The master's craft



He writes long novels in which his characters are put through every kind of difficulty – with jobs, relationships, family, medical issues and even angry mobs. But ultimately, Jonathan Franzen just wants to make his readers happy.

'I think writers are reluctant to speak of the audience for fear of appearing to pander. It’s a way to assert one’s literary purity, to say, "I just follow my genius and let others run along behind."' — Jonathan Franzen

This eagerness to please was clear when he read an excerpt from his new novel, Freedom, to a packed Toronto theatre at the International Festival of Authors last night. The lanky, bespectacled writer elicited roaring laughter as he delivered a passage involving the character Joey, a confident, aspirational college freshman whose relationship with his unambitious sweetheart causes him excruciating discomfort.

In a boardroom at his publisher’s 20^th-floor office the morning after the event, Franzen reveals that he’s one of the few literary authors who will admit to writing with their readers in mind.

"I think writers are reluctant to speak of the audience for fear of appearing to pander," he offers. "It’s a way to assert one’s literary purity, to say, ‘I just follow my genius and let others run along behind.’"

Referring to the night before, Franzen says he was "energized" rather than drained by the absurdly long queue of readers with books to sign. Unlike the late David Foster Wallace, with whom he had "a close and yet competitive relationship," Franzen feels no agony about being a bestseller.

"He worried about the side of himself that would please people, and I was in no position to resist my innate wish to make people happy by what I’m doing. Why are you doing it, otherwise? Why not just leave it in a drawer if it’s just about expressing oneself, or creating the beautiful work of art?"

Franzen has even let go of his misgivings about Oprah Winfrey’s advocacy of his novels. Back in 2001, his equivocal statements about the show prompted her to cancel his appearance to talk about his last novel, The Corrections. He’s not even bothered by the fact that the Jonathan Franzen page on his publisher’s website lists his new book as "Freedom – Oprah #64," as if this were its full title.

"Obviously, there was a time when that would have caused me all sorts of consternation," he admits. "But now, I’m in a different place, and Oprah herself is in a very different place with her book club. Painful as our encounter nine years ago was, I think we both learned things from it, and it’s satisfying to have a chance to demonstrate publicly how close we are in our view of a potential audience for interesting books."

The experience recalls one of Franzen’s great delights in writing novels: "to let enough time elapse in a story that you are able to be surprised by seeing people from a different side." In Freedom, Joey’s father, Walter, a birder like Franzen, comes across as both deluded and heroic in his all-consuming fight to save the cerulean warbler — sometimes to the detriment of other people’s lives. He argues with just about everyone – his earnest wife, Patty; his sarcastic friend, Richard; and people he barely knows. You find yourself alternately agreeing with and disdaining his detractors. Franzen’s ability to create a multiplicity of voices is compelling.

"I think everyone to some degree has multiple personalities," he says. "We have these different modules running in our heads. I can feel myself thinking like my father; I can sound to myself like my mom … and I write because I’m unresolved. Numerous strains in my personality are not resolvable.

"My professional enterprise is humane. I have to be deeply and sympathetically involved in problems of people, and the occasional misanthropy that creeps in when you care about other species is simply not reconcilable with that, so those voices are both going to go into the book."

In Freedom, conflict arises between the younger generation and the older. Joey opposes his parents’ left-wing ideals by contracting dodgy supplies from South America for the U.S. military, with potentially ruinous consequences. Franzen does not cleave to any particular interpretations of his book, but he insists that the material isn’t satirical. When he asked his friend George Packer (The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq) for advice on writing about Iraq, "he said, ‘Make up anything you want. Anything you make up cannot be stranger or more outrageous than what actually happened there.’ That’s a great gift to a realist writer. It means you can freely invent and still be within the bounds of realism." 

Realism, he says, drives him to take his own anger and assign it to characters – at times their rants might read like polemics, but because of the characters’ fallibility, we’re not expected to take their points of view as authorial gospel. Franzen actually seems to delight in taking his characters down a few pegs, especially when it comes to the younger men — like Joey in Freedom and Chip in The Corrections, whose attempt to defraud American investors in Lithuania goes spectacularly wrong.

When asked about his capacity for schadenfreude, Franzen peers off through his trademark tortoiseshell glasses, absent-mindedly twisting a tuft at the back of his swirl of grey-and-white hair. It’s as if he’s mining his brain for the right turns of phrase.

He puts his characters through the wringer, he says, but "I put myself through the wringer in [2007 memoir] the Discomfort Zone too. The closer the character is to me, the more I need to abuse him as a narrator in order to achieve sympathy for him. I had a problem with Joey for years, that I just didn’t like the kid. And it wasn’t till I figured out how to make his life difficult that I began to like him."

Perhaps these correlations between discomfort, difficulty and affection are what make Franzen so popular: despite our initial misgivings, we become fascinated by his characters and their various trials earn, if not our respect, then at least a measure of understanding. Franzen’s writing also acknowledges how hard it is to forge meaningful connections with other people, even those that you admire.

Recently, Franzen met up with avowed fan Barack Obama at the White House.  "It’s awkward to make talk for 15 minutes with the president of the United States," Franzen admits. "I felt we worked very hard not to make it too awkward, and we succeeded. I was happy we didn’t talk too much about the book or any books, but were able to get into presidential history and into his frustration with not having a responsible opposition.

"I had a more coherent conversation with David Axelrod, his senior adviser, and talked about health care, but I didn’t go there to advocate. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there; I was just honoured to meet the president."

The experience was gratifying, Franzen says, but it won’t fuel a future book. After all, Freedom started life as an explicitly political novel, but he found he was hopelessly competing with what he understands as "the great national novel" of politics itself.   

"It has its own chapters and satisfying or unsatisfying endings, and there’s nothing for the novelist to do but run along afterwards," he says. "That’s not a position for any novelist to be in. We lead; we don’t tag along."

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.