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.