Jonathan Franzen

BIO

Jonathan Franzen is the author of THE CORRECTIONS, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction; the novels THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY and STRONG MOTION; and a collection of essays, HOW TO BE ALONE, all published by FSG. He lives in New York City.

INTERVIEW

September 21, 2001

Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, THE CORRECTIONS, needs no introduction. The opus and its author are ubiquitous. Not to mention the biggest critical darlings that have come along in quite some time. Franzen recently talked with The Book Report about how the development of the Lambert family, his epic writing process and the death of the modern novel.

TBR: THE CORRECTIONS is the stage for a pretty large cast --- the brilliantly realized Amazing Lambert 5 along with a host of unforgettable periphery characters (Gitanas, the Lithuanian --- total genius!). Were the Lamberts conceived as a whole, or during the invention of, say, Parkinson's addled Alfred, did you have a flash of inspiration for confused and searching Denise? Was it difficult to find and sustain the voices of so many different characters? Were any personalities more difficult to develop than others?

JF: Many years ago, during a brief stint in a theory-mad English department, I started developing the character of a comically anxious young literary theoretician whom I called Chip. When I needed to put the screws on him, a couple of years after that, I gave him a pair of radically uncool Midwestern parents who drop in to see him on a very bad day. The parents were Alfred and Enid, and by and by I pulled in another character I'd long been developing, a young cook named Denise, and made her their daughter. At that point, the Lambert family began to seem more interesting than anything else in the novel I was working on, so I threw away the rest and kept them. Gary was the last to be added but he, too, was a character I'd been thinking about for years --- sometimes as an Italian-American from Philadelphia, sometimes as a real-estate developer from Colorado. I see faces, and eventually I find my way to dramatic situations that allow me to attach the faces to actual characters.

TBR: In your 1996 Harper's essay, "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels", you highlight the plight of the social novelist by asking, "How can you achieve topical 'relevance' without drawing on an up-to-the-minute vocabulary of icons and attitudes and thereby far from challenging the hegemony of overnight obsolescence, confirming and furthering it?". THE CORRECTIONS is a socially motivated novel that draws on a buffet of popular culture icons and attitudes. Are you at all fearful of it succumbing to an "overnight obsolescence" or do you feel you've solved the problem of achieving both topical relevance and timelessness? How so?

JF: I'm a whole lot less worried about so-called cultural or social relevance than I was when I began writing the Harper's essay. The way I understand things now, the culture serves the novelist, the novelist doesn't serve the culture. If I happen to choose to weave various strands of our contemporary social fabric into the story I'm telling, I do it because it helps the characters feel alive and vital to me, not because I think the novelist has some duty to report on society. What matters is that the book work as a book.

TBR: It took you eight years to write THE CORRECTIONS. What was that process like for you? Is the prospect of a fourth novel more or less daunting now?

JF: Well, let's call it five years of work, nine years of elapsed time between novels.  The hardest years were the ones when I was doubting there was any point to writing novels; once I regained my faith in the enterprise, I had the usual feelings of mortality and unwished-for anonymity, but I also felt sustained by the existence of a project --- the sense that my life had some purpose. And because THE CORRECTIONS was so long in the making, I don't feel particularly daunted by the prospect of a fourth novel. This could change, of course, but right now, all around me, I'm being offered evidence that you can take forever to write a book and still find a readership when it's done. Certainly I'm looking forward to the time when I'll be writing fiction again, rather than doing publicity.

TBR: I was surprised to learn that THE CORRECTIONS has already been optioned as a movie. Will you be working on the screenplay or overseeing the production? Any concerns about what the final product might be like?

JF: I will not be doing the screenplay, and my main interest in the movie is whether it gets made, not how it gets made. The book will remain itself, available in its original form to any reader who cares to take a look at it.

TBR: Care to weigh in on B. R. Myers' now infamous article, "A Reader's Manifesto"? Are you a yeah, nay, or somewhere in between on his accusation that literary fiction --- Don DeLillo, an influence of yours, was featured prominently on the hit list --- has become hopelessly quagmired in pretension and affected, meaningless prose?

JF: Myers picked on two writers who I think are (or have become) rather ludicrously bad. He also picked on DeLillo and seriously misread him. If WHITE NOISE were, as Myers claims, a "satire," then it would indeed have rather too-familiar objects. But the book is comedy, not satire (and, my God, the number of reviewers who use these two terms interchangeably! --- it's really appalling), and so very little that Myers had to say about it made sense to me. It was like listening to someone list all the ways in which "The Raven" fails as a sonnet. My main response to Myers, though, was: WAS IT NOT EVER THUS? Implicit in his lament is the idea that we used to live in a golden age when critics and academics and prize committees uniformly lauded works of genius. I would invite him to take a look at some of the critical darlings of the Forties and Fifties. Compared to ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES, I think he'd find Paul Auster's recent work quite compelling and readable.

On the other hand, every age needs its scourges, and it's lovely to see people still heatedly discussing books here in 2001.

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