In Freedom, the recurrent metaphor is sleepwalking. Not that you’re deceiving yourself — you’re simply asleep, you’re not paying attention, you’re in some sort of dream state. The Corrections was preoccupied with the unreal, willfully self-deceptive worlds we make for ourselves to live in. You know, enchantment has a positive connotation, but even in fairy tales it’s not a good thing, usually. When you’re under enchantment, you’re lost to the world. And the realist writer can play a useful and entertaining role in violently breaking the spell. But something about the position this puts the writer in, as a possessor of truth, as an epistemological enforcer, has come to make me uncomfortable. I’ve become more interested in joining the characters in their dream, and experiencing it with them, and less interested in the mere fact that it’s a dream.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was your first effort to build a novel around Andy Aberant, but eventually you excised him, as you would later from Freedom.
FRANZEN
Yes, Andy of the undead has now failed twice to make the cut. He was a self-consciously morally compromised character, first as a Securities and Exchange Commission attorney, later as the operator of a bogus land trust. In The Corrections I imagined him involving himself in a family that was really, really shut down, and coming to have a relationship with each member of the family, helping them achieve what they couldn’t achieve themselves. I’m always looking for ways to see things through fresh eyes, and it seemed to me potentially interesting to observe a family from the perspective of an essentially adopted son—“self-adopted in adulthood” was the notion. It was akin to observing the Probsts through the eyes and ears of those eavesdropping Indians.
INTERVIEWER
In an early section, published in Granta, you say that Andy came into the world needing people to believe that he knew everything.
FRANZEN
One of the reasons Andy never worked is that he was too much like me, at least the depressive side of me. I get depressed when I’m failing to get a novel going, and Andy seems to come along as the voice of my depressive, hyperintellectual distance from my own life. If he’d ever been able to rise to the level of parody, he might have worked as a character.
But those Lamberts just kept getting larger and larger. Alfred and Enid were always Alfred and Enid, their voices were taken from life. My parents were not Alfred and Enid, but on bad days they could sound like them. Chip and Gary and Denise had been floating around in my mind, in different avatars, for some years, with different occupations and in different situations. Figuring out how to gather these five characters into some believable semblance of a family took several very unpleasant years of false starts and note taking.
INTERVIEWER
The Corrections was the first book you wrote entirely on a computer.
FRANZEN
In terms of process, the one small difference between a typewriter and a computer is that a computer makes it easier to find fragments you’ve written and then forgotten about. When you work at a book for as long as I do, you end up doing a lot of assemblage from scavenged materials. And with a computer you’re more likely, on a slow morning, to drift over to another file folder and open up something old. Chunks of text travel with you, rather than getting buried in a drawer or stored in some remote, inaccessible location.
One afternoon in 1995 I wrote six or eight pages about the gerontocracy of St. Jude, based on some Midwestern houses that I happened to know well. I’d just finished reading the manuscript of Infinite Jest. I’d been trying for several years to launch a grotesquely overplotted novel about Philadelphia and prisons, and reading a good friend’s amazing manuscript roused me from my dogmatic slumbers, so to speak. Around the same time, I was also working on a short story about a person living in New York, trying to have a life, trying to make contact with women, and impeded by the fact that his father was sleeping in an enormous blue chair in his living room. I couldn’t figure out where to go with the story, so I set it aside. But a few months later, when I desperately needed something to read at a Paris Review-sponsored event with David Means, I searched my computer and found these two chunks of writing that I could put together and read. Donald Antrim and Jeff Eugenides, whom I hardly knew, but who subsequently became good friends, came up afterward and said, “That was really good.” The Paris Review went on to publish that chunk, and it became something I wanted to use in the novel, too.
INTERVIEWER
And it went smoothly after that?
FRANZEN
No. Then came further bad years, trying to make that ridiculous, overplotted monster work. It was finally another friend’s work that roused me; I read the manuscript of Underworld on a Mexican vacation. I came home from that vacation and set aside the still-monstrous plot and plunged into the cruise-ship chapter and had an experience very similar to Alfred’s in that chapter. I’d intended to write a simple, quick narrative about cruise-ship hilarities, and I fell through the surface of the present action into a long, long flashback. I was writing about an “ordinary” evening with the Lamberts — basically just a small drama of Chip’s refusal to eat his food. But DeLillo’s method in the recycling chapter of Underworld, where various lines of thought are crisply sorted into alternating paragraphs in the same way that his main character is sorting his household trash, had attuned me to how much suspense and foreboding you can create simply by deploying paragraph breaks. In my case, I was sorting the family’s four points of view by paragraph.
The writing process for that flashback was different from any process before or since, and it really changed my idea of what I was doing as a novelist. I’d quit cigarettes a month earlier, and as a result I was drinking tons of coffee. I’d get up in the morning and drink so much coffee that I made myself almost sick. Then I’d have to lie down and take a hard nap, which I could suddenly do because I was in better contact with my natural body rhythms. Instead of having a cigarette when I was feeling sleepy, why not just lie down and sleep? For the first time in my life, I could take these wonderful, intense twenty-minute naps. But then, because I was so loaded up with caffeine, I would come surging back up to the surface and go straight to the desk and write a page. And that was it for the day.
INTERVIEWER
Just one page?
FRANZEN
A page was enough, by then. If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.
INTERVIEWER
How did you conceive of the structure of the book?
FRANZEN
I was very aware of how time would be handled. Once I’d finally figured out that a large novel could be constructed out of multiple short novels, each of them building to a crisis in which the main character can no longer escape reality, I had an opportunity to play with time management — how far back into the past to plunge after the opening section, how to parcel out the gradual return toward the present, where to situate the meeting of the backstory with the present story. I sketched out in pencil how the chronology would work in each of the five novellas, and I was pleased to have a different structure for each of them. I also liked the way the graphs looked: A horizontal line, representing the present action, was interrupted by chunks of backstory which would rise at various slopes like something surfacing. Like a missile rising up out of the past to intersect with a plane flying horizontally in the present.