Geez, what to say about Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel? It landed the St. Louis native on the cover of TIME, and The New York Times Sunday Book Review called it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Last fall, Left Bank Books had to move Franzen’s reading to Christ Church Cathedral, where 800 people showed up despite the lack of air conditioning. Franzen read for half an hour, answered questions, and then faced a long, snaking book-signing line. On October 15, he visits St. Louis County Library’s Headquarters Branch for Read St. Louis (readstlouis.org).
SLM recently talked to Franzen about Freedom’s paperback release, his New Yorker essays, and the HBO adaptation of The Corrections, which could begin airing as early as 2013.
Let’s start with this intense book tour. You mostly write on a laptop with no Internet, but you also seem to enjoy going into the world with a book.
I really like the signing lines. It’s just a chance to shake the hands of people who care enough about books to come out on a Tuesday evening and listen to an author read from his work… A lot of what people want to talk about is their personal take on [the books’] characters. And the conversations are strangely intimate, therefore. It’s like I’m talking to friends about some mutual friend of ours, except the mutual friend is a character in the book. And within that general heading, everyone wants to say who their favorite character is and which characters they didn’t like. There’s a certain percentage who say, “Well, I didn’t like any of them.” And they say really rather amazing things, like “Do families this dysfunctional really exist?” And I don’t know what to say—because I don’t think they’re dysfunctional at all! [Laughs.] I think they’re complicated, and they have trouble in their lives, but it’s a very functional family in Freedom. But mostly, the real interest for me is seeing the very different ways that various readers react to what is really just the same set of marks on a page.
There are very young characters in Freedom. When someone over 25 starts writing in a teen voice, it has the potential to go horribly wrong…
To give credit where credit is due, a younger editor did read the final draft of the book. And I would say there were probably a dozen points where he said, “Eh.” [Laughs.] And then he suggested some cuts or some changes. My favorite of his marginal comments came where Joey and his friend Jonathan are referring to each other as “dawg.” And this young editor, Lorin Stein—he’s no longer an editor at my publisher; he’s the editor of The Paris Review—he said, “The way of the dawg is fraught with danger.” [Laughs.] Then I very carefully removed almost all of the “dawgs.”
You also spent time in 2007 and 2008 interviewing 22-year-olds who had just moved to New York.
Right, for the New Yorker piece I ended up not writing. [Laughs.] The kind of person who becomes a fiction writer is, arguably, a lazy person—someone who likes to pretend to have more knowledge than he has and is good at making use of relatively small pieces of experience and generalizing from them. I think that’s really part of the fiction writer’s job. As a college student, I was always trying to act more knowledgeable than I was.
Well, that’s the college student’s job.
Yeah, exactly. And they taught me well. [Laughs.] If I were to answer the question seriously, I suffered when I was young by feeling not my age. Even at the age of 8 or 9, I felt like a middle-aged person, because my parents were much older than me; I was a late child. I spent a lot of time with older people, and was extremely responsible and serious in the way that older people were. So I’ve always been—and this is a thing I think about a lot of fiction writers—we don’t have a single, fixed personality. We have a mess of different personalities. It makes living life hard, but it serves us well when we go to tell stories about people who are not like us, ’cause I can kind of turn into the character I’m writing. That age confusion I had as a young child, I still have. I’m feeling more my own age than I probably ever have, and yet there’s a part of me that is absolutely 19.
I’m curious about your research process. There’s a poet here in town who actually makes site visits.
He was probably a very good student in college. He was probably the kind of student I was always jealous of, the one that actually read all the secondary sources! [Laughs.]
So you don’t dig through archives?
As little as I possibly can. And I think, really, the world of writers divides into two basic types. There’s the kind that does an immense amount of research, and feels comfortable because they know so much, and then there’s the kind that does as little as possible, because they don’t want to know too much. I think knowing a medium amount is a terrible place to be, because you’re surrounded by all these interesting facts, and you want to try to work them into the work, but you don’t know so much that you can start leaving things out. Being still that lazy college sophomore, my approach is to imagine things. Then I check my facts afterwards. It saves a lot of time, because there aren’t that many facts to check after you’ve imagined something. You don’t have to read the entire corpus of work on any subject. You just have to answer a few specific questions.
It’s just like film continuity, then.
And again, the fact that fiction works as well as it does is kind of a miracle, the fact that we read it as if it’s a dream we’re having and that dialogue feels like dialogue, it doesn’t feel like marks on a page. And one of the other magical things about fiction is that a couple well-researched little details can convey a sense of general authority. If you just plant those things strategically, you make it clear to someone who lives in, say, St. Paul, that you know the geography in St. Paul, and you know where people went to hear cutting-edge music in 1988. If you just show the reader a few things like that, they trust you, and it feels like, “OK, all the other stuff he’s not saying, I’m sure he knows that; he’s just choosing not to say it, because he’s concentrating on his characters.”
Over time, your books seem to have moved from so many facts to feelings. Freedom, in particular, seems like a book of feeling.
I notice as a reader myself that I have less and less interest in descriptions of buildings and furniture and art in a novel. I don’t want a diluted drink. I’m reading about it to have an adventure with the writer and to go to intense dramatic and emotional places… There was a time when people didn’t have TV and movies, and so if you were out in Nebraska, reading a novel about New York City, and you’d never been there, the only way you could find out about what it was like was to have Herman Melville describe it to you. Description is…not so important now, because we snap into things quickly, and we’ve all seen movies set in New York, we’ve seen movies set everywhere. I’m just more impatient as a reader.
There’s also an interesting undercurrent in Freedom with class.
Actually, the last couple of novels—in The Corrections, I was quite tuned to class. And I’m not an unpolitical person. I was made aware as a student of what an interesting subject class is, and I feel fortunate to have come from the middle class. It’s not that huge a reach up, but it’s also not that huge a reach down. My mom had a little bit of college, but she was a bartender’s daughter. And it was all about work. There was absolutely no accumulated money in our family; even when my parents died, there was hardly anything. So I feel like I had cultural ties to the working class when I was growing up, but I was very much in a middle-class suburb, in Webster Groves. And eventually my father, through hard work, came to be culturally if not economically more upper–middle class. I do think because class issues are being exploited politically, constantly, this taboo is a very self-serving taboo. We are going to exploit all these class resentments, but if you call us on it, we’re going to accuse you of class warfare. Unmentionable subjects really are catnip for a certain kind of novelist. Yeah, so, sure…it’s in there. And it was consciously in there.
I also want to talk about humor—you have this great bit in The Discomfort Zone about seeing the sign for Effingham and wondering if it’s short for “Fuckingham.” I burst out laughing every time I drive by there.
[Laughing.] No one has ever said they liked that! And I was so proud of that line.
You don’t always get credit for being a funny writer. Why not?
Some critics…well…they might not have a very good sense of humor. But it’s frustrating, because if you miss the humor and you miss the irony, then you’re taking things straight that it’s just like…
It makes people mad.
Right—it makes people mad... I have also maintained that most of the fiction that really counts has at least some humor in it. I’m out in Santa Cruz now, and every summer there is a Shakespeare festival here, and they do a couple of plays in a glen in the woods, and they’re great. But the ones that really work are the comedies. They’re so, so funny, and yet Shakespeare’s this giant figure that’s considered the peak achievement in English literature. I think maybe it has to do with the way that literature is taught at the junior-high-school and high-school level. By the time that people are in book clubs and discussing work, they equate humor with lack of seriousness. I think people might even be trying to do a funny writer a favor by not dwelling on the humor, because they’ll say, “Well, you probably don’t want to hear this, but you’re actually very funny.”
Writers are afraid they’ll get shelved by the Mad Libs.
Yeah, I know! But there are three responses I look for in a reader of my work: I like to make them think, I like to make them cry, and I like to make them laugh. It’s incredibly important. But it does interfere with this notion we have that you can’t be serious if you’re laughing.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m writing scripts for HBO, for a show they seem very serious about making out of The Corrections. It’s a real four-season series that is being contemplated here. I continue to have a lot of nonfiction projects. I did a long piece for The New Yorker this spring about the origins of the English novel and Robinson Crusoe.
Which is also the essay where you talk about losing your friend David Foster Wallace—how did you balance the feeling and the thinking there?
For an essay to come alive, it needs to contain stuff that’s “hot” for the writer—an unresolved conflict, or a seemingly untellable story, or a suite of unexamined strong feelings. I’ve found that one way to manage the hot stuff, and to make otherwise unsayable things sayable, is to tell several different stories at once and let the several stories defend and reinforce each other. That’s certainly what I was doing in the essay about Dave, the English novel, and my trip to the remote islands.
So what’s on your docket now?
I’m working on a book-length project that is significantly a memoir—but not just a memoir—about an Austrian writer from the turn of the previous century, Karl Kraus, who I was very taken with as a young man. I’m trying to write about my experience of Germany and German literature and some more personal things than that… And this is what I need to do now, because I know if I was trying to write another novel, I would simply be sailing. Maybe in a year’s time, I can sit down and start failing at that again.
Describe the experience of coming back here.
I did a reading in St. Louis last September, downtown. And it was just an incredibly moving evening. First of all, just how many people came—I was blown away by that. And then all these faces from the past, all these people I had not seen for 35 years, and who were living in my mind very much as they were 35 years ago. It’s always a huge treat to go back there. The only thing that’s a problem is, I’m a little bit more nervous reading for a hometown crowd.
Why’s that?
Oh, I don’t think it’s particularly complicated. [Laughs.]
