Jonathan Franzen - How He Came to Be Somewhere - An Interview and Three Early Stories

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 Dubliners even 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.

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 status and 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 The Twenty - 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.”

Portrait of Jonathan Franzen

as a Young Man

OUR FRIEND DANNI’S young husband had been intending, since before he was her husband, to talk about his feelings about having children, but because these feelings consisted mainly of reluctance and aversion, and because Danni, who was a few years older than he, was unmistakably determined to have a family, this conversation promised to be so unhappy that the young husband still hadn’t managed to begin it by the time Danni reached a career plateau and announced that she was ready. The young husband told her that he needed to go to Burlington, Vermont. He said he needed to replenish his store of antique lumber for his custom-renovation business. From Burlington he called Danni every few days, sounding worried about her emotional state, but it was not until Danni received a card from the postal service, confirming the young husband’s change of address, that she understood that he wasn’t coming back. She said on the telephone, “Did you leave me? Are we not together anymore?” For the young husband, unfortunately, answering these questions would have meant initiating precisely the conversation that he couldn’t bring himself to have. He replied that all of a sudden, in Vermont, nobody was naïve about lumber anymore. Every single person in the state seemed to know that antique thirty-foot oak beams now sold for three thousand dollars. Even very stupid and isolated rural people were aware of this. He said that, as information became cheaper, markets became more perfect and real bargains impossible to find. Probably online auction sites like eBay contributed to this trend, which was bad for entrepreneurs like himself but good for rural Vermonters, he had to admit. A few days later, while Danni was on a business trip, the young husband drove to New York in his pickup and fetched his personal things, including a sixty-pound chunk of maple burl, from their apartment on East Tenth Street. Even after Danni had met a twenty-seven-year-old psychotherapist and become pregnant with his child, the young husband remained unable to tell her that he didn’t want children and should never have married her. The divorce was done by mail.