FRANZEN
Well, apart from my wife, yes. Around the same time, I also got to know Bill Vollmann, who was living in New York then.
INTERVIEWER
And what difference did this make?
FRANZEN
It’s all bound up in the story of my marriage, which I really would prefer not to get into here. But, briefly put, it was a very hermetic marriage, and simply to be in conversation with other people who I thought were doing good work—and also to get their take on my marital situation—was huge. Soon after that, I got to know David Means, too. So right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer friends, as opposed to none. And because I was entering a period of radical doubt about the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredible blessing to talk with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and talented, who were dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that you and Wallace corresponded about fiction less than people might expect.
FRANZEN
At a certain point, you get to be good enough friends that you pick up the phone rather than writing a letter. The letter-writing phase is sort of a “feeling out each other’s position” phase. I came into those conversations with a feeling of an unattractively extreme rage against literary theory and the politicization of academic English departments. It was related to my growing antagonism toward a status model of the novel—the idea that a novel’s highest achievement is to be read and studied by scholars. And yet my own attempts to connect with a larger audience had so far failed. Dave was very comfortable in the academy, but he himself was going through experiences that were making clear that there was more to life than producing interesting texts that a small number of very smart readers might engage with. His own life was in crisis, and he was coming into new material, his authentic personal material, and so he, too, welcomed a conversation about how to move beyond pure intellectual play into realms of, for want of a better word, emotional significance. The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached was the notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance. The formulation had slightly different meanings for the two of us, but it was the bridge we eventually found to connect his view to my view.
INTERVIEWER
And the difference?
FRANZEN
I took the notion, finally, as a call to arms to continue trying to write books that ordinary people, nonprofessionals, could connect with. I think that Dave, up to the time when he stopped writing, was still struggling with his distrust of the part of himself that wanted to please people.
I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a competition between the writer who was pursuing art for art’s sake and the writer who was trying to be out in the world. The art-for-art’s-sake writer gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books written about his or her work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public attention and money. Like I say, I perceived this as a competition, but I don’t know for a fact that Dave perceived it that way. There’s some evidence that he did, but he was a troubled person and was tormented by the possibility of people misperceiving him. His instinct was to keep people at a distance and let the work speak for itself, and I do know that he enjoyed the status he’d attained. He might have denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously true things at different moments. He came from an academic family, and the fact that lots of books were being written about his work really was gratifying to him. In the way that sibling competition works, I’ve consistently maintained a position of not caring about that stuff. And Dave’s level of purely linguistic achievement was turf that I knew better than to try to compete on.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first come across DeLillo?
FRANZEN
I remember a Christmas visit to my wife’s family during which she gave me Players. I remember reading it on the train back up to Boston and having one of the purest aesthetic responses I’ve ever had. I’d finally found somebody who was putting on the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic that I’d been looking for in film and photographs and had found expressed in music, particularly by Talking Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it on the page and writing like a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You must write better. Here, see, it can be done. I find it remarkable that people don’t talk more about Players. In certain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.
INTERVIEWER
What did you find so attractive about him?
FRANZEN
It came as no surprise when I learned, later, that he sometimes composed books with one paragraph on each page, starting a new page after only a few sentences. His paragraphs really do have a stand-alone quality. It was through reading him that I came to see pages as collections of individual sentences. For a young writer, in particular, the terrors of the paragraph become more manageable when you see it as a system of sentences. I also started to see all the junk DNA that had cluttered my paragraphs before then, and that I’d been unaware of.
INTERVIEWER
DeLillo’s sentences seem to involve intimate connections between individual words, even letters—a visual patterning.
FRANZEN
Yes. In my own work, I can see his visual influence in the dinner-table scene in The Corrections that I wrote immediately after reading Underworld. But I don’t think my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder letters—c’s and p’s. I think of him as being more into l ’s and a’s and i’s.
INTERVIEWER
C’s and p’s?
FRANZEN
I kept seeing a plate of food with beet greens and liver and rutabaga—-intense purple green, intense orange, rich rusty brown—and feeling a wish to write sentences that were juicy and sensuous.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean the sound, too?
FRANZEN
No, the way they looked, the roundness of b’s and g’s, the juiciness. That’s almost the last time I remember thinking about the words that way. Nowadays I have almost the opposite aesthetic—I’m looking for transparency.
INTERVIEWER
And when did you discover Pynchon?
FRANZEN
I’d come up with the plot of The Twenty-Seventh City when I was a college sophomore, in a playwriting workshop, and our instructor had told me I’d better take a look at Pynchon. I finally got around to it after I graduated and went back to Germany. I took Gravity’s Rainbow along in mass-market paperback, and it utterly consumed me. It was like getting the flu to read that book. It was like I was fighting off some very aggressive infection. I started writing Pynchonian letters to my then-fiancée, and I think it’s significant that she hated those letters and made her hatred of them known, and that I steered away from that voice—because of our relationship, because of an intense relationship with a woman. Which now seems to me emblematic: You could either play with the boys like that, and relegate women to minor and substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you could try to have a full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that kind of boy writing, however brilliant and masterful, was necessarily subordinate. It’s worth noting that at this point in my life, I feel much more indebted to various female writers—Alice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Paula Fox, to name a few—than I do to Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
What about the letters was Pynchonian?
FRANZEN
The tangly sentences, the overfullness of them, and a kind of dirty explicitness. A hipster jadedness. “Seen it all, done it all, don’t mean shit.” Like the dark side of R. Crumb.
And yet Pynchon’s enterprise in that book—creating an immensely complex world in which conspiracy is the organizing principle—was something I internalized and tried to build on. I saw that I might be able to go beyond the unseen conspiracy to a seen conspiracy, inhabit
ed by complicated characters with whom we might, moreover, sympathize. To turn the whole notion of the victim of conspiracy inside out and make the victim himself a problematic figure and the conspirators perhaps well justified. That was my best shot, as a twenty-three-year-old, at dealing with my brief but life-threatening infection with Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
And that infection did not last to your later novels?
FRANZEN
No. Even in my first book, I found a better model in Coover. He had some of the same satiric and encyclopedic ambitions as Pynchon, but he was working at the level of characters and their relationships to one another, and I just gravitated to that.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve described your first two books as “systems novels.”
FRANZEN
I had an idea of the social novel that I didn’t realize was already outmoded. I rather naively believed that, if I could capture the way large systems work, readers would understand their place in those systems better and make better political decisions. I’d taken real delight in the books of the previous generation that had revealed these kinds of systems to me. In The Twenty-Seventh City, the systems were city and county government and regional economics. And there were various systems in Strong Motion, most notably the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world.
This conception of the novel, I think, came out of my engagement with science fiction, which is all about concepts. You have a cool idea: What if we could travel back in time? What if in the future there’s only one sex? And then the characters come into being to make that story happen. Going into my first two books, I did have several characters firmly stuck in my head, but many of the smaller characters were invented to serve the systems. Whereas, in my last two novels, the systems are there to serve the characters. There are lingering elements of the old method in The Corrections—I’d been fascinated, for example, by my parents’ stories of cruises and, like Dave Wallace, I saw the cruise ship as somehow emblematic of our time. But my priorities have mostly flipped.
INTERVIEWER
How did you begin to write Strong Motion?
FRANZEN
A bunch of things had happened. My first book had been published, and my wife and I had fled to Europe; things were getting hard in the marriage. And, perhaps not coincidentally, I’d fallen under the spell of religious writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor and Dostoyevsky. My wife and I began touring cathedrals and looking at medieval sculpture and Romanesque churches. Wise Blood, The Brothers Karamazov, and the cathedral at Chartres are all examples of religious art, which is neither just religion nor just art; it’s a special category, a special binding of the aesthetic and the devotional. O’Connor and Dostoyevsky venture intensely into the extremes of human psychology, but always with serious moral purpose. Because of the difficulties in my marriage, I was attracted to their search for moral purpose in emotional extremity. I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other. I had the title Strong Motion very early on.
INTERVIEWER
When had you become interested in earthquakes?
FRANZEN
I’d been a research assistant in seismology—this was the excellent job that had funded the writing of The Twenty-Seventh City—and so I knew a lot about it, including the fact that human beings can cause earthquakes by pumping liquids underground. There are very few bridges between the geologic scale and the human scale, between the large forces of nature and the small forces of the heart, and I recognized early on that the phenomenon of humanly induced seismicity was kind of a gold mine literarily.
But Strong Motion is mainly a novel about an intense love affair. It spins outward from there to encompass an alternative Boston in which earthquakes are occurring. By that point in my life, relationships, for want of a better word, had presented themselves as being of undeniable primary importance. The conflict in my marriage could no longer be ignored.
INTERVIEWER
And that found its way into the novel?
FRANZEN
Strong Motion was a novel written by a person to whom things were happening as he wrote it. It was a third party in the relationship. My wife’s own second novel was a fourth party. We brought these two extra figures into the house, so as to have much longer and more complicated discussions and fights. But I honestly have a poor recollection of how I wrote that book. It was a bad time, and we were traveling a lot—running, really—attempting geographic solutions to non-geographic problems.
One of the lines from The Trial that has always stayed with me is, approximately, “He had so much important, urgent work to do at the office, and he was losing so much time to his trial. Precisely now, when he needed to devote all his wits and strength and attention to his career, he instead had to worry about his trial.” When I think about my own trajectory as a writer, it’s in those terms. I began with an ambitious wish to be a writer of a certain stature, and to be mentioned in the company of such and such, and to produce a certain kind of masterful book that engages with contemporary culture and all that. I wanted to get on with the serious business of being an ambitious writer, but there was this damn trial welling up from within. It was certainly true in Strong Motion, when things were getting hard in the marriage, and it became all the more true in The Corrections. Precisely then, when I needed to focus all of my attention on writing a novel, my parents were falling apart. If you suffer with that for enough years, it eventually dawns on you that, in fact, you’ve misconstrued the real work of being a novelist.
INTERVIEWER
You once described The Corrections as an attack on the novel’s enemies, as an argument for the novel.
FRANZEN
The enemy I had in mind was materialism. The fear out of which that book was written was that the new materialism of the brain, which has given us drugs to change our personalities, and the materialism of consumer culture, which provides endless distractions and encourages the endless pursuit of more goods, were both antithetical to the project of literature, which is to connect with that which is unchanging and unchangeable, the tragic dimension of life.
INTERVIEWER
Patty describes the responsibility of parents to raise children who recognize reality.
FRANZEN
I am indeed interested in self-deception. Realist fiction presupposes that the author has access to the truth. It implies a superiority of the author to his or her comically blundering characters. The Corrections was written as a comedy, a somewhat angry comedy, and so the self-deception model worked perfectly. Self-deception is funny, and the writer gets to aggressively inflict painful knowledge on one character after another.
In Freedom, the recurrent metaphor is sleepwalking. Not that you’re deceiving yourself—you’re simply asleep, you’re not paying attention, you’re in some sort of dream state. The Corrections was preoccupied with the unreal, willfully self-deceptive worlds we make for ourselves to live in. You know, enchantment has a positive connotation, but even in fairy tales it’s not a good thing, usually. When you’re under enchantment, you’re lost to the world. And the realist writer can play a useful and entertaining role in violently breaking the spell. But something about the position this puts the writer in, as a possessor of truth, as an epistemological enforcer, has come to make me uncomfortable. I’ve become more interested in joining the characters in their dream, and experiencing it with them, and less interested in the mere fact that it’s a dream.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was your first effort to build a novel around Andy Aberant, but eventually you excised him, as you would later from Freedom.
FRANZEN
Yes, Andy of the undead has now failed twice to make the cut. He was a self-consciously morally compromised character, first as a Securities and Exchange Commission attorney, later as the operator of a bogus la
nd trust. In The Corrections I imagined him involving himself in a family that was really, really shut down, and coming to have a relationship with each member of the family, helping them achieve what they couldn’t achieve themselves. I’m always looking for ways to see things through fresh eyes, and it seemed to me potentially interesting to observe a family from the perspective of an essentially adopted son—“self-adopted in adulthood” was the notion. It was akin to observing the Probsts through the eyes and ears of those eavesdropping Indians.
INTERVIEWER
In an early section, published in Granta, you say that Andy came into the world needing people to believe that he knew everything.
FRANZEN
One of the reasons Andy never worked is that he was too much like me, at least the depressive side of me. I get depressed when I’m failing to get a novel going, and Andy seems to come along as the voice of my depressive, hyperintellectual distance from my own life. If he’d ever been able to rise to the level of parody, he might have worked as a character.
But those Lamberts just kept getting larger and larger. Alfred and Enid were always Alfred and Enid, their voices were taken from life. My parents were not Alfred and Enid, but on bad days they could sound like them. Chip and Gary and Denise had been floating around in my mind, in different avatars, for some years, with different occupations and in different situations. Figuring out how to gather these five characters into some believable semblance of a family took several very unpleasant years of false starts and note taking.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was the first book you wrote entirely on a computer.
FRANZEN
In terms of process, the one small difference between a typewriter and a computer is that a computer makes it easier to find fragments you’ve written and then forgotten about. When you work at a book for as long as I do, you end up doing a lot of assemblage from scavenged materials. And with a computer you’re more likely, on a slow morning, to drift over to another file folder and open up something old. Chunks of text travel with you, rather than getting buried in a drawer or stored in some remote, inaccessible location.