Jonathan Franzen

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Jonathan Franzen joins us now from New York. Welcome to The Book Show, Jonathan.

Jonathan Franzen: Hi, Ramona, nice to be here.

Ramona Koval: Well, first, Jonathan, I think we have to thank you for your role as a good literary citizen of the world. And by this I mean firstly your championing of two books that have been important to me—and there have been many others of course—but I first read about Paula Fox when you wrote about finding her book, Desperate Characters on the reading shelf at someone's holiday house; then I interviewed her when the book was subsequently republished, and she was a real find. Tell us about how you came to do what you did with that book.

Jonathan Franzen: You know, you enter a dark wood at a certain point in your life and things start falling apart; your life is not what you expected it to be. And if you encounter a book that really speaks to where you are at that moment, it's a life-changing encounter, and that happened to me with Desperate Characters. I just thought, 'Why have I not heard of this book?' I have not read a better novel written by an American since 1945. It was an incredible book, and it was out of print, so I started vacuuming up all these sort of second-hand copies, and wrote about my experience. And people paid attention to that and now of course she's back in print; she has a new book coming out this fall.

Ramona Koval: And she was a fantastic woman to talk to too.

Jonathan Franzen: Oh! She's got an amazing story. She was an orphan. She was... I mean, she had a mother, but the mother basically came home from the hospital, handed her to somebody else, and disappeared for much of the rest of Paula's life.

Ramona Koval: And then you've given your 'best books' to Oprah's book club and on it you have The Man Who Loved Children, by Australian writer Christina Stead. And it was one of the most important books I read as a girl. I wonder whether it influenced you in the way you see the family, or writing about the family.

Jonathan Franzen: You know, it's certainly, it's a giant of world literature. And it does three times what many writers' entire oeuvres don't do, which is it creates a lasting, giant character. And there are three characters in that book, all of whom are just these primal, giant, rich, unforgettable characters. Certainly the strength of the characterisations is something that I admire and aspire to. You know, I came from not as completely messed-up a family as Christina Stead did—quite the opposite, actually—so it didn't speak to me directly, it spoke to me more for its just obvious literary merit.

Ramona Koval: Well, although you are deeply concerned about all kinds of political ideas and movements—the environment, for example—which we can read about in your non-fiction, it seems that these things are not necessarily the drivers of your fiction. It seems it's the one-to-one relationships in couples and in families and in groups of friends and neighbourhoods that drives your literary interest. Would that be right?

Jonathan Franzen: I think that's accurate. There was a time when I was more motivated by some kind of socially instructive impulse and it has gradually, somewhat painfully, dawned on me that people don't really go to novels so much for information anymore; they're not looking to be educated when they pick up a book. I mean, there's a certain kind of book that does that, but people who are reading serious, funny, literary fiction generally don't need to be told, you know, what to think about things and what's going on in the world—they know. What they're looking for, what I'm looking for, as a reader is work that explores what's going on underneath the surface of the very busy world we're in, and that's something you get at better by paying very close attention to just a couple of characters.

Ramona Koval: Why do you say, 'gradually and painfully'? What was the pain?

Jonathan Franzen: Well, you know, back in the day, back in the nineteenth century, people really did read novels for news of the world. They, you know, Dickens was bringing his readers vital information about stuff that they might not know about. There was a whole tradition of the social novel and the practitioners of that kind of book were celebrities: they were the film directors; they were the actors; they were the TV personalities of their time. And to no longer have that kind of profile as a novelist—for any novelist nowadays—what many writers in the nineteenth century had, you know, that's a painful thing to accept. One dreams as a young man, 'Oh, it's just temporary, we'll get it back,' but, no, in fact the situation has changed and we're playing on a somewhat smaller field now, there's just no way around it.
Ramona Koval: Although your field has gotten rather large, hasn't it?

Jonathan Franzen: Ha! Yeah, I mean, everything's relative, of course.

Ramona Koval: And if everything's relative, I think you're right up there playing the big field.

Jonathan Franzen: Um, it's been a crazy last three or four months. It started with the cover photograph of Time magazine...

Ramona Koval: What did you think of that? Did you think, 'God, I've really sold out now,' or what? 'Or has the world changed now? What I was lamenting in that essay in Harper's magazine about the death of the social novel in America, that's all changed.' What could you have possibly thought, when you saw yourself on the cover of Time?

Jonathan Franzen: Well, I had written about who Time magazine puts... what writers Time magazine over history had put on its cover. And they'd put James Joyce twice on the cover; they'd put really intensely serious and rather difficult writers on their cover over the years. And then it gradually turned into putting more popular and money-generating writers on their cover, and then for the last ten years there'd been nothing at all. So there was... I mean, I'd written about it partly in the context of the difficulty now in agreeing what we all have in common culturally, even within a single country, and talking about how my Dad had read Time magazine all his life and, for him, whatever was between the covers of Time magazine and whatever was on the cover, that was culturally important. And we don't have that anymore. And so in a way I was kind of stabbed with this sadness for my Dad and all that he had represented and all that he had striven for.

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Jonathan Franzen: I would have liked him to see that cover, obviously.

Ramona Koval: Yeah, it would have been fantastic. And of course, he's part of... his story, his story of becoming demented, his own story, was partly told, in a fictional way, in The Corrections. And I was reminded just then of... you've written a list of your 'rules for writing', as part of a group of writers who've written their lists following Elmore Leonard's 'rules for writing' in The Guardian. And one of them you say, 'The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more biographical story than Kafka when he wrote The Metamorphosis.' Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between that invention, but the taking from the guts, from your own life?

Jonathan Franzen: Well, I think that wonderful short novel / long short story of Kafka's really is a great example, because, you know, it's about a man who wakes up one morning and finds he's been turned into an insect. And naturally his family, finding an insect in their son's bedroom, don't react very well. And it's this just unbelievably painful family drama about what happens when a family finds an insect in their son's bedroom. And that's their son, and they realise that that's their son. It's very hard to read that book and not feel that Kafka was talking in this incredibly straightforward way about what it felt like to be him in his family with his much more culturally conservative Dad. And in a way anything he could have... you know, you can read his letters to his father and they're intense, but in fact nothing gets at the emotional truth of his life the way that completely invented story does.

And, you know, you mentioned my Dad having had dementia, which he did, and I have written about that in a non-fiction way and that was sort of a ready-made experience that I, after a lot of hesitation, seized on and used in The Corrections: what it's like to have a parent who's succumbing to dementia and no longer reachable in the ways we're accustomed to reaching him. And you can say, 'Well, yes, that's very autobiographical. You actually used some scenes that happened to you in the nursing home and one or two at home.' And it's true—I did take those directly, whereas in the new book, there really is no scenes from my own life. And yet I feel as if what I'm really about is actually much more present in the new book because I had to reach into myself; I wasn't sort of just reaching off the shelf, I was having to go inside and create these imaginary objects. And they came straight out of the dark, dreaming part of me.

Ramona Koval: So, you mentioned Kafka, I mentioned Kafka, and his sense that he's a creature that his parents aren't familiar with, and in Freedom you have both Patty and Walter are creatures that their parents aren't familiar with...

Jonathan Franzen: Well, they have a son who, when it turns out... they're good liberals, they're good liberal democrats, right thinking people—Walter in particular—and his son is this young Republican entrepreneur. And where that comes from, who knows? It's almost as mysterious and as repellent to Walter as if the son had turned into this sand beetle.

Ramona Koval: Exactly. You've called yourself a 'German writer' in the past—'cos I know that you spent some time in Berlin when you were a young man—and you talked about the literary models that you've found in the writing of middle Europe. But then you've applied it to the big American story?

Jonathan Franzen: Yes. Well, I am an American. And there are certain kinds of literary possibility in the US because it's so big. It's possible, even if you still have percentage-wise a very small audience, just the sheer numbers make it seem like a realistic possibility for a writer to make a living just writing books that people really want to read. So there's a kind of... Whereas in Germany, most really serious writers assume that the state is going to be taking care of them one way or another, that there's a kind of a subsidy of the arts. And that's necessary in part because the book-buying audience is smaller and also because just the whole culture is different, it's a more state-driven culture. So, yeah, there's kind of more of a commercial impulse you could call it if you're in a critical mood and you're German You could say, 'Oh those Americans, they're writing commercial entertainments,' and I say, 'Well, what's wrong with being entertaining if you're also doing something interesting and serious at the same time?' So I think that's where... But my notion of what something interesting and serious might be does come directly out of my reading of the great modern German prose writers.

Ramona Koval: Well, you're listening to The Book Show on ABC Radio National. I'm Ramona Koval and I'm speaking with the great Jonathan Franzen today.

Jonathan Franzen, you are a great observer of the minutiae of human life. You're also a great user of the phrase that paints a whole vision; the idea of competitive salad making for the people who are living in that gentrified time in the 1970s, or another person—'one of the people who carry around laminated literature.' [Laughs]

Tell me about how do these observations come to you? One of your rules for writing, I notice, is, 'You see more sitting still than chasing after.' And I know that you're a passionate birdwatcher and I wonder whether you watch humans like you watch birds. And I've met birdwatchers before and you're not supposed to raise your voice, and you're not supposed to point, so do you make yourself a small sort of target when you're observing human beings too?

Jonathan Franzen: Um, you know, I'm not one of those writers who walks around with a little notebook and is kind of sitting in cafes studying people and taking detailed notes. I chastise myself for being too much of an amateur to do that, or not having the discipline. I did notice, I got a new glasses' prescription a couple of weeks ago and I got these progressives, which are very good for reading and also seeing for distance, but one thing they don't have—it's a very narrow little part of the lens that you actually use, so much of the lens is just blurry. And I've noticed that I just, I can't stand walking down a sidewalk anymore. Because I realise that all the time my eyes are kind of looking sideways at people, and I can't do that because now they're all blurry and you can't... What the optician tells you is, 'Oh you just have to turn your head and look at them,' and I say, 'Precisely not! I want to see them without their seeing that I'm looking at them and that requires these kind of sidelong glances.' And I realised as soon as I put these glasses on, I must be doing that constantly when I'm walking down the sidewalk.

Ramona Koval: So you need other writers' glasses, don't you?

Jonathan Franzen: You know, I've just ordered a pair of pure distance glasses to wear when I'm out walking on the sidewalk—and bird watching, I guess, too.

Ramona Koval: Tell me about the bird watching. You wrote an essay—I think it was called 'My Bird Problem', is that right? It kind of illuminated for me your way of writing fiction as well, because this is about how you discovered bird watching, and your passion for bird watching, and how intensely you can do it. And then it was also about your marriage that you made when you were very young, and the long years of being in that marriage, and the dissolution of it. It seemed to be about bird watching and everything. And I thought, well, this is what your style is, this is how you see the world, isn't it? Because everything is connected to everything else for you.
Jonathan Franzen: Well, that's very nice of you to say. There were three things that were on my mind five years ago as I was becoming, as I saw it at the time, kind of addicted to bird watching—I was wasting my time doing this compulsive chasing of interesting birds. And I was incredibly embarrassed about that; it seemed like this very nerdy thing to do. And I was also, I'd been thinking a lot about what a strange marriage I had; and also I was very intensely preoccupied with climate change. And at a certain point I realised, 'I don't want to write about any of these things. None of them works by itself.' What am I going to say about climate change? You can't say anything, because nobody wants to hear about it, or else they've already heard about it. And the marriage was just so weirdly shameful and strange, and this bird watching habit was shameful and strange. So one reason they're all together in that essay is that if you put, like, everything completely unsayable and shameful all together, it can kind of... the various pieces can help each other out and make the whole project doable in a way that individually they wouldn't be. Does that make any sense?

Ramona Koval: It does make sense. And did you feel like you needed to cut any of it out? Or it just needed to be said first and then removed?

Jonathan Franzen: It's all about finding the right tone for it and I basically... that's the last chapter of my memoir, The Discomfort Zone. And one of the things I figured out going into that was the only way I could write it was to make myself... was to be hard on myself, to laugh at myself, to make myself the ridiculous figure always. So by the time I was getting to that last chapter I had that ridiculous self fully in place. And of course it's easy for a young, beginning bird watcher to appear ridiculous, and it's easy when you look back 20 years later at the mistakes you made as a 22 year old in getting married—you know, again, there was a readymade ridiculousness about it. And I think we're all ridiculous when it comes to global warming. We're all worried about it and yet we all have these habits and these ways of thinking that are, you know, making the problem worse. And you can cry about it a lot, but every once in a while you have to laugh at it too.

Ramona Koval: Walter, of course, the nicest man in the Midwest, evolves into a man who's passionate about birds, saving the bird, the particular bird that he's interested in, and getting involved in a complex way. Can you read for us just a little bit from this section called, 'The Nice Man's Anger' and introduce us to him?

Jonathan Franzen: Yes, this is the first paragraph of that chapter and it includes a very long sentence. Cut me off if we run out of time.

Ramona Koval: I'm not cutting you off!

Jonathan Franzen: OK.

[reads from: Late on a dismal afternoon in March in cold and greasy drizzle... to ...and direct his anger at problems more worthy of it.]

Ramona Koval: Jonathan Franzen reading from Freedom: a Novel. What a sentence! Now, how did that sentence come about? Did you just emote and then see what you had, or... Tell me about it. Tell me about how you actually arrived at the sentence.

Jonathan Franzen: You know, 'The Nice Man's Anger' was an alternate title for the whole book. And I had... you know, I'm not Walter and there are many very significant differences between us, and I'm not as nice as he is, but there is a certain... something happened in the last, oh, eight years of American public life where people who are nice just feel like they're getting taken advantage of. Like, they keep on being nice because they have to be nice and yet they're getting more and more taken advantage of and the world is getting worse and worse—for them and for everybody else. So I was trying to figure out how to get into this chapter and it occurred to me that road rage might be a way to get in. And it happens that... you know, I'm not the world's most patient driver and, you know, my Dad was a terribly impatient driver, my grandfather was a terribly impatient driver, so it kind of runs in the family. Yeah, I just started listing all the things that have annoyed me at some point in my life.

Ramona Koval: Yeah, but the other thing is that you... on the one hand, Walter is criticising the very behaviour that he's actually doing on other occasions, too, and...

Jonathan Franzen: Exactly, yeah, he's perfectly aware of the ways in which he's... because he's nice! He can see he's being a complete hypocrite.

Ramona Koval: Yeah, that's right. But it's also... It's a book about the freedoms that... the freedom to do what we want to do, but that means that we hurt other people and if we all want to be free, what does that mean about the society we create? So freedom and personal liberties—the liberty to have children, the liberty to not have children, the idea about overpopulation... Somebody says, 'You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to go,' which is the sort of right wing freedom, isn't it? The gun-toting, healthcare hating angle on freedom.

Jonathan Franzen: Yeah, well, that's I believe Walter's line; that it is very complicated. And I didn't set out to write about freedom. I just put that title on the book and I was in some ways referring to my own freedom to write that book, but once it was there and that word was staring at me day after day, when I wasn't thinking the book was going to be called 'The Nice Man's Anger', it occurred to me that this was an opportunity to try to at least restore some complexity to what has turned into this very empty political slogan in this country.

Ramona Koval: Yes, and complexity is what it's about and it's about the problem of figuring out how to live.

Jonathan Franzen: Yeah. Yep, well, um, thank you for seeing that! Um, I...

Ramona Koval: You seem surprised. Why are you so surprised?

Jonathan Franzen: No, I'm not surprised, I'm just pleased. I'm pleased. You seem to like the book...

Ramona Koval: I do like the book.

Jonathan Franzen: ...and I like people to like the book. And you seem to have gotten something about it and I also like that. And yet...

Ramona Koval: And yet?

Jonathan Franzen: ...it also makes me uncomfortable in a way. I want people to enjoy it and then I can kind of go about my private life and not have to talk about it myself. So it's tricky. I'm having interview stress! I'm kind of melting down as we speak.

Ramona Koval: Yeah. You find conversations like this hard?

Jonathan Franzen: Um, when it gets to the abstract level about what the book's about. Because I really, really want... I was writing about the stuff that matters most to me, ultimately, and my most fervent wish was that people would find the book welcome, that it would intersect with things that were important to them and that they would be happy to see engaged with in a novel. But it comes from a very private place; that's really my job to just, like, go into really, really private interior places and come up with a story that can then pass into the public and then be re-experienced in some intense and private way. And so there's something about talking, you know, describing what I might have been after in terms of a reading experience, that makes me uncomfortable. I know it has to be done, because that's kind of modern media, but I'd rather just like press the book on you and say, 'Read it. Tell me what you think.'

Ramona Koval: One of the rules that you wrote about, the one that made me wonder what you meant was, 'You have to love before you can be relentless.'

Jonathan Franzen: I had in mind particularly how easy it is to be snarky or cruel to your characters, how easy it is in a way to do satire, to make fun of people, and how insufficient that is as a novelistic activity, ultimately, and how important it is to find something loveable about your characters first. Those were rules for writers, you know, it was not... and I was trying to advise people who might be very hard on their characters, writers who might be very hard on their characters, to make sure they really, really like the character before they start being hard on them. That was the point of that.

Ramona Koval: Well, I know you have to go, so unfortunately I'm going to have to stop talking with you, but...

Jonathan Franzen: You're competing with Australian TV actually. I've got a taping for something, Lateline I think.

Ramona Koval: Ah, yes, well, our colleagues on the ABC, so I'll let you go. But it's been a great pleasure to speak with you. I'm sorry if you found it a little bit uncomfortable, but I indeed thought the book was fantastic and I'm sure listeners will buy it and think that they might immerse themselves in it too. Thank you, Jonathan Franzen, for being on The Book Show today.

Jonathan Franzen: Ramona, don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed the conversation, so thank you so much for having me.

Ramona Koval: Good! Freedom: a Novel is by Jonathan Franzen, it's published here in Australia by Fourth Estate.

Publications

Title: Freedom

Author: Jonathan Franzen

Publisher: Harper Collins