TALL, ANGSTY and intense, Jonathan Franzen slopes into the meeting room of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire and offers a handshake and a wary smile,writes ARMINTA WALLACE.
At first glance the American novelist and essayist seems strikingly unlike his writing, which is ebullient, fluid, confident and – dammit – funny. Franzen is seriousness personified. As well he might be, given the storms of publicity that whirl around him wherever he goes.
A row with Oprah Winfrey in 2000, when she selected The Correctionsfor her book club – then, following uncomplimentary remarks by the author, de-selected it again. A Time magazine cover which proclaimed him a Great American Novelist. And currently, a kerfuffle over the UK edition of his new novel Freedom– which, despite having garnered wildly enthusiastic reviews from literary critics on this side of the Atlantic, turns out to be far from literally perfect.
Let’s put these topics to bed, I suggest, so that we can talk about the novel. Franzen emits a noise that sounds suspiciously like a groan. “In what hell would the writer like to be fried?” he asks. “It’s no fun talking about the novel because what is there to say, except ‘please read it’?”
Obligingly, however, he trots through my checklist.
Time magazine? “What writer – if he or she were honest with him or herself – would not welcome that designation? But I think it sets up certain expectations that I fear no novel could live up to. And it’s a bit of an albatross. I’d like the book to be enjoyed and taken on its own terms.”
Oprah? “That has all been sorted out, and it’s a relief to me to finally set the record straight and to get past some hurt feelings on both sides.”
The new book is now officially an Oprah Book Club selection, and Franzen says he’s looking forward to appearing on her TV show. “In a certain way. TV’s always a torment for the writer. But she and I have been having some nice talks on the phone.”
And the UK edition of Freedom? "That will not be sorted out . . . well, according to Peter Carey, who I got an email from yesterday, I'm going to be signing the 'wrong' copies of the book for the next 30 years. He says bad copies of the US version of Oscar and Lucinda from 30 years ago still show up at his signings."
It’s a classic 21st century techno-error: the wrong file went to the printer, complete with misprints and muddled-up sentences and even subtle changes to the characters. Good copies are being rushed into shops even as you read this. Still, though.
“Fourth Estate is mortified,” says Franzen, “and I’m mortified on their behalf. They keep emailing the publicist who’s travelling with me, saying ‘Is he okay? Is he okay?’ And we’re just laughing at it. They’re not okay, but we’re okay.”
Misprints and all, Freedomis more than okay. It's a great big alternative universe of a book, almost criminally readable, satirical and astute and chock-full of memorable characters. How one would even begin to write such a book is quite beyond me.
“The title came first,” Franzen says. “It came out of a particularly strong moment of irritation with the misuse and malign appropriation of the word for propaganda purposes in the US in the middle of the last decade.” Having chosen it, he adds, he quickly became embarrassed by it because he thought it sounded pompous.
It doesn't. Franzen has a happy knack of finding exactly the right names for things. There's a young punk band in Freedomcalled The Traumatics which is reconstituted, in sedate middle age, into an alt-country outfit called Walnut Surprise.
His 1988 debut novel – on the topic of the decline of St Louis, Missouri – was The Twenty-Seventh Cityand his wonderful collection of essays is called How To Be Alone. But it was the success of The Correctionsput Franzen on the international literary map. That novel added a Parkinson's Disease strand to his preferred theme of the "dysfunctional" family, ratcheting up its emotional impact in the process.
A decade later, Freedomis suffused with a strongly ecological subtext; an elegiac lament for the destruction we have wrought on the planet in the all-too-concrete shape of urban sprawl, SUVs and "goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns". Franzen's genius is to weave his chosen issues so coherently into his characters as to make them impossible to unravel – or ignore.
Thus, after one particularly vicious row with his wife (about a boob job, of all things), Walter is “frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge pools in Appalachian valleys”.
IS THIS A CENTRAL CONCERNof his fiction, I ask – to connect the personal and the social? There's a long pause, followed by a lot of fiddling with a bottle of water and a glass. He sighs heavily.
“It is, in fact,” he says slowly, “not realistic to write about sensitive people under stress in the modern world and not refer to the social context of that, because it is so much part of our lives. We are reacting to the bad political news, the bad environmental news, the bad energy news, the bad cultural news, the bad technological news – and, occasionally, some little bits of good news. And those things get mixed up, in particular during periods of distress.
“If you are a feeling person it’s not easy to sort out – at a moment of peak confusion or indecision – what is being driven by your personal narrative and what is being driven by these other narratives. We have the neuro-chemical narrative: am I really distressed in my relationship with my child, or is my brain chemistry messed up? Am I really distressed because of something deep going on between us, or has the child just taken on a whole different relationship with the world because he or she is so much more comfortable with technology? Is it a cultural problem – is it just that we watched different TV shows when we were growing up? And so on.
“All of these things come to bear on moments of intense personal crisis – which are the kind of moments that novelists have always been drawn to. We have such instant access nowadays to these other narratives that it feels more pressing than ever to consider the larger social dimension. And yet, if you come in with some preconceived notion of what that social dimension means, the characters get subordinated to it and the whole thing dies in your hands.” He grins bleakly. “That’s my poetics in a nutshell.”
And the structure of the book, which is written in seven distinct, yet overlapping, movements – does he work that out rigorously in advance?
“No. That’s a . . . ” Long pause. “You’re scaling a rock face looking for handholds, basically. It’s a kind of free climbing where you don’t even have very good ropes. You’ve gotten to a place – a sticky place – and you’re desperately looking for whatever will work to get you a little higher up. And it does often happen – and happened for three months just last year, when I didn’t have more than a third of the book written – that you have to back down. You’ve gone to a place that you cannot, in fact, proceed from. And you have to retrace backwards – which is especially painful for any writer – to the point where you knew you were on the way. And seek out a different way.”
This time his grin is almost happy. “That’s a fresh metaphor, by the way. I’ve never used that one before.”
Maybe he's just happy that we're almost done. There are more questions, and more answers: but now we're out of space as well as time. I can't help but recall Patty Berglund's reaction when, towards the end of Freedom, she finally gets to ask her mother – after 30 years – why she never attended her daughter's childhood basketball games. Joyce answers; and though the answer is unexpected and moving it also, somehow, takes the question to a different place. "It wasn't a lot," Patty concludes, "it didn't solve any mysteries, but it would have to do."
Franzen’s favourites: musical inspiration
SINCE one of the main characters in Freedom, Richard Katz, is an ageing rock star, and since the book is liberally spiced with musical observations – mostly of the caustic kind: check out the hilarious lyrics to one of Katz's early hits, Insanely Happy– it seems reasonable to ask Jonathan Franzen what kind of music he actually enjoys, as opposed to enjoys sending up.
“My favourite band over the long term remains The Mekons,” he says. “A good Leeds band who have proved remarkably tenacious and prolific. But I’ve become one of those people who listens to individual songs. You don’t want a playlist or anything. Do you?”
I shouldn’t, but I do. A Franzen playlist is just too good to pass up. After one of his characteristic long pauses, he says that two songs have made him cry in recent years.
One is The Byrds' version of the traditional ballad John Riley: "a particularly haunting, beautiful version of a tear-jerker of a song."
The other – " I guess I look for songs that bring tears to my eyes" – is the Sufjan Stevens song Casimir Pulaski Day. "It's a recollection of a friend who died of bone cancer as a teenager. The key moment is that after the friend dies in a hospital room, there's this line 'the cardinal hits the window'. The cardinal is the beautiful Mid-Western red bird. Oh, God. That's a killer line. It's just so good."
There's also a Hawaiian ukulele player whose name he can't recall, but whose version of Somewhere Over The Rainbowis "to die for". (Post-interview Googling will reveal this to be the gentle giant Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, pictured left.)
"For me, music helps amplify and clarify emotional states," Franzen concludes. "It's really, really intense, and it's great. And yet it can't do what a novel does. It doesn't engage allthe interesting parts of the brain. "
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, is published by Fourth Estate at £20
