, get
my hands dirty with some problem. Only after the China piece failed to find a
discernible audience or have any discernible impact did I get it through my
head that I might actually have more effect on the world by retreating to my
room and doing what I was put on earth to do.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know when the work is going
well?
FRANZEN
The word I’ve been using to talk about
that lately is adequacy. My primary reader and consultant for Freedom was my friend Elisabeth Robinson,
who’s been struggling with her own new novel, and one of her gifts to me was
her saying, “You only have to make this book adequate.” To which she was nice
enough to add: “Your adequate is very good.”
When I was younger, the main struggle was
to be a “good writer.” Now I more or less take my writing abilities for
granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well. And, by a wide margin,
I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did
when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again,
as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This feels nothing like the
writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.” I wasn’t seeing in
the pages any of the signs I’d taken as encouraging when I was writing The
Corrections. The sentences back then had had a pop. They were, you
know, serious prose sentences, and I was able to vanquish my doubts simply by
rereading them. When I was showing Corrections chapters to David Means, I basically
expected his rubber stamp, because the sentences had a level of effulgence that
left me totally defended. But here, with Freedom, I felt like, “Oh my
God, I just wrote however many metaphor-free pages about some weird days in the
life of a college student, I have no idea if this is any good.” I needed
validation in a way I never had before.
I was admittedly somewhat conscious that
this was a good sign—that it might mean that I was doing something different,
pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent
access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories. But
it still felt like a leap into the void.
INTERVIEWER
It is often said about your recent books
that they look more like nineteenth-century novels than twenty-first-century
ones.
FRANZEN
The people at the Swedish Academy, who
bestow the Nobel Prize, recently confessed their thoroughgoing lack of interest
in American literary production. They say we’re too insular, we’re not writing
about the world, we’re only writing about ourselves. Given how Americanized the
world has become, I think they’re probably wrong about this—we probably say more
about the world by writing about ourselves than a Swedish author does by
writing about a trip to Africa. But even if they’re right, I don’t think our
insularity is necessarily a bad thing.
Nineteenth-century Russia strikes me as a
parallel. Russia is its own little world, famously good at repelling incursions
by foreign powers, and it’s maintained a separate superpower identity for
centuries. Maybe that very insularity, that feeling of living in a complete but
not quite universal world, creates certain kinds of literary possibility. All
of those old Russians were dramatically engaged with the question of what would
become of their country, and the question didn’t seem inconsequential, because
Russia was a vast nation. Whereas, when a Liechtensteiner wrestles with the
future of Liechtenstein, who really cares? It’s possible that the U.S. and
Russia are exactly the right size to be hospitable to a certain kind of
expansive novelistic project. England was, too, for a time, thanks to its
empire, and the golden age of the English novel coincided with its imperial
domination. There again, it wasn’t the whole world, it was just a very large
microcosm. True cosmopolitanism is incompatible with the novel, because
novelists need particularity. But we also need some room to move around. And
we’re lucky to have both here.
That said, I don’t feel particularly
nineteenth century. All of the issues that became problematic with modernism
still need to be negotiated in every book.
INTERVIEWER
And yet it doesn’t seem that novelty is
all that important to you anymore.
FRANZEN
I’m wary of the pursuit of novelty for
novelty’s sake. At the same time, if I don’t feel like I’m doing something new,
I can’t do anything. Reading time is so scarce nowadays, and alternative
entertainment is so widely available, that I’m keenly attuned, as a reader, to
whether a book’s author seems to be experiencing something new or is just
turning the crank.
There’s always new content, of course.
Content will carry you a certain distance; it can rescue you when you’re in
trouble formally. I think the importance of content is what Harold Bloom, for
example, really underestimates in the novel. Bloom’s at his best with poetry,
because poetry is so purely language. But his approach becomes something close
to nonsense when he applies it to novels, because he’s still basically just
looking at language. Language is important, absolutely, but the history of the
novel is only partly stylistic. Faulkner obviously begat many influences, ditto
Hemingway, ditto Joyce, ditto Carver and Lish, ditto DeLillo. But rhetorical
innovation is just one of the many streams that feed into the river of fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Where do the modernists figure in your
development?
FRANZEN
I have learned and feel I will continue to
learn an enormous amount from Proust—his purely novelistic gifts, his
recognition of how much you can gain by letting a story slowly extend over long
stretches of time, his method of rendering the sense of gradual dawning as we
live our lives. Things are not what they initially seem, things are often
exactly the opposite of what they seem.
And Conrad: the prescience of The
Secret Agent, the psychological brutality and intensity of Victory,
the incisive critique of colonialism in Nostromo. Those books are marvels
to me in both content and method. Conrad devotes the first half of Nostromo to slowly building to a set piece that
he then omits, so that he can jump to a different place at a different time and
blow your socks off there. He built himself up to a scene, he was then not
interested in writing, at which point he miraculously discovered, “Oh, but
there is a story here, it’s just not the one I thought!” It’s breathtaking. I
love it, love it.
INTERVIEWER
You once gave a beautiful description of Ulysses as being like a cathedral.
FRANZEN
Maybe my Joyce time is still coming. I
like Portrait of the Artist a lot. I like Dublinerseven
more. But I can never shake the feeling that, after those books, Joyce was
chasing a certain kind of status. He was inventing the very category in which
he wanted his work to place him. And that’s where the cathedral image comes
from: I’m going to build something
grand that you’re going to admire and study for decades. There’s a sort of chilly Jesuitical quality to Joyce, and the Jesuits are, of course, great statusmongers and elitists. I’m an old egalitarian Midwesterner, and that kind of personality just rubs me the wrong way. I find someone like Beckett much more sympathetic. He’s often harder to read than Joyce, so it’s not a matter of the difficulty. It’s the feeling that Beckett is going after a really personally felt horror and finding comedy and universality in that horror. He’s obviously very concerned with language, but the language is in the service of something not merely thought but also felt. And that, to me, is a friendlier enterprise.
grand that you’re going to admire and study for decades. There’s a sort of chilly Jesuitical quality to Joyce, and the Jesuits are, of course, great statusmongers and elitists. I’m an old egalitarian Midwesterner, and that kind of personality just rubs me the wrong way. I find someone like Beckett much more sympathetic. He’s often harder to read than Joyce, so it’s not a matter of the difficulty. It’s the feeling that Beckett is going after a really personally felt horror and finding comedy and universality in that horror. He’s obviously very concerned with language, but the language is in the service of something not merely thought but also felt. And that, to me, is a friendlier enterprise.
I should also say something about those
words status and contract.
Probably through faults of its own, my essay on literary difficulty and William
Gaddis has been somewhat misunderstood. The primary thing I failed to make
clear was that the terminology of statusand contract was Gaddis’s own. As far as one can
tell from his rather confused and opaque nonfiction writings, he was a big status
guy. He seems to have believed that the world really was better off in the late
Middle Ages than it is today, when the world is arranged by vulgar contract. He
seems to have preferred the older status system, where high was high and low
was low and great works of art were understood by very few. The reason I seized
on those words is that status has another, more common meaning in
this country—“status symbol,” “literary status,” and so on.
INTERVIEWER
Is the response of critics important to
you?
FRANZEN
I’d be lying if I pretended that Terrence
Rafferty’s vicious review of TheTwenty-Seventh City in The New Yorker didn’t have an effect on the way I
went about writing Strong Motion. Basically,
though, with very few exceptions,
I stopped reading my reviews after James Wood’s piece on The
Corrections. I’d looked to forward to it because he can be a very
perceptive reader, and I knew that we had some common enemies and enthusiasms.
And what he wrote was a quibbling and carping and narrowly censorious thing,
with a willfully dense misreading of my Harper’s essay. That disappointment, along with
fifteen unwisely spent minutes of Googling myself in 2001, pretty well cured me
of the need to read about myself.
INTERVIEWER
And the overwhelming response to Freedom hasn’t changed that?
FRANZEN
Nah.
INTERVIEWER
What are people missing or overlooking in
your work?
FRANZEN
I think they may be overlooking Strong
Motion a little bit.
But what seems to me most often overlooked is that I consider myself
essentially a comic writer. This was particularly true with The
Discomfort Zone, which I wrote for laughs, and which I’m told
wasn’t laughed at in all quarters.
I’m reminded of a very earnest young
Italian man who came up to me after a reading in Rome at which I’d read some of
my breakup stories. He said to me, with this kind of tragic face, “I don’t
understand. You’re reading about people who are going through terrible pain,
and everyone in the audience is laughing.” I don’t remember what I said to him,
but I’d like to think I said, “Exactly.”
The Paris Review No. 195, Winter 2010
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