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.