Leroy N. Soetoro
2015-08-22 16:46:12 UTC
http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/aug/21/jonathan-franzen-purity-
interview
Jonathan Franzens new novel, Purity, is partly set in Santa Cruz, a
Californian town 70 miles south of San Francisco, where the novelist lives
with his partner, Kathy. Their house is in the U-bend of a crescent, on
the edge of a suburban housing estate, overlooking a wooded conservation
area to the Pacific Ocean beyond. It is, for one of Americas foremost
literary novelists, a modest property, overlooked on three sides by
neighbours in a way that, say, Philip Roths grand pile in Connecticut is
not. However, it affords good views from the deck (the novelist is an avid
birdwatcher) and the low overheads that permit Franzen to let five years
go by without delivering a novel. Im not used to talking about this
book, he says of Purity, which, like his preceding two novels, is a 600-
page doorstopper. There is a long, Franzonian pause: Im trying to figure
out how much I should say and how much I should not say.
That question, as central to the writing as to the publicising of the
novel, is one that Franzen has frequently struggled to answer. At 55, he
has the earnest, slightly puggish look of a younger man, and the
occasional intemperance of one, too. On a refresher driving test he took
recently, the novelist scored high on the scale for susceptibility to road
rage. (There are 11 things that are warning signs of road rage, and I
had, like, nine of them.) His fame has as much to do with the fights he
has picked or has had foisted upon him as with the quality of his
fiction; Franzen riles people in a way that is unusual, and perhaps
reassuring for a novelist, given the endless debate about the relevance of
that role. He has attracted the scorn, over the years, of users of social
media, environmentalists, certain stripes of feminist critic, lesser
novelists, the lead book reviewer of the New York Times and fans of Oprah
Winfrey.
Franzen says he is hurt and ashamed to be the target of such ire, but
he is also unrepentant. No sooner has one controversy died down than
another pops up in its place, most recently in the wake of a long piece he
wrote in the New Yorker in April, suggesting that, contrary to research
published by the bird charity the National Audubon Society, climate change
was not the greatest threat to avian welfare it was more immediate
dangers such as hunting and collision with glass. The society accused him
of intellectual dishonesty, and its members attacked him online, an
unpleasant, but also, perhaps, a bleakly satisfying experience: the
incident foreshadowed the themes of Franzens new novel.
Purity is the story of Pip, a girl in her early 20s, and a Julian Assange-
type character called Andreas Wolf, who runs a rival organisation to
Wikileaks called the Sunlight Project. Internet culture is, in some ways,
perfect fodder for Franzen, who is never stronger than when calling out
the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us a gap wherein
so much of online life now resides. But it is also an odd fit; a novel
about technology by someone who avowedly doesnt like using it. Many years
ago, Franzen spoke about jamming the USB port on his computer in order to
get stuff done, and more recently scolded Salman Rushdie for wasting time
on Twitter. This distaste is in part aesthetic the very brevity of
Twitter offends Franzen and partly a reaction against what he calls the
totalitarianism of online culture, wherein retribution by the mob can be
vast, swift and violently misinformed.
The irony of all this is that Franzen, a white male novelist frequently
accused of elitism, is, in this scenario, something of an underdog, the
nerd repeatedly beaten up by the cool kids online although he identifies
the real villain of the piece as the internet itself, which he compares in
Purity to communist East Germany. You cant not have a relation to, in
the case of East Germany, the socialism of the state, Franzen says. In
the case of the internet, you can ignore it, or you can abet it. Either
way, you are in a relation to it. And thats whats totalitarian.
As for social media, it feels like a protection racket. Your reputation
will be murdered unless you join in this thing that is, in significant
part, about murdering reputations. There is a long pause. Why would I
want to feed that machine?
Reading Jonathan Franzen on form is like watching a baseball star toss a
ball, knowing that behind the casual gesture is a virtuoso talent and
10,000 hours of practice. Franzens prose is deadpan, unexcitable, almost
aggressively rational, made up of long, finely planed sentences that
quiver with the sarcasm that is at the root of his comedy. Unlike his
friend, the late David Foster Wallace, he has never been fashionable he
isnt avant-garde and takes everything too seriously for the postmodern
style. Neither does he fall easily into a literary rat pack. I look at
McEwan and Amis and Hitchens, he says. They seemed like a pack. And I
dont think thats how it works so much here [in the US]. Its not a
generational divide. At least in my experience, what separates people into
packs is not age, its taste. He allies himself with writer friends such
as Paula Fox, Don DeLillo, David Means and Jeffrey Eugenides. [Jonathan
Safran] Foer, he says, Im friendly with him. And even if Ive never met
the person I met Edward St Aubyn once, at a reading, but hes part of
the pack. Dead people can be part of the pack.
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These friends are also loving competitors, and for a long time Franzen
felt angry at his relative lack of progress. At the age of 40, having
spent a decade writing two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong
Motion, both of which were well-reviewed and little-sold, he resigned
himself to a certain amount of cultural irrelevance, which he attributed
not to any failing in himself, but to a failing in the culture. He was, he
says, experiencing a disillusionment with the American reading public,
the kind of grandiose attitude that the reviewer Michiko Kakutani was
perhaps trying to puncture when she called him a jackass in the New York
Times. Franzen, smiling, allows that he may at times have been a little
insufferable. (Inevitably, he fought back and called Kakutani tone deaf
and humourless.) You adopt a certain attitude when you feel like you
have something thats not appreciated. You have to generate some sense of
bigness on your own; thats an insufferable activity.
It is important here to note Franzens Midwestern background he was
raised in a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, a part of the US with a regional
identity strongly rooted in humility, so Franzens arrogance is in some
ways a performance. Once he achieved success, he says, I could revert to
my native Midwestern modesty.
His shyness is not to be overlooked, either. Franzen is pained and baffled
when he hears himself described as misanthropic. I dont dislike people;
I love people, he says to me at one point, and there is a line in Purity,
applied to a character called Anabel, that could be the author addressing
himself: She kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her
sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness.
Everything changed with The Corrections, Franzens novel of the family
Lambert: Enid and Alfred, the warring old couple, and their three
dysfunctional adult children. The fictional family bore strong
similarities to Franzens own, his father a railway engineer, his mother a
housewife, although, he says, as writing becomes more autobiographical,
the less it hues to actual lived experience. The text takes on meaning
when you start to depart from experience. Because then it starts to tap
into the writers nature.
Franzen had no great hopes for The Corrections. I thought I would write
for a small audience. And had put all the stuff that was really shameful
to me... its hard to conceive of now, that I was ashamed of writing a
book, deeply ashamed, cripplingly ashamed of writing a book that turned on
a mothers wish to have the family together for Christmas.
Because you felt it was too small a canvas?
It was small, and I was embarrassed to have come from the innocent
Midwest. And I was embarrassed to still care about family. And there were
many other things. Chips freakishness, that drew to some extent from my
own sense of freakishness. You explore the shameful things for people who
thats what they go to fiction for. Thats why theyre reading Kafka, or
Dostoevsky. But thats a small audience.
John Updike and to some extent Philip Roth had, for decades, been writing
novels with domestic settings that hadnt stopped them being taken
seriously, but Franzen couldnt conceive of Enid and Alfred winning him
the same kind of respect. They were too weird, too pitiful, too specific
to his own family and his disastrous adolescence (a period Franzen
revisits in his essay Then Joy Breaks Through, in which, memorably, he
goes to church camp and on the way does everything he can to avoid being
consigned to the car of Social Death).
And to discover that these things that I thought were freakish parts of
my history and my personality people were saying, Oh, someones writing
about me! And this is my family. I thought, oh my God, Ive been so
embarrassed my whole life about my family. And here people are telling me
that they recognise it. I felt deeply grateful, but I also realised that
my contempt for the non-hardcore readers the softer core readers... not
contempt, but my writing them off, had been premature. In fact, there was
a whole lot more people looking for a certain kind of novelistic
experience than I had any idea.
The Corrections, which was published in 2001, when Franzen was 42, sold
more than three million copies. It was simply no longer appropriate to be
angry.
Good relationships make for boring novels. For the last 13 years, Franzen
has lived with Kathryn Chetkovich, a writer and editor whom he persuaded
to move in with him four months after The Corrections came out, and with
whom, says Franzen, Im never bored. As an editor, Chetkovich mostly
works with social scientists. She helps them think better. She knows a
lot of stuff. And its hard to get away with a specious argument in her
presence. I dont think I could live with someone that I didnt have an
intellectual friendship with. Maybe a dog.
Against this background of domestic harmony halfway through the
interview, Franzen gets a call from the garage, informing him that
Chetkovichs long-awaited VW Golf has arrived, and he is buoyantly excited
for her the novelist revisits, in his fiction, terrible relationships of
the past. For 14 years, from his early 20s onwards, he was married to
another writer, Valerie Cornell. With all the caveats about autobiography
in place, elements of the experience clearly inform parts of Purity. While
sections of the new novel (and Franzens previous one, Freedom) read like
an intellectual exercise, the car crash of Tom and Anabels marriage is
straightforwardly brilliant, captivating, unbearable.
A little bit funny? he says, anxiously.
Hilarious!
Good.
It struck Franzen that no one had really done the entire slow-motion
train wreck in all its brutality. He is terrific at arguments that
terrible, slow suck into someone elses version of reality, wherein, as
Tom says, every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response,
each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would
have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led
eight or ten steps out on to some dangerous tree branch and what a
despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch
to a neutral starting point.
The fact that Anabel is a feminist so warped and fanatical that she forces
Tom to, for example, atone for his maleness by sitting down on the toilet
to pee, will be received by Franzens feminist critics as an aggressive
act, a deliberate ridiculing of the cause, which he concedes is somewhat
the case. Theres a certain degree of glee in putting that stuff in the
book. Because I know that if you are hostile, you will find ammunition. I
wrote this deliriously praising celebration of Edith Wharton. People
managed to find a way to make it sound like I was hating on Edith Wharton.
So why not just let it all rip and: have fun with that, guys. (Criticism
of the Wharton essay rounded on Franzens observation that Wharton wasnt
pretty, something he suggested, not unreasonably, fed into her fictional
disquisitions on the complicated currency of female beauty.)
Im not a sexist, he says. I am not somebody who goes around saying men
are superior, or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out
of my way to champion womens work that I think is not getting enough
attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. Its
like theres no way to make myself not male. And one of the running jokes
in the Tom and Anabel section is that hes really trying to not be male.
His ex-wife did not try to get him to pee sitting down. But theres a
sense that there is really nothing I can do except die or, I suppose,
retire and never write again.
Dying wouldnt help, I suggest: then he would be a dead white male
novelist, a category even more problematic than a living one. Yes, even
worse. So I was attracted to a story of someone trying to do reparations.
And trying really hard and really sincerely, and lovingly, and finally not
being able to. The comedy of that.
He has written some great female characters Enid Lambert; Patty
Berglund; in Purity, Toms mother Clelia, her name a nod to Stendhals The
Charterhouse Of Parma these hard, awkward, embarrassing women who turn
out to have been heroes. Franzens real crime, one suspects, is not one of
content, but of presentation; his propensity for feeling hard done by
doesnt play well with those who face greater barriers just to get to the
start line. NYT raved about Franzens new book, tweeted the US novelist
Jodi Picoult when Freedom was published in 2010. Is anyone shocked? Would
love to see the NYT rave about authors who arent white male literary
darlings. The novelist Jennifer Weiner made similar remarks, to which
Franzen replied, earlier this year, that she was freeloading on the
legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon to promote her novels.
But there is also something courageous in Franzens willingness to step up
to the fight. It takes nerve, these days, to criticise social media, as it
does to piss off Oprah, as the novelist famously did in 2001. In the essay
Franzen wrote after the incident, he cleared up a lot of the
misconceptions, namely that he turned down Oprah when she invited him to
be on her show. In fact, she disinvited Franzen after he made some
equivocal remarks about being on the show during publicity and was a brat
when the crew came to St Louis to film background. (This is so bogus! he
exclaimed, when they asked him to stand in front of an old haunt and look
soppy.)
It was a tragic misunderstanding, Franzen says. I blame myself, because
I said things that were stupid. And hurt a number of people. There is a
pause, during which one feels Franzen leaning inexorably, and rather
endearingly, in a direction that can do him no good. I also blame Oprah,
he says. Because, from our very first conversation, it was clear we were
not speaking the same language. I didnt scream when she called me. I
said, Oh, hey. And was trying to talk like a media professional to a
media professional. And she didnt know what to do with that.
She treated him like a competition winner?
Oh, totally. Yes. And what is the one thing a competition winner has to
do? They have to show abject gratitude. And I was, like, well, I dont
think youd be doing this if it werent good for you, too. So lets work
together. And the answer was no. So I blame her, too.
She couldnt break persona for him?
Thats the thing. And I think the fact that I was a white guy made that
harder. And I think she was sensitive to any suggestion that I might be
dissing her. And, of course, then I did diss her. But not before Id had
that experience.
Towards the end of 2006, Franzen started to feel a certain lack in his
life. He was approaching his late 40s, he was immensely successful, well
remunerated and in a good relationship. The thing that he lacked was
access to young people.
I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a
child, he says. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by
the notion. We were in a bar. He picked up a pair of toothpicks and made
the sign of the cross and held it in front of him and said, Please dont
do that. And then he paused and said, But maybe we can rent you some
young people.
For a year, Franzen checked in regularly with a group of new graduates
from Berkeley, who were part of a semi-longitudinal study into kids whod
just graduated from college, eventually writing a piece for the New Yorker
about the experience, out of which, many years later, Pip, the 20-
something heroine of Purity, was born. Pip is smart, funny, awkward, all
the things Franzen likes in a person. I knew her. She was easy.
Did hanging out with the young people nix his desire to have a baby?
Oh, it was insane, the idea that Kathy and I were going to adopt an Iraqi
war orphan. The whole idea lasted maybe six weeks. And was finally killed
by Henrys response. He made a persuasive case for why that was a bad
idea. The main thing it did one of the things that had put me in mind of
adoption was a sense of alienation from the younger generation. They
seemed politically not the way they should be as young people. I thought
people were supposed to be idealistic and angry. And they seemed kind of
cynical and not very angry. At least not in any way that was accessible to
me. And part of what journalism is for me is spending time with people who
I dislike as a class. But I became very fond of them, and what it did was
it cured me of my anger at young people.
The anger moved on to new targets, the greatest of which, of course, was
the internet. There is a danger for Franzen, that an author who is not a
native user of the internet will be exposed in the way in which he writes
about it, and there are a few false notes in Purity; an off use of the
term going viral, a tin-eared reference to Jeff Bezos, and the
overwrought phrase moused and clicked to describe the activity of
industrious interns at their desks.
Cannily, given how much of the storyline he is made to shoulder, the
Andreas Wolf character is positioned as a pre-internet creature, born and
raised in communist East Germany, with a commensurate understanding of how
systems that claim to liberate human potential can actually constrain it.
The apex of the book is an extraordinary rant Wolf goes on against what he
calls the New Regime coincidentally, an echo of remarks made by Assange
himself in his 2012 book of essays, in which the Wikileaks founder warned
that the internet could be turned into a dangerous facilitator of
totalitarianism.
Assange was mainly talking about surveillance technologies. In Purity,
Franzens critique is much broader. Smart people were actually far more
terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-
smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA, rages Wolf in the novel.
It was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own
methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself
as the only defense against them and most of the would-be Snowdens kept
their mouth shut.
Who is the Stasi, in the East German analogy?
Technology itself is the Stasi. Technology is the genie out of the
bottle. And the Stasi didnt actually need to do that much. It didnt
arrest that many people. Even with all its resources, it couldnt do that
many full operations. So it counted on people censoring themselves. And
controlling their own behaviour for fear of the Stasi, without their
needing to lift a finger.
What worries Franzen is the potentially deforming effect these new forces
might have on the novelists interior landscape. The ways in which self-
censorship operates. The fear of being called a bad name. People become
very careful. And it becomes very hard to be creative, actually. Because
youre worried about what you might be called, and whether its fair or
not. It is also, he says, a question of resisting pressure to engage in
forums that, for the novelist, can only undermine the task at hand. It
used to be possible to do a lot of things that had no content within a
capitalist context. For example, creating art. And there used to be rather
serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public the gallery,
the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says,
self-promote or die. And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be
forced into.
Franzen gives some aspects of social media too much credibility in this
argument, and ascribes his own working habits the need for total
seclusion to concentrate to everyone; novelists with small children face
greater threats to their concentration than Twitter, yet manage somehow.
But the larger point, about the internalisation of judgment, is a powerful
one. I think it is what the serious writer is needed for now: to keep
trying to assert the right to imagine. And assert really the right to
speak about whatever seems interesting. And I can afford to do it. But I
know its harder for people who are less defended by all the things I have
to defend me.
We live, he believes, in more conformist times than the 1950s. I think
cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people
who simply cant conform and people who do conform, but underneath theyre
not feeling conformist. The shame tanks appear to be full.
Surely under Obama the US has become more liberal? Franzen doesnt agree.
Its weird how stark political polarisation can exist within a context of
radical conformity. Politics has been subtracted from the essence of
public life, in a funny way. Its a flavour now. So conformism in the
Eisenhower era, or conformism in East Germany, had an ineluctably
political flavour. And now, in fact, Sarah Palin and Bill McKibben are
both tweeting away according to certain rules. And enforcing the same kind
of conformism, just from different political sides.
Isnt there anything good to say about social media? That those curating
their Facebook and Instagram feeds experience a measure of the
satisfaction the writer gets from producing an essay? Or the democratising
value of these platforms to marginalised voices? Franzen looks weary. Im
frequently cast as someone who says its all bad, but Im not that person.
That goes on the positive side of the ledger and all these other things
are on the negative side. And admittedly theres a bias at work here, in
that I am part of the writer tribe and my friends are good writers. And
they publish. And I have a concern for younger writers coming up into this
world what they are being made to do.
He thinks for a moment. It may even be, as you say, a democratising
thing, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it might, in this respect, be a
positive development. But Im not trying to maximise everyones happiness.
Im trying to keep alive the kind of writing that I enjoy.
There is a Facebook account bearing Jonathan Franzens name that he made a
few updates to in the autumn of 2007, since when his publishers have taken
over the feed. It has 42,000 likes. Franzen has been forced to take down
several fake Twitter accounts, because Ive had this problem with people
impersonating me, not in a parodic way. And its actually not
straightforward to have them taken down. I have to photograph myself
holding my passport to my face. He looks pained.
I didnt even know how to look at Twitter. People sometimes copy things
from Twitter and send them to me. But dont you have to sign up?
Yes, I say.
There is a long pause. I wouldnt want to sign up.
All of this feeds into what one suspects are the authors lifelong
feelings of being misunderstood. The bird controversy, in which, within
the space of just a few days, Franzens subtle and well-argued position
had been boiled down to the summary climate change-denier depressed him
immensely.
I feel that it hurts me that I dont engage, he says. The thing for me
to do wouldve been to get online and fire back. And call names. And the
whole thing gets worse and worse. There are many people who are quite
hostile to me and the project of my work. But there are also friendly
voices, and some of them have said, Youre not doing yourself any favours
by not responding.
Nonetheless, he resisted. The only thing to be done, he believes, is to
wait out the noise and to have faith that something that is well made
will stick around. People will find their way to it.
We go outside to have his photograph taken. Franzen very much wants to
help and is game, but he is also anxious. He refuses to pose with
binoculars, since were not in birdwatching season. Im not trying to be
difficult! he insists. Am I being unreasonable?
On the doorstep, I ask if he ever got as far as wondering what kind of dad
he would have been.
I thought about that a little bit. Im very good at being silly. I think
I have the silliness part of fathering down.
Hed have been great at wordplay, I imagine.
And just being a goof. I put on a certain amount of seriousness when
someone comes to visit. And there it is: the unbridgeable gap between
inside and out. Did I mention? he says, smiling, I think of myself as a
comic novelist.
Purity, by Jonathan Franzen, is published on 1 September by Fourth
Estate at £20. To order a copy for £13.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
or call 0330 333 6846; free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Watch
Jonathan Franzen answer Weekends Q&A at guardian.com/video
--
Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $18 trillion in the six
years he has been in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
Barack Obama, reelected by the dumbest voters in the history of the United
States of America. The only American president to deliberately import a
lethal infectious disease from Africa, Ebola.
Loretta Fuddy, killed after she "verified" Obama's phony birth
certificate.
Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
improper vetting of Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama, a confirmed
felon using SSAN 042-68-4425, belonging to a dead man.
Obama ignored the brutal killing of an American diplomat in Benghazi, then
relieved American military officers who attempted to prevent said murder
in order to cover up his own ineptitude.
Obama continues his goal of disarming America while ObamaCare increases
insurance premiums 300% and leaves millions without health care.
--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ***@netfront.net ---
interview
Jonathan Franzens new novel, Purity, is partly set in Santa Cruz, a
Californian town 70 miles south of San Francisco, where the novelist lives
with his partner, Kathy. Their house is in the U-bend of a crescent, on
the edge of a suburban housing estate, overlooking a wooded conservation
area to the Pacific Ocean beyond. It is, for one of Americas foremost
literary novelists, a modest property, overlooked on three sides by
neighbours in a way that, say, Philip Roths grand pile in Connecticut is
not. However, it affords good views from the deck (the novelist is an avid
birdwatcher) and the low overheads that permit Franzen to let five years
go by without delivering a novel. Im not used to talking about this
book, he says of Purity, which, like his preceding two novels, is a 600-
page doorstopper. There is a long, Franzonian pause: Im trying to figure
out how much I should say and how much I should not say.
That question, as central to the writing as to the publicising of the
novel, is one that Franzen has frequently struggled to answer. At 55, he
has the earnest, slightly puggish look of a younger man, and the
occasional intemperance of one, too. On a refresher driving test he took
recently, the novelist scored high on the scale for susceptibility to road
rage. (There are 11 things that are warning signs of road rage, and I
had, like, nine of them.) His fame has as much to do with the fights he
has picked or has had foisted upon him as with the quality of his
fiction; Franzen riles people in a way that is unusual, and perhaps
reassuring for a novelist, given the endless debate about the relevance of
that role. He has attracted the scorn, over the years, of users of social
media, environmentalists, certain stripes of feminist critic, lesser
novelists, the lead book reviewer of the New York Times and fans of Oprah
Winfrey.
Franzen says he is hurt and ashamed to be the target of such ire, but
he is also unrepentant. No sooner has one controversy died down than
another pops up in its place, most recently in the wake of a long piece he
wrote in the New Yorker in April, suggesting that, contrary to research
published by the bird charity the National Audubon Society, climate change
was not the greatest threat to avian welfare it was more immediate
dangers such as hunting and collision with glass. The society accused him
of intellectual dishonesty, and its members attacked him online, an
unpleasant, but also, perhaps, a bleakly satisfying experience: the
incident foreshadowed the themes of Franzens new novel.
Purity is the story of Pip, a girl in her early 20s, and a Julian Assange-
type character called Andreas Wolf, who runs a rival organisation to
Wikileaks called the Sunlight Project. Internet culture is, in some ways,
perfect fodder for Franzen, who is never stronger than when calling out
the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us a gap wherein
so much of online life now resides. But it is also an odd fit; a novel
about technology by someone who avowedly doesnt like using it. Many years
ago, Franzen spoke about jamming the USB port on his computer in order to
get stuff done, and more recently scolded Salman Rushdie for wasting time
on Twitter. This distaste is in part aesthetic the very brevity of
Twitter offends Franzen and partly a reaction against what he calls the
totalitarianism of online culture, wherein retribution by the mob can be
vast, swift and violently misinformed.
The irony of all this is that Franzen, a white male novelist frequently
accused of elitism, is, in this scenario, something of an underdog, the
nerd repeatedly beaten up by the cool kids online although he identifies
the real villain of the piece as the internet itself, which he compares in
Purity to communist East Germany. You cant not have a relation to, in
the case of East Germany, the socialism of the state, Franzen says. In
the case of the internet, you can ignore it, or you can abet it. Either
way, you are in a relation to it. And thats whats totalitarian.
As for social media, it feels like a protection racket. Your reputation
will be murdered unless you join in this thing that is, in significant
part, about murdering reputations. There is a long pause. Why would I
want to feed that machine?
Reading Jonathan Franzen on form is like watching a baseball star toss a
ball, knowing that behind the casual gesture is a virtuoso talent and
10,000 hours of practice. Franzens prose is deadpan, unexcitable, almost
aggressively rational, made up of long, finely planed sentences that
quiver with the sarcasm that is at the root of his comedy. Unlike his
friend, the late David Foster Wallace, he has never been fashionable he
isnt avant-garde and takes everything too seriously for the postmodern
style. Neither does he fall easily into a literary rat pack. I look at
McEwan and Amis and Hitchens, he says. They seemed like a pack. And I
dont think thats how it works so much here [in the US]. Its not a
generational divide. At least in my experience, what separates people into
packs is not age, its taste. He allies himself with writer friends such
as Paula Fox, Don DeLillo, David Means and Jeffrey Eugenides. [Jonathan
Safran] Foer, he says, Im friendly with him. And even if Ive never met
the person I met Edward St Aubyn once, at a reading, but hes part of
the pack. Dead people can be part of the pack.
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These friends are also loving competitors, and for a long time Franzen
felt angry at his relative lack of progress. At the age of 40, having
spent a decade writing two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong
Motion, both of which were well-reviewed and little-sold, he resigned
himself to a certain amount of cultural irrelevance, which he attributed
not to any failing in himself, but to a failing in the culture. He was, he
says, experiencing a disillusionment with the American reading public,
the kind of grandiose attitude that the reviewer Michiko Kakutani was
perhaps trying to puncture when she called him a jackass in the New York
Times. Franzen, smiling, allows that he may at times have been a little
insufferable. (Inevitably, he fought back and called Kakutani tone deaf
and humourless.) You adopt a certain attitude when you feel like you
have something thats not appreciated. You have to generate some sense of
bigness on your own; thats an insufferable activity.
It is important here to note Franzens Midwestern background he was
raised in a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, a part of the US with a regional
identity strongly rooted in humility, so Franzens arrogance is in some
ways a performance. Once he achieved success, he says, I could revert to
my native Midwestern modesty.
His shyness is not to be overlooked, either. Franzen is pained and baffled
when he hears himself described as misanthropic. I dont dislike people;
I love people, he says to me at one point, and there is a line in Purity,
applied to a character called Anabel, that could be the author addressing
himself: She kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her
sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness.
Everything changed with The Corrections, Franzens novel of the family
Lambert: Enid and Alfred, the warring old couple, and their three
dysfunctional adult children. The fictional family bore strong
similarities to Franzens own, his father a railway engineer, his mother a
housewife, although, he says, as writing becomes more autobiographical,
the less it hues to actual lived experience. The text takes on meaning
when you start to depart from experience. Because then it starts to tap
into the writers nature.
Franzen had no great hopes for The Corrections. I thought I would write
for a small audience. And had put all the stuff that was really shameful
to me... its hard to conceive of now, that I was ashamed of writing a
book, deeply ashamed, cripplingly ashamed of writing a book that turned on
a mothers wish to have the family together for Christmas.
Because you felt it was too small a canvas?
It was small, and I was embarrassed to have come from the innocent
Midwest. And I was embarrassed to still care about family. And there were
many other things. Chips freakishness, that drew to some extent from my
own sense of freakishness. You explore the shameful things for people who
thats what they go to fiction for. Thats why theyre reading Kafka, or
Dostoevsky. But thats a small audience.
John Updike and to some extent Philip Roth had, for decades, been writing
novels with domestic settings that hadnt stopped them being taken
seriously, but Franzen couldnt conceive of Enid and Alfred winning him
the same kind of respect. They were too weird, too pitiful, too specific
to his own family and his disastrous adolescence (a period Franzen
revisits in his essay Then Joy Breaks Through, in which, memorably, he
goes to church camp and on the way does everything he can to avoid being
consigned to the car of Social Death).
And to discover that these things that I thought were freakish parts of
my history and my personality people were saying, Oh, someones writing
about me! And this is my family. I thought, oh my God, Ive been so
embarrassed my whole life about my family. And here people are telling me
that they recognise it. I felt deeply grateful, but I also realised that
my contempt for the non-hardcore readers the softer core readers... not
contempt, but my writing them off, had been premature. In fact, there was
a whole lot more people looking for a certain kind of novelistic
experience than I had any idea.
The Corrections, which was published in 2001, when Franzen was 42, sold
more than three million copies. It was simply no longer appropriate to be
angry.
Good relationships make for boring novels. For the last 13 years, Franzen
has lived with Kathryn Chetkovich, a writer and editor whom he persuaded
to move in with him four months after The Corrections came out, and with
whom, says Franzen, Im never bored. As an editor, Chetkovich mostly
works with social scientists. She helps them think better. She knows a
lot of stuff. And its hard to get away with a specious argument in her
presence. I dont think I could live with someone that I didnt have an
intellectual friendship with. Maybe a dog.
Against this background of domestic harmony halfway through the
interview, Franzen gets a call from the garage, informing him that
Chetkovichs long-awaited VW Golf has arrived, and he is buoyantly excited
for her the novelist revisits, in his fiction, terrible relationships of
the past. For 14 years, from his early 20s onwards, he was married to
another writer, Valerie Cornell. With all the caveats about autobiography
in place, elements of the experience clearly inform parts of Purity. While
sections of the new novel (and Franzens previous one, Freedom) read like
an intellectual exercise, the car crash of Tom and Anabels marriage is
straightforwardly brilliant, captivating, unbearable.
A little bit funny? he says, anxiously.
Hilarious!
Good.
It struck Franzen that no one had really done the entire slow-motion
train wreck in all its brutality. He is terrific at arguments that
terrible, slow suck into someone elses version of reality, wherein, as
Tom says, every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response,
each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would
have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led
eight or ten steps out on to some dangerous tree branch and what a
despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch
to a neutral starting point.
The fact that Anabel is a feminist so warped and fanatical that she forces
Tom to, for example, atone for his maleness by sitting down on the toilet
to pee, will be received by Franzens feminist critics as an aggressive
act, a deliberate ridiculing of the cause, which he concedes is somewhat
the case. Theres a certain degree of glee in putting that stuff in the
book. Because I know that if you are hostile, you will find ammunition. I
wrote this deliriously praising celebration of Edith Wharton. People
managed to find a way to make it sound like I was hating on Edith Wharton.
So why not just let it all rip and: have fun with that, guys. (Criticism
of the Wharton essay rounded on Franzens observation that Wharton wasnt
pretty, something he suggested, not unreasonably, fed into her fictional
disquisitions on the complicated currency of female beauty.)
Im not a sexist, he says. I am not somebody who goes around saying men
are superior, or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out
of my way to champion womens work that I think is not getting enough
attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. Its
like theres no way to make myself not male. And one of the running jokes
in the Tom and Anabel section is that hes really trying to not be male.
His ex-wife did not try to get him to pee sitting down. But theres a
sense that there is really nothing I can do except die or, I suppose,
retire and never write again.
Dying wouldnt help, I suggest: then he would be a dead white male
novelist, a category even more problematic than a living one. Yes, even
worse. So I was attracted to a story of someone trying to do reparations.
And trying really hard and really sincerely, and lovingly, and finally not
being able to. The comedy of that.
He has written some great female characters Enid Lambert; Patty
Berglund; in Purity, Toms mother Clelia, her name a nod to Stendhals The
Charterhouse Of Parma these hard, awkward, embarrassing women who turn
out to have been heroes. Franzens real crime, one suspects, is not one of
content, but of presentation; his propensity for feeling hard done by
doesnt play well with those who face greater barriers just to get to the
start line. NYT raved about Franzens new book, tweeted the US novelist
Jodi Picoult when Freedom was published in 2010. Is anyone shocked? Would
love to see the NYT rave about authors who arent white male literary
darlings. The novelist Jennifer Weiner made similar remarks, to which
Franzen replied, earlier this year, that she was freeloading on the
legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon to promote her novels.
But there is also something courageous in Franzens willingness to step up
to the fight. It takes nerve, these days, to criticise social media, as it
does to piss off Oprah, as the novelist famously did in 2001. In the essay
Franzen wrote after the incident, he cleared up a lot of the
misconceptions, namely that he turned down Oprah when she invited him to
be on her show. In fact, she disinvited Franzen after he made some
equivocal remarks about being on the show during publicity and was a brat
when the crew came to St Louis to film background. (This is so bogus! he
exclaimed, when they asked him to stand in front of an old haunt and look
soppy.)
It was a tragic misunderstanding, Franzen says. I blame myself, because
I said things that were stupid. And hurt a number of people. There is a
pause, during which one feels Franzen leaning inexorably, and rather
endearingly, in a direction that can do him no good. I also blame Oprah,
he says. Because, from our very first conversation, it was clear we were
not speaking the same language. I didnt scream when she called me. I
said, Oh, hey. And was trying to talk like a media professional to a
media professional. And she didnt know what to do with that.
She treated him like a competition winner?
Oh, totally. Yes. And what is the one thing a competition winner has to
do? They have to show abject gratitude. And I was, like, well, I dont
think youd be doing this if it werent good for you, too. So lets work
together. And the answer was no. So I blame her, too.
She couldnt break persona for him?
Thats the thing. And I think the fact that I was a white guy made that
harder. And I think she was sensitive to any suggestion that I might be
dissing her. And, of course, then I did diss her. But not before Id had
that experience.
Towards the end of 2006, Franzen started to feel a certain lack in his
life. He was approaching his late 40s, he was immensely successful, well
remunerated and in a good relationship. The thing that he lacked was
access to young people.
I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a
child, he says. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by
the notion. We were in a bar. He picked up a pair of toothpicks and made
the sign of the cross and held it in front of him and said, Please dont
do that. And then he paused and said, But maybe we can rent you some
young people.
For a year, Franzen checked in regularly with a group of new graduates
from Berkeley, who were part of a semi-longitudinal study into kids whod
just graduated from college, eventually writing a piece for the New Yorker
about the experience, out of which, many years later, Pip, the 20-
something heroine of Purity, was born. Pip is smart, funny, awkward, all
the things Franzen likes in a person. I knew her. She was easy.
Did hanging out with the young people nix his desire to have a baby?
Oh, it was insane, the idea that Kathy and I were going to adopt an Iraqi
war orphan. The whole idea lasted maybe six weeks. And was finally killed
by Henrys response. He made a persuasive case for why that was a bad
idea. The main thing it did one of the things that had put me in mind of
adoption was a sense of alienation from the younger generation. They
seemed politically not the way they should be as young people. I thought
people were supposed to be idealistic and angry. And they seemed kind of
cynical and not very angry. At least not in any way that was accessible to
me. And part of what journalism is for me is spending time with people who
I dislike as a class. But I became very fond of them, and what it did was
it cured me of my anger at young people.
The anger moved on to new targets, the greatest of which, of course, was
the internet. There is a danger for Franzen, that an author who is not a
native user of the internet will be exposed in the way in which he writes
about it, and there are a few false notes in Purity; an off use of the
term going viral, a tin-eared reference to Jeff Bezos, and the
overwrought phrase moused and clicked to describe the activity of
industrious interns at their desks.
Cannily, given how much of the storyline he is made to shoulder, the
Andreas Wolf character is positioned as a pre-internet creature, born and
raised in communist East Germany, with a commensurate understanding of how
systems that claim to liberate human potential can actually constrain it.
The apex of the book is an extraordinary rant Wolf goes on against what he
calls the New Regime coincidentally, an echo of remarks made by Assange
himself in his 2012 book of essays, in which the Wikileaks founder warned
that the internet could be turned into a dangerous facilitator of
totalitarianism.
Assange was mainly talking about surveillance technologies. In Purity,
Franzens critique is much broader. Smart people were actually far more
terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-
smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA, rages Wolf in the novel.
It was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own
methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself
as the only defense against them and most of the would-be Snowdens kept
their mouth shut.
Who is the Stasi, in the East German analogy?
Technology itself is the Stasi. Technology is the genie out of the
bottle. And the Stasi didnt actually need to do that much. It didnt
arrest that many people. Even with all its resources, it couldnt do that
many full operations. So it counted on people censoring themselves. And
controlling their own behaviour for fear of the Stasi, without their
needing to lift a finger.
What worries Franzen is the potentially deforming effect these new forces
might have on the novelists interior landscape. The ways in which self-
censorship operates. The fear of being called a bad name. People become
very careful. And it becomes very hard to be creative, actually. Because
youre worried about what you might be called, and whether its fair or
not. It is also, he says, a question of resisting pressure to engage in
forums that, for the novelist, can only undermine the task at hand. It
used to be possible to do a lot of things that had no content within a
capitalist context. For example, creating art. And there used to be rather
serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public the gallery,
the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says,
self-promote or die. And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be
forced into.
Franzen gives some aspects of social media too much credibility in this
argument, and ascribes his own working habits the need for total
seclusion to concentrate to everyone; novelists with small children face
greater threats to their concentration than Twitter, yet manage somehow.
But the larger point, about the internalisation of judgment, is a powerful
one. I think it is what the serious writer is needed for now: to keep
trying to assert the right to imagine. And assert really the right to
speak about whatever seems interesting. And I can afford to do it. But I
know its harder for people who are less defended by all the things I have
to defend me.
We live, he believes, in more conformist times than the 1950s. I think
cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people
who simply cant conform and people who do conform, but underneath theyre
not feeling conformist. The shame tanks appear to be full.
Surely under Obama the US has become more liberal? Franzen doesnt agree.
Its weird how stark political polarisation can exist within a context of
radical conformity. Politics has been subtracted from the essence of
public life, in a funny way. Its a flavour now. So conformism in the
Eisenhower era, or conformism in East Germany, had an ineluctably
political flavour. And now, in fact, Sarah Palin and Bill McKibben are
both tweeting away according to certain rules. And enforcing the same kind
of conformism, just from different political sides.
Isnt there anything good to say about social media? That those curating
their Facebook and Instagram feeds experience a measure of the
satisfaction the writer gets from producing an essay? Or the democratising
value of these platforms to marginalised voices? Franzen looks weary. Im
frequently cast as someone who says its all bad, but Im not that person.
That goes on the positive side of the ledger and all these other things
are on the negative side. And admittedly theres a bias at work here, in
that I am part of the writer tribe and my friends are good writers. And
they publish. And I have a concern for younger writers coming up into this
world what they are being made to do.
He thinks for a moment. It may even be, as you say, a democratising
thing, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it might, in this respect, be a
positive development. But Im not trying to maximise everyones happiness.
Im trying to keep alive the kind of writing that I enjoy.
There is a Facebook account bearing Jonathan Franzens name that he made a
few updates to in the autumn of 2007, since when his publishers have taken
over the feed. It has 42,000 likes. Franzen has been forced to take down
several fake Twitter accounts, because Ive had this problem with people
impersonating me, not in a parodic way. And its actually not
straightforward to have them taken down. I have to photograph myself
holding my passport to my face. He looks pained.
I didnt even know how to look at Twitter. People sometimes copy things
from Twitter and send them to me. But dont you have to sign up?
Yes, I say.
There is a long pause. I wouldnt want to sign up.
All of this feeds into what one suspects are the authors lifelong
feelings of being misunderstood. The bird controversy, in which, within
the space of just a few days, Franzens subtle and well-argued position
had been boiled down to the summary climate change-denier depressed him
immensely.
I feel that it hurts me that I dont engage, he says. The thing for me
to do wouldve been to get online and fire back. And call names. And the
whole thing gets worse and worse. There are many people who are quite
hostile to me and the project of my work. But there are also friendly
voices, and some of them have said, Youre not doing yourself any favours
by not responding.
Nonetheless, he resisted. The only thing to be done, he believes, is to
wait out the noise and to have faith that something that is well made
will stick around. People will find their way to it.
We go outside to have his photograph taken. Franzen very much wants to
help and is game, but he is also anxious. He refuses to pose with
binoculars, since were not in birdwatching season. Im not trying to be
difficult! he insists. Am I being unreasonable?
On the doorstep, I ask if he ever got as far as wondering what kind of dad
he would have been.
I thought about that a little bit. Im very good at being silly. I think
I have the silliness part of fathering down.
Hed have been great at wordplay, I imagine.
And just being a goof. I put on a certain amount of seriousness when
someone comes to visit. And there it is: the unbridgeable gap between
inside and out. Did I mention? he says, smiling, I think of myself as a
comic novelist.
Purity, by Jonathan Franzen, is published on 1 September by Fourth
Estate at £20. To order a copy for £13.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
or call 0330 333 6846; free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Watch
Jonathan Franzen answer Weekends Q&A at guardian.com/video
--
Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $18 trillion in the six
years he has been in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
Barack Obama, reelected by the dumbest voters in the history of the United
States of America. The only American president to deliberately import a
lethal infectious disease from Africa, Ebola.
Loretta Fuddy, killed after she "verified" Obama's phony birth
certificate.
Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
improper vetting of Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama, a confirmed
felon using SSAN 042-68-4425, belonging to a dead man.
Obama ignored the brutal killing of an American diplomat in Benghazi, then
relieved American military officers who attempted to prevent said murder
in order to cover up his own ineptitude.
Obama continues his goal of disarming America while ObamaCare increases
insurance premiums 300% and leaves millions without health care.
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