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

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 of Underworld 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 a meaning, 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.