That piece grew out of my coming to terms with not having had children, my sense that I was getting old before my time, that I’d lost a vital connection with youth and thus with hope and possibility. The China piece came out of a question that Dave and I talked about constantly: How can we keep sitting in our rooms and struggling with fiction when there is so much wrong with the world? During the summer after I signed the book contract, my sense of duty became utterly oppressive. So much bad stuff was happening in the country — and happening to wild birds around the world! — that I felt I just couldn’t keep wasting months. I had to go out and do something, get my hands dirty with some problem. Only after the China piece failed to find a discernible audience or have any discernible impact did I get it through my head that I might actually have more effect on the world by retreating to my room and doing what I was put on earth to do.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know when the work is going well?
FRANZEN
The word I’ve been using to talk about that lately is adequacy. My primary reader and consultant for Freedom was my friend Elisabeth Robinson, who’s been struggling with her own new novel, and one of her gifts to me was her saying, “You only have to make this book adequate.” To which she was nice enough to add: “Your adequate is very good.”
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a “good writer.” Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well. And, by a wide margin, I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years — this just feels transparent.” I wasn’t seeing in the pages any of the signs I’d taken as encouraging when I was writing The Corrections. The sentences back then had had a pop. They were, you know, serious prose sentences, and I was able to vanquish my doubts simply by rereading them. When I was showing Corrections chapters to David Means, I basically expected his rubber stamp, because the sentences had a level of effulgence that left me totally defended. But here, with Freedom, I felt like, “Oh my God, I just wrote however many metaphor-free pages about some weird days in the life of a college student, I have no idea if this is any good.” I needed validation in a way I never had before.
I was admittedly somewhat conscious that this was a good sign — that it might mean that I was doing something different, pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories. But it still felt like a leap into the void.
INTERVIEWER
It is often said about your recent books that they look more like nineteenth-century novels than twenty-first-century ones.
FRANZEN
The people at the Swedish Academy, who bestow the Nobel Prize, recently confessed their thoroughgoing lack of interest in American literary production. They say we’re too insular, we’re not writing about the world, we’re only writing about ourselves. Given how Americanized the world has become, I think they’re probably wrong about this — we probably say more about the world by writing about ourselves than a Swedish author does by writing about a trip to Africa. But even if they’re right, I don’t think our insularity is necessarily a bad thing.
Nineteenth-century Russia strikes me as a parallel. Russia is its own little world, famously good at repelling incursions by foreign powers, and it’s maintained a separate superpower identity for centuries. Maybe that very insularity, that feeling of living in a complete but not quite universal world, creates certain kinds of literary possibility. All of those old Russians were dramatically engaged with the question of what would become of their country, and the question didn’t seem inconsequential, because Russia was a vast nation. Whereas, when a Liechtensteiner wrestles with the future of Liechtenstein, who really cares? It’s possible that the U.S. and Russia are exactly the right size to be hospitable to a certain kind of expansive novelistic project. England was, too, for a time, thanks to its empire, and the golden age of the English novel coincided with its imperial domination. There again, it wasn’t the whole world, it was just a very large microcosm. True cosmopolitanism is incompatible with the novel, because novelists need particularity. But we also need some room to move around. And we’re lucky to have both here.
That said, I don’t feel particularly nineteenth century. All of the issues that became problematic with modernism still need to be negotiated in every book.
INTERVIEWER
And yet it doesn’t seem that novelty is all that important to you anymore.
FRANZEN
I’m wary of the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake. At the same time, if I don’t feel like I’m doing something new, I can’t do anything. Reading time is so scarce nowadays, and alternative entertainment is so widely available, that I’m keenly attuned, as a reader, to whether a book’s author seems to be experiencing something new or is just turning the crank.
There’s always new content, of course. Content will carry you a certain distance; it can rescue you when you’re in trouble formally. I think the importance of content is what Harold Bloom, for example, really underestimates in the novel. Bloom’s at his best with poetry, because poetry is so purely language. But his approach becomes something close to nonsense when he applies it to novels, because he’s still basically just looking at language. Language is important, absolutely, but the history of the novel is only partly stylistic. Faulkner obviously begat many influences, ditto Hemingway, ditto Joyce, ditto Carver and Lish, ditto DeLillo. But rhetorical innovation is just one of the many streams that feed into the river of fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Where do the modernists figure in your development?
FRANZEN
I have learned and feel I will continue to learn an enormous amount from Proust — his purely novelistic gifts, his recognition of how much you can gain by letting a story slowly extend over long stretches of time, his method of rendering the sense of gradual dawning as we live our lives. Things are not what they initially seem, things are often exactly the opposite of what they seem.
And Conrad: the prescience of The Secret Agent, the psychological brutality and intensity of Victory, the incisive critique of colonialism in Nostromo. Those books are marvels to me in both content and method. Conrad devotes the first half of Nostromo to slowly building to a set piece that he then omits, so that he can jump to a different place at a different time and blow your socks off there. He built himself up to a scene, he was then not interested in writing, at which point he miraculously discovered, “Oh, but there is a story here, it’s just not the one I thought!” It’s breathtaking. I love it, love it.
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.