August 25, 2002

IN 1996, Jonathan Franzen made a reckless public vow. He did it in the pages of the American magazine Harper’s, in a bitter, eloquent, intensely personal essay entitled “Perchance to dream: in an age of images, a reason to write novels”. The big socially engaged novel was dead, he declared, killed off by TV. Serious postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo were doomed to irrelevance. Contemporary readers wanted entertainment, not news, engaging stories, not ideology.

Franzen did more than just diagnose the problem. He implied that he could solve it. He made a promise to deliver a book that had it all, a novel that was intimate, socially engaged and compelling.

How he would do so wasn’t exactly clear. Still, the essay was a dashing piece of audacity on the part of an obscure young writer with two novels to his name. With its provocative argument, authoritative tone and chummy allusions to members of the American fiction establishment, it presented Franzen as a major league literary player from whom one could expect great things.

“I raised the bar,” he concedes now. “And boy, it was really high stress.”

We’re at a restaurant in Greenwich Village, eating crabcakes. He tells me how, having written the Harper’s essay, he locked himself away in his spartan studio on 125th Street in East Harlem to write. Some days, in order to keep his mind “free of all cliches”, he wrote in the dark, with the blinds drawn and the lights off. And he wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold.

He lived like this for four years. “I don’t think you know how weird I am,” he says nervously. The corrections finally hit American bookshops last September, propelled by extraordinary hype and expectation. It became an immediate, unequivocal success. Time magazine deemed it “one of the great books of the year”, and the New York Times Sunday Book Review found it “marvellous — everything we want in a novel”.

It certainly looks like vindication. But success has not entirely agreed with Franzen. When Oprah Winfrey selected The corrections for her book club — a decision virtually guaranteeing millions of dollars in additional sales — he publicly questioned her judgment, suggesting to more than one interviewer that his novel’s ‘high-art’ literary qualities made it a dubious choice for a programme normally associated with middlebrow fiction.

His remarks started a national scandal. Winfrey disinvited Franzen from appearing on her show, and the literary community rallied to her defence, calling Franzen arrogant and ungrateful.

Franzen later tried to explain his way out of the gaffe, telling the New York Times: “Mistake, mistake, mistake to use the word ‘high’. Both Oprah and I want the same thing and believe the same thing, that the distinction between high and low is meaningless.”

Whatever his true feelings on the high- versus low-brow debate (and one suspects he was not being entirely honest with the New York Times), Franzen’s book is much clearer on this point. The corrections is as clever as the brainy postmodernists Franzen admires but infinitely more accessible.

It sounds suspiciously simple. But this, it turns out, is Franzen’s big idea: characters are what the contemporary novel lacks — and what can save it from oblivion. And come to think of it, he has a case. In stuffing their books with formal gimmicks and oracular pronouncements, male postmodernists turned the social novel into an act of intellectual machismo and long ago showed characters the door. The job of creating memorable characters became women’s work, the forte of writers such as Anne Tyler and Annie Proulx.

Franzen aims to bring these traditions together. Like DeLillo, he wants to take on the world, but rather than populate his book with an anonymous horde, he gambles his ambition on a single family. Franzen’s Lambert family is in a state of freefall (‘Correction’ is the term employed by Wall Street to describe a sudden collapse in, well, in values). There is Enid Lambert, the obsessive Midwestern wife, fixated on the impending family Christmas; there is Al, her exasperating husband, battling Parkinson’s-induced dementia. Then there are the three mixed-up Lambert children scattered along the East Coast. The question preoccupying Enid is, can she induce her children to recreate the family for the holiday period?

Franzen is explicit about the aim of his book. “Alleviating suffering is very good, but it comes at the cost of what I would call a narrative understanding of one’s life,” he says. “You don’t need to have a story anymore. From a humanitarian standpoint, that’s great, but it makes for a less interesting world.”

Franzen has almost wilfully made sure that his own personal world has been ‘interesting’ in this sense ever since he began writing. As newly weds in the mid-1980s, he and his wife, Valerie Cornell, from whom he is now divorced, lived a strange, hermetically sealed life in a tiny flat near Harvard University. Separated by only 20 feet, they wrote eight hours each day and then, after a dinner break, read for five more. Franzen supported them both with a weekend job as a research assistant tracking earthquakes for the university’s geology department. He and Valerie ate out precisely once a year: on their wedding anniversary.

Franzen’s writerly life began shortly after he and Cornell graduated from Swarthmore in 1981. At a gathering of the campus literary magazine, she dazzled him with a casually brilliant interpretation of a particularly inscrutable poem. In 1982, they decided to marry and devote themselves to writing.

A decade later, Franzen was miserable. His marriage was unravelling, his father was dying of Alzheimer’s and, though he had published two accomplished novels, he was broke and essentially unknown. His first book, The twenty-seventh city, appeared in 1988, when he was 29. An intricate thriller about urban planning set in St Louis (Franzen’s hometown), it made a splash, but some critics were confused about its intentions. Strong motion, published in 1992, featured earthquakes, corporate conspiracy and family conflict. It did worse than the first book.

When he and Cornell separated in 1994, Franzen was supposed to be at work on his third book. He produced an 80-page lament about his feelings of cultural irrelevance instead. That essay, titled My obsolescence, was never published. But Franzen mined its dark themes for his Harper’s essay.

Unlike other novelists wedded to reportage, Franzen did not haunt Bronx ghettos or Atlanta social clubs in search of material. His struggle to complete his novel took place mostly in the solitude of the studio he began renting in 1997, a nook inside a sculptor friend’s Harlem loft. When asked how he was able to write convincingly about Parkinson’s or the streets of Vilnius (to which Chip flees on a rash impulse), he shrugs. “I’ve never been to Lithuania,” he says. “And my agent’s brother is a neurologist; we went to dinner.”

Nor did he raid his circle of acquaintances for titillating personality traits. If characters are Franzen’s great distinction as a writer, that’s because he has dedicated the bulk of his strenuous imaginings to making them up. For The corrections, he literally spent years developing characters before he tackled the plot.

As for his title, Franzen originally conceived a central prison theme for The corrections, but as the decade crept on, and the stock market boomed and busted, it took on an uncanny new resonance. “I’d been predicting this for years,” he harrumphs about the recent downturn.

Franzen had an easier time with his title than with his prose. “I was in such a harmful pattern,” he recalls. “In a way, it would begin on a Friday, when I would realize what I’d been working on all week was bad. I would polish it all day to bring up the gloss, until by four in the afternoon I’d have to admit it was bad. Between five and six, I’d get drunk on vodka. Ten have dinner, much too late, consumed with a sick sense of failure. I hated myself the entire time,”he says.

One night, he got scared. He asked a female friend who had come to see him to leave in the middle of a downpour. Soon after, he made an appointment with a doctor who could prescribe antidepressants. In the end, unsure about how a substance like Prozac would affect a writer’s brain, he decided not to go.

“I feel my sensitivity is my business,” he explains. It could be Gary Lambert talking. “One of the things a really good novel can do is give you a sense of recognition about the strange private life you are leading,” he tells me. “Our life is not just our parents dying or being angry about what we read in the paper. It’s about questions: ‘What does my life mean?’ and ‘How should I live it?’ the best novel you can write is the one that’s going to take into account both.”

It’s hard to think of suffering as research. No doubt Franzen wouldn’t see his own this way. Misery befell him; he didn’t seek it out. And as his despair receded, his work began to flow; he wrote most of his book in 2000. Besides, as cultural myths go, the one of the suffering artist has been way overplayed. Sylvia Plath’s depression, Jackson Pollock’s drinking: was their art really fuelled by their afflictions?

Still, it is tempting in some ways to believe that Franzen’s suffering was a condition for his success, that to make us believe in his characters’ struggles, he needed to endure his own. And hardship, it seems, is something Franzen seems almost too willing to bear. He certainly wears it easier than success. For an instant, he stares me straight in the eye. “Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.”— Dawn/ Observer news service

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