INTERVIEWER
You once gave a beautiful description of Ulysses as being like a cathedral.
FRANZEN
Maybe my Joyce time is still coming. I like Portrait of the Artist a lot. I like Dubliners even more. But I can never shake the feeling that, after those books, Joyce was chasing a certain kind of status. He was inventing the very category in which he wanted his work to place him. And that’s where the cathedral image comes from: I’m going to build something grand that you’re going to admire and study for decades. There’s a sort of chilly Jesuitical quality to Joyce, and the Jesuits are, of course, great statusmongers and elitists. I’m an old egalitarian Midwesterner, and that kind of personality just rubs me the wrong way. I find someone like Beckett much more sympathetic. He’s often harder to read than Joyce, so it’s not a matter of the difficulty. It’s the feeling that Beckett is going after a really personally felt horror and finding comedy and universality in that horror. He’s obviously very concerned with language, but the language is in the service of something not merely thought but also felt. And that, to me, is a friendlier enterprise.
I should also say something about those words status and contract. Probably through faults of its own, my essay on literary difficulty and William Gaddis has been somewhat misunderstood. The primary thing I failed to make clear was that the terminology of status and contract was Gaddis’s own. As far as one can tell from his rather confused and opaque nonfiction writings, he was a big status guy. He seems to have believed that the world really was better off in the late Middle Ages than it is today, when the world is arranged by vulgar contract. He seems to have preferred the older status system, where high was high and low was low and great works of art were understood by very few. The reason I seized on those words is that status has another, more common meaning in this country—“status symbol,” “literary status,” and so on.
INTERVIEWER
Is the response of critics important to you?
FRANZEN
I’d be lying if I pretended that Terrence Rafferty’s vicious review of The Twenty-Seventh City in The New Yorker didn’t have an effect on the way I went about writing Strong Motion. Basically, though, with very few exceptions, I stopped reading my reviews after James Wood’s piece on The Corrections. I’d looked to forward to it because he can be a very perceptive reader, and I knew that we had some common enemies and enthusiasms. And what he wrote was a quibbling and carping and narrowly censorious thing, with a willfully dense misreading of my Harper’s essay. That disappointment, along with fifteen unwisely spent minutes of Googling myself in 2001, pretty well cured me of the need to read about myself.
INTERVIEWER
And the overwhelming response to Freedom hasn’t changed that?
FRANZEN
Nah.
INTERVIEWER
What are people missing or overlooking in your work?
FRANZEN
I think they may be overlooking Strong Motion a little bit. But what seems to me most often overlooked is that I consider myself essentially a comic writer. This was particularly true with The Discomfort Zone, which I wrote for laughs, and which I’m told wasn’t laughed at in all quarters.
I’m reminded of a very earnest young Italian man who came up to me after a reading in Rome at which I’d read some of my breakup stories. He said to me, with this kind of tragic face, “I don’t understand. You’re reading about people who are going through terrible pain, and everyone in the audience is laughing.” I don’t remember what I said to him, but I’d like to think I said, “Exactly.”
THREE
EARLY
STORIES
Portrait of Jonathan Franzen
as a Young Man
1
BREAKUP STORIES
OUR FRIEND DANNI’S young husband had been intending, since before he was her husband, to talk about his feelings about having children, but because these feelings consisted mainly of reluctance and aversion, and because Danni, who was a few years older than he, was unmistakably determined to have a family, this conversation promised to be so unhappy that the young husband still hadn’t managed to begin it by the time Danni reached a career plateau and announced that she was ready. The young husband told her that he needed to go to Burlington, Vermont. He said he needed to replenish his store of antique lumber for his custom-renovation business. From Burlington he called Danni every few days, sounding worried about her emotional state, but it was not until Danni received a card from the postal service, confirming the young husband’s change of address, that she understood that he wasn’t coming back. She said on the telephone, “Did you leave me? Are we not together anymore?” For the young husband, unfortunately, answering these questions would have meant initiating precisely the conversation that he couldn’t bring himself to have. He replied that all of a sudden, in Vermont, nobody was naïve about lumber anymore. Every single person in the state seemed to know that antique thirty-foot oak beams now sold for three thousand dollars. Even very stupid and isolated rural people were aware of this. He said that, as information became cheaper, markets became more perfect and real bargains impossible to find. Probably online auction sites like eBay contributed to this trend, which was bad for entrepreneurs like himself but good for rural Vermonters, he had to admit. A few days later, while Danni was on a business trip, the young husband drove to New York in his pickup and fetched his personal things, including a sixty-pound chunk of maple burl, from their apartment on East Tenth Street. Even after Danni had met a twenty-seven-year-old psychotherapist and become pregnant with his child, the young husband remained unable to tell her that he didn’t want children and should never have married her. The divorce was done by mail.
Danni’s old college friend Stephen, a jazz guitarist and a fixture in the downtown free-improv scene, had been living with a fabric designer named Jillian for seven years when he informed his friends that he was getting married. “Yeah, so, Jillian’s the love of my life at the moment,” he said, “and she really wants to make things official, so.” Jillian had lately grown impatient with Stephen’s poverty and his insistence on staying out until three every night and the favors he was always doing for nuns, such as giving nuns rides to family funerals in distant states or hauling around crappy nun furniture in a truck provided by his parish priest (Stephen had been schooled and intermittently raised by nuns), and it was Jillian’s notion that marriage would settle Stephen down, make him less susceptible to the wishes of nuns and more susceptible to her own wishes, and he would start cleaning his fingernails better and getting home before midnight and so on. These expectations of Jillian’s came as a surprise to Stephen once they were married. On the weekend after their little wedding, which was held on the lawn of an upstate friend in bright October sunshine, Stephen retiled the bathroom of a nun named Sister Doina and returned from a late-night gig near dawn. Jillian moved out three weeks later. When the time came for the newlyweds to use their plane tickets to Pittsburgh for Christmas, Jillian jostled her way through the US Airways concourse at LaGuardia, looking for the one seat that was maximally distant from each of the many barking airport TV screens. She knew she had finally located this seat when she found Stephen sitting in it, his fingers pressing on his special miniature deep-insertion stereo earphones, which doubled as noise-reducing earplugs. In Pittsburgh, he and Jillian received felicitations from eighty-odd party guests of Jillian’s parents, who were well-to-do and had also bought the plane tickets, and for several nights the newlyweds had trembling, furtive kiddie sex in Jillian’s childhood bed, although she had already filed New York State paperwork for a legal separation and was constantly on the phone with her new, non-Catholic, nonmusical boyfriend in Manhattan, reassuring him, every day, that she was so, so over Stephen.
A few months before Ron started introducing his friends to his new girlfriend, Lidia, his father died and left him enough money to buy the kind of West Village duplex that Ron had always wished he could afford. Ron taught philosophy at the Ne
w School. Over the years, he had confided to various friends that he feared his only purpose on the planet was to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women; the roster of insertees included both former students and students actively enrolled in one or more of his classes, various junior and senior New School faculty, fellow-guests at philosophy conferences in other cities, the grown daughters of his accountant and his wine dealer, the fabric designer Jillian, the girlfriend of a former next-door neighbor, and several female staff members at the local branch of the New York Sports Clubs. Ron’s academic specialty was moral philosophy. A big reason women fell for him so hard was that he was a person of great feeling and conscience. He listened to women with patience and active sympathy; he was like the tender, respectful brother or father they’d always imagined having. And even though these were the very qualities that led women to invest their trust in him and thus advance what he feared was his sole mission in life, he genuinely was a nice man; there genuinely were good reasons that he had so many loyal friends. Which was why, as the years went by, he chastised himself so bitterly for his inability to stay faithful to any girl for longer than about sixty days. Every once in a while, he confessed his sins to his friends, who were grieved to see him suffering and beating up on himself and who hastened to reassure him that he was not a sick monster. His bad behavior caused him so much pain that you wanted to comfort him, not condemn him (although it certainly helped, in this regard, that you never got to see whatever pain his behavior might have caused the girls who trusted him). Whenever a new girl entered his life, he disappeared with her behind closed bedroom doors, as if to avoid potentially compromising interactions with his friends (in whose minds, as the years went by, his many identically slender and dark-eyed young dates and short-term girlfriends all kind of blurred together) and to minimize the fuss of dumping the girl when the time for dumping came. Finally, though, with the death of his father, and with his acquisition of a duplex on Bank Street, and with the looming of his fortieth birthday, Ron decided to put childish things behind him. Within weeks of meeting Lidia—a young Ecuadoran beauty from Jackson Heights who prosecuted drug cases for the Manhattan district attorney—he made a point of introducing her to all his friends. Sitting beside Lidia in various restaurant booths, he averred to his friends that he had finally met his intellectual match. While Lidia was in the bathroom, he further disclosed that his relationship with her was “basically a done deal,” that there was “no backing out now,” that he and she were so definitely “on track to get married” that he was preparing to adopt her three-year-old daughter from her short-lived first marriage, and that, although it would obviously require titanic effort on his part, he was determined to stay faithful to Lidia for the rest of his life, because he was in awe of her intellect and she had such a great sense of humor. Ron delivered this huge news in a curiously abstract tone of voice, without meeting his friends’ eyes. When Lidia returned from the bathroom, having darkened her lipstick and mascara, Ron’s friends couldn’t help noticing that he sat facing away from her, leaving twelve or fifteen inches of space between them, and that she said “expresso” and “eck cetera” and “between you and I,” all of which famously grated on Ron’s ears. You almost got the sense that Ron wasn’t even listening to Lidia. While she spoke of their upcoming camping trip to British Columbia, glancing eagerly at Ron to reassure herself of his approval, he gazed off into the distance like a man trying to empty his mind while a phlebotomist took blood from his arm. Now and then he came back into focus, leaned over and put his arm around Lidia, and instructed her, for example, to tell his friends about the word she’d played in Scrabble the other night for eighty-seven points. Lidia lowered her eyes to her napkin. The word, she said, was “plenary”—not even that great a word. But Ron insisted that he had never seen this word before, that her vocabulary was much larger than his, and, absurdly, that he had never in his life scored eighty-seven points in one Scrabble play. “I’m happy,” he said simply, his body angled toward the restaurant’s front door. “I feel like I could be content to play Scrabble with Lidia for the rest of my life.” A few months later, during summer vacation, when some of his friends asked him how things were with Lidia, Ron sounded distracted and impatient, as if his feelings were well known by now and he found it weird even to be asked about them. He said that he and Lidia had recently passed their six-month mark and might as well be married—it was pretty much a done deal; he couldn’t back out now—and, yeah, O.K., sometimes it was hard to imagine having sex with the same one person for the rest of his life, but he was forty years old, and it was time to grow up, and he was committed to making this relationship work, and so, basically, yeah, things were really, really, really good between the two of them. A few weeks later, he dropped out of all voice, e-mail, and face-to-face contact. When he surfaced again, toward the end of August, it was to send his friends terse e-mails with a new postal address and phone number. Pressed for an explanation, Ron replied in an irritated tone that he’d rented a two-room box on East Twenty-eighth Street and was working on his Heidegger book. Lidia he preferred not to talk about at all, though he did refer to a summer-school student named Kristin several times, and under close questioning he admitted that taking moral responsibility for his many broken promises to Lidia had been costly to him financially. Lidia was devastated, he said, when his involvement with Kristin came to light—an involvement that he didn’t insult his friends’ intelligence by pretending was going to last past Labor Day—and, since there was no conceivable excuse for his misbehavior, he’d made amends as well as he could by providing a thirty-per-cent down payment on a comfortable West End Avenue apartment, a classic six suitable for a single professional woman and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, which had necessitated putting the Bank Street duplex on the market and pricing it to sell, which was why he was now living in an anonymous box in Murray Hill. Ron was probably the world’s leading authority on Heidegger’s moral philosophy; he was renowned for his extemporaneous and wittily annotated classroom translations of knotty Greek and German texts; and so his friends, even his very smart friends, were simply too intimidated intellectually to question his cash payment of several hundred thousand dollars for the sin of cheating on his girlfriend of six months. That his real-estate transactions must already have been in motion even as he was assuring his friends that he and Lidia were practically married—that the entire private drama of exposure and shame and penance couldn’t possibly have been jammed into the three and a half weeks that he’d dropped out of sight—became just another of the never-again-referred-to mysteries that were the price you paid for the pleasure of Ron’s company.
Stephen’s cousin Peter, on the other hand, when he’d been having unprotected sex with his Pilates instructor, Rebecca, frequently enough (and then some) to make her pregnant, went straight to his wife, Deanna, with whom he already had two children, and said that although he was committed to their marriage he was also in love with Rebecca, and he wanted to be involved with raising their child, and perhaps everyone could just learn to get along? Peter’s plan was financially realistic—he was a radiation oncologist with a busy uptown practice—and he felt that if Deanna was realistic herself she could hardly say no. Peter was a nice, late-blooming Midwestern boy who had married his plain and rather clingy college girlfriend and let her go to work at a bank to support him in med school. He could see now that a successful Manhattan oncologist could do a lot better, spouse-wise, than a sour, fussy, pinch-faced mom with large thighs, and that to stay with her would be like continuing to pay eighties-level interest rates while the rest of the world refinanced its mortgages—there was no earthly reason for it, basically—but, at the same time, he recognized that he owed a lot to Deanna, and he loved his kids, and one of the many excellent things about Rebecca was how comfortable she was with the idea of French-style family arrangements. So it wasn’t like there were any jerks in the picture here. Everyone was doing his or her best to be nice and r
esponsible while remaining, of course (as Peter stressed in his presentation to Deanna), realistic. It was only after Deanna had hired a capable lawyer and won full custody of the kids and a financially eviscerating divorce settlement that Peter realized how wrong he’d been, from the very beginning, about Deanna—she’d never really been nice at all! she was homely and mean!—and how lucky he was to have Rebecca, who was not just young and shapely but also (as witness her willingness to share Peter with Deanna) genuinely menschy, although, as he sometimes admitted to himself in the shower, or in bed at three in the morning, when his second Martini was wearing off, or when he happened to think of Deanna in her bloated new house up in Harrison, with her atrocious S.U.V., and caught himself mentally addressing her in terms like “Old Pig Eyes,” niceness was a relative term and Deanna probably viewed the matter somewhat differently.
Or, as Peter’s friend Antonia liked to tell visitors to the high-floor parkside unit on Central Park West that she’d bought with the proceeds of her own divorce settlement, there came a point in every failing marriage when you found yourself in a room with a waxwork hologram of yourself: when you saw, through your spouse’s demented eyes, the monster he projected in your place, a monster who resembled you superficially (though it was probably somewhat fatter and more wrinkly than you really were, just as his youthful idealization of you had probably been firmer and sexier than you’d really been back then) but was in every other respect a fantastic and wholly unfamiliar creature. Antonia made all her visitors remove their shoes at the door to her place on the Park and never let more than one friend at a time come to see her; even her daughters had to visit one at a time, without bringing overnight guests or wearing shoes inside. These were just some little house rules that Antonia allowed herself to enforce after twenty-plus years of motherhood and hellish corporate-wifedom in Palo Alto. The decisive moment in her own marriage had come in her Palo Alto kitchen, after she made an unloving remark to her husband. The remark was no different from a thousand other unloving remarks she’d made in the previous ten years; but this time the husband, who was a small and mild and nose-scrunchingly nervous man with a face familiar to viewers of “Wall $treet Week,” grabbed her by the throat with his right hand and pressed his thumb into her windpipe. With his left hand, he pinned her wrists against her chest. He brought his face very close to hers, which was rapidly turning purple, and pleaded with her: “Why are you doing this to me?” To which Antonia could only say, “Kegh. Ecck!” And so the husband screamed directly in her face, “Why are you doing this to me! Would you please stop doing this to me!” As Antonia later told her visiting, shoeless friends, one by one, this was the moment when, in spite of her growing fear, she had suddenly seen herself as her husband saw her: as a crushingly strong and evil person who had been causing him terrible harm for many years; as the monstrous figure who kept him from attaining every pleasure and every freedom he’d ever wished for, who annihilated his manhood with her cunning and her wit. Nevertheless, she tried to point out the patent absurdity of his plea. “Guaggh—kgheck,” she said. Some time later, when she regained consciousness, she found herself lying on her back on the kitchen floor. The husband was leaning against the utility island, eating a folded-over piece of sandwich-style rye bread. Antonia’s throat was raw and clogged, but she had more of a sense of humor than of self-protection. “I was trying to say,” she said, coughing as she laughed, “who’s strangling who?” The husband’s reply was matter-of-fact: “I wasn’t strangling you.” “Then why,” Antonia said, “is my windpipe practically broken and me lying on the floor?” The husband stated flatly, “I never touched you.” And the curious thing, Antonia told her friends, was that he believed what he was saying. And she saw what he meant, and she believed him, too; because how could he have touched her when she, the real she, wasn’t even in the same room (or, possibly, the same universe) that he was in? Nevertheless, she said, it worried her to see him behaving psychotically. “Honey?” she essayed tenderly, from the floor. At this, the husband reached out and seemed to strangle invisible Antonias in the air all around him, his eyes beseeching Heaven. “What will it take to get rid of you?” he cried. “What do I have to do to make you stop doing this to me?” Oh, the poor little man, Antonia thought; I’ve nearly killed him. “Just give me half the money,” she said, putting her hands on her throat. “Just—haugh, guagg, hack, kkgh! That’s all! Just aaaghkk the money, honey!” She laughed and coughed, and the husband ran from the room ashen-faced, as if he’d seen a fulminating witch, a dead woman speaking, some kind of horror-flick apparition. In later years Antonia never, in her stocking-footed friends’ hearing, spoke of him with anger, always only pity, because, she said, he knew himself so poorly. And her friends, listening to her tell these stories in a voice that grew more cartoonishly little-girlish with each year she spent on Central Park West, felt sorry for the husband, too.