Q&A Jonathan Franzen
 (Michael Kupperman) |
THE OPENING PASSAGES of Jonathan Franzen's fifth book are a triumph of personal narrative. The scene itself is commonplace: The grown-up author lets himself into his childhood home, lays claim to the liquor cabinet, and ransacks the freezer in search of breakfast sausages. And his mission, to sell his late parents' modest colonial, is hardly remarkable. But each detail-the heaps of bagged cranberries, for example, where he'd hoped to find savory meats-is so specific, ordinary, and delicately comic that it inspires a vicarious ache. So when Franzen suddenly starts acting like an insolent child, zealously purging the house of the hundred-plus family snapshots his mother had spent years lovingly, obsessively hoarding, and skulks down to the basement to rip them from their frames, this reader, at least, was startled, but not put off. In all of three paragraphs he'd rejected misty wistfulness, and in so doing convinced me that, had it been me, I might have scrapped the photos, too.
This subtle creation of complicity in the reader runs throughout ``The Discomfort Zone" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a collection of six linked essays about the author's Midwestern childhood. So I was shocked to read Michiko Kakutani's aggrieved verdict in The
But Franzen has a talent for ticking off the press. Having read reams of reviews and profiles, I blame his chronic ambivalence. It's not that Franzen is a snob, as the Oprah dust-up made him out to be (is there anyone who doesn't remember Franzen's conflicted reaction to the news that Oprah's Book Club had selected ``The Corrections"?), or a ``mean-spirited Lucy on steroids," as Kakutani accuses after reading his chapter on the Peanuts comic strip. It's that his inability to suppress his constitutional dividedness translates far more successfully on the page than it does in public. Last weekend, we discussed this and other things at his apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
IDEAS: Since ``The Corrections," you've gone from being relatively obscure to fairly famous, and you've written two books of nonfiction about yourself. Is there any correlation?
FRANZEN: I can look back now and see a correlation. For instance, maybe a residual uneasiness with the way in which my identity was taken from me when ``The Corrections" was published, and the level of misinformation and outright fantasy in the media, which was sobering and angering. Maybe I wanted to be the one to tell the story of myself for a change. But at the time, it just felt like the writing was alive. Most of what I write is bad, so if after three months of producing badness something comes alive on the page, I go with it. The writing that was coming alive was these strange little pieces about my junior high and high school experiences.
My fiction has suffered for a number of years for having to be written in the wake not only of the success of ``The Corrections," but in the wake of the writing of it. It was a big book, I put a lot into it, and every time I've started a novel I take a couple of years to produce a more baroque version of the book I just wrote. I keep doing the same dumb thing each time.
IDEAS: Did you have any models for your nonfiction?
FRANZEN: ``The Discomfort Zone" is a postwar American memoir in which nothing traumatic and certainly nothing remotely world-historical happens, so you can't relax in the arms of the powerful drama that was my childhood. A book like this runs on tone, so the books I looked to most directly were tonal achievements, particularly Tobias Wolff's ``This Boy's Life" and Frank Conroy's ``Stop-Time." It's not that I saw myself in them; both kids were essentially juvenile delinquents. It's that both writers have a very nice way of talking about their younger selves with a combination of love and intense scrutiny and lack of sympathy. And both books were very comic, and anything that's comic I'm attracted to. It produces good will in me when I read somebody who recognizes how stupid they were when they were young, because it implies humility in the present, too.
IDEAS: So your decision to paint yourself in a less than flattering light was a matter of technique?
FRANZEN: Oh, it was fully justified. I was ridiculous. I thought it was practically the definition of adolescence to be filled with a sense of fraudulence, to long for authenticity and never achieve it. You look like a clown if you take that seriously; you become laughable rather than funny.
IDEAS: Your way of expressing your ambivalence in public has caused a lot of agitation.
FRANZEN: Well, you don't make any friends by being unable to help considering both sides of a situation. Putting it that way makes it sound like a moral virtue, but it's just something I have, a temperament thing. I tried to write about the sense of being in the middle of things in ``The Discomfort Zone." I grew up as a sort of clearinghouse for opposing viewpoints: I had two different characters as parents, and my two brothers were extremely different, but they all made sense to me, I love them all. Obviously there is some way to resolve those viewpoints because I don't explode on the sidewalk.
I came from the Midwest, from a family that was not working class but was not well-off, respecting my father's sense of superiority, his sense of impatience at the stupidity of the world, but also respecting my mother's yearning to belong and her feeling that intelligence is not a moral virtue. If you try to translate that into public utterance nowadays, you naturally raise the ire of both sides. You're a traitor to those who pride themselves on their sophistication and intelligence, and you enrage the self-denying populists.
The only frustrating thing for me is how much of the conversation ends up being based on out-of-context quotations in spoken interviews rather than reference to verifiable, carefully vetted words on the page, of which there are a lot. Why choose the early morning interview with The (Portland) Oregonian and not the essay I spent three months writing? But then I hear my mom say, ``You should always speak carefully and you shouldn't judge other people for judging you; you judged other people yourself," and it's true.
You get beat up in the press a little bit, and you get over it, and you're feeling fine again, and then you read something in the paper, some minor celebrity who's gotten in some sort of trouble, and you believe every word of it. Every word of it! You feel all this wonderful, delicious, self-righteous rage for this person, on the basis of what? Something you read in The New York Times.
Kate Bolick is senior editor of Domino magazine and teaches writing at New York University. Her interviews appear regularly in Ideas. E-mail kbolick@globe.com.
