How He Came to Be Somewhere: An Interview and Three Early Stories Read online

  * * *

  JONATHAN FRANZEN

  An Interview

  — and —

  Three Early Stories

  THE PARIS REVIEW

  New York • 2010

  ©2010 The Paris Review Foundation, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  THE PARIS REVIEW is published quarterly by

  The Paris Review Foundation, Inc.

  544 West 27th Street, New York, NY, 10001

  ISSN: 0021-2037

  ISBN: 978-0857861740

  EDITOR

  Lorin Stein

  BOARD OF DIRECTORS

  Scott Asen • Clara Bingham • Jeffrey Eugenides • Stephen Gaghan • Mala Gaonkar • James C. Goodale • Lawrence H. Guffey • Drue Heinz • Bokara Legendre • Peter Matthiessen • Jeanne McCulloch • Terry McDonell • Sandy Gotham Meehan • Sarah Dudley Plimpton • Robert Silvers • Rose Styron • Liza Wachter • Antonio Weiss

  www.theparisreview.org

  CONTENTS

  How He Came to Be Somewhere

  Introduction by Stephen J. Burn

  An Interview with Jonathan Franzen

  Three Early Stories

  1. Breakup Stories

  2. Two’s Company

  3. How He Came to Be Nowhere

  ABOUT JONATHAN FRANZEN

  JONATHAN FRANZEN WAS BORN IN 1959 in Chicago and grew up in St Louis, where his father was a civil engineer. He majored in German at Swarthmore College and from 1983 to 1987 worked part-time as an earthquake analyst for the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. After his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, he received a Whiting Writers Award. His second novel, Strong Motion, appeared in 1992. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

  HOW HE

  CAME TO BE

  SOMEWHERE

  The Franzens: Bob, Irene, Jonathan, Tom.

  Webster Groves, MO

  INTRODUCTION

  by Stephen J. Burn

  JONATHAN FRANZEN’S FICTION BEARS the mark of a Midwest upbringing, his books preoccupied with quiet lives nurtured there and broken apart by contact with the rest of the world. But four long novels into an unusually public career, Franzen now moves about the country quite a bit, living most of the year in New York, where he writes in an office overlooking busy 125th Street, and some of it in a leafy community on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where I met him just a few days before his most recent novel, Freedom, was released.

  The scale of Freedom’s rapturous reception isn’t yet evident on the morning of our first conversation, though the book has already been called “the novel of the century,” and its author has just become the first writer in a decade to appear on the cover of Time magazine; a visit to the White House is soon to come. At the same time, two popular female novelists have been arguing, via Twitter, that Franzen owes his stature to the prejudices and gender asymmetries of book reviewing, and there are hints, too, that a broader backlash is brewing. (In London a few weeks later, he’ll have his glasses stolen by pranksters at a book party.) As we drive through the morning fog, Franzen recounts both sides to me as if he has no vested interest in either position—his stance is that of a detached, and slightly amused, observer.

  Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. The youngest of three children, Franzen grew up in a home dominated by pragmatic parents—his father an engineer, his mother a homemaker—who saw little value in the arts and who encouraged him to occupy himself instead with more practical subjects. A fascination with the sciences hangs over much of Franzen’s early writing, composed before his arrival at Swarthmore College. One unpublished story describes a visit from Pythagoras. An early play about Isaac Newton was championed by a physics teacher at Webster Groves High School.

  Franzen describes his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), as a sci-fi novel that is all fi and no sci—a concept-driven omnibus fiction in which a group of influential and politically ambitious Indians, led by the former police commissioner of Bombay, infiltrate the bureaucracy of an unspectacular Midwestern town and terrorize its residents. The Twenty-Seventh City is set in his native St. Louis, but Franzen wrote the majority of the novel while employed as a research assistant at Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where he worked crunching data on seismic activity. This experience would enrich his second novel, Strong Motion (1992), an intimate depiction of a Massachusetts family whose emotional and economic lives are disrupted by a series of unexpected earthquakes in the Boston area.

  Strong Motion signaled the start of a turbulent decade for Franzen, as he suffered personal losses—the death of his father; divorce from Valerie Cornell, his wife of fourteen years—and struggled to come to terms with the purpose of writing fiction after his first two novels won critical praise but dishearteningly few readers. Those struggles were the subject of much of the searching nonfiction he wrote during the nineties, and his midcareer masterpiece The Corrections (2001) was the outcome. The expansive saga of a disjointed Midwestern family, The Corrections won the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and introduced Franzen, then a relatively obscure author of ambitious fiction, to the broad audience of readers he had long been seeking—a broader audience than any literary novelist of his generation.

  The following interview took place over two days in an office borrowed from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Situated amid redwoods on the mountain rim above Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, the office would have offered an ocean view, but a makeshift arrangement of towels, bedsheets, and pillows had been engineered to block out the combined dangers of light and distraction. Improvised window treatments aside, Franzen prefers his work space to resemble Renée Seitchek’s house in Strong Motion—a “bare, clean place.” Aside from a laptop, the only personal items in the room were six books, arranged in a single pile: a study of William Faulkner, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and four works by John Steinbeck.

  THE PARIS REVIEW

  INTERVIEW #207

  INTERVIEWER (STEPHEN BURN)

  Have you matured as a writer?

  JONATHAN FRANZEN

  When The Twenty-Seventh City was being misunderstood, and when Strong Motion was failing to find an audience, I assumed that the problem was not the writer but the wicked world. By the time I was working on Freedom, though, I could see that some of the contemporaneous criticisms of those books had probably been valid—that the first really was overdefended and inexplicably angry, and that the politics and thriller plotting (and, again, the inexplicable anger) of the second really were sometimes obtrusive. The writer’s life is a life of revisions, and I came to think that what needed revision were my own earlier books.

  One of the great problems for the novelist who persists is the shortage of material. We all solve the problem in different ways; some people do voluminous research on nineteenth-century Peru. The literature I’m interested in and want to produce is about taking the cover off our superficial lives and delving into the hot stuff underneath. After The Corrections I found myself thinking, What is my hot material? My Midwestern childhood, my parents, their marriage, my own marriage—I’d already written two books about this stuff, but I’d been younger and scared and less skilled when I wrote them. So one of the many programs in Freedom was to revisit the old material and do a better job.

  INTERVIEWER

  Better how?

&n
bsp; FRANZEN

  I understand better how much of writing a novel is about self-examination, self-transformation. I spend vastly more time nowadays trying to figure out what’s stopping me from doing the work, trying to figure out how I can become the person who can do the work, investigating the shame and fear: the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm. That kind of self-analysis was entirely absent with The Twenty-Seventh City, and almost entirely absent with Strong Motion. It became necessary for the first time with The Corrections. And it became the central project with Freedom—so much so that the actual writing of pages was almost like a treat I was given after doing the real work.

  INTERVIEWER

  There was a nine-year interlude between those two novels.

  FRANZEN

  The Corrections cast a shadow. The methods I’d developed for it—the hyper-vivid characters, the interlocking-novellas structure, the leitmotifs and extended metaphors—I felt I’d exploited as far as they could be exploited. But that didn’t stop me from trying to write a Corrections-like book for several years and imagining that simply changing the structure or writing in the first person could spare me the work of becoming a different kind of writer. You always reach for the easy solution before you, in defeat, submit to the more difficult solution.

  There certainly was no shortage of content by the middle of the last decade. The country was in the toilet, we’d become an international embarrassment, and those materialistic master languages that I’d mocked in The Corrections were becoming only more masterful. And I still had my own deep autobiographical material, which I’d employed in well-masked form in the first two novels. Eventually I realized that the only way forward was to go backward and engage again with certain very much unresolved moments in my earlier life. And that’s what the project then became: to invent characters enough unlike me to bear the weight of my material without collapsing into characters too much like me.

  INTERVIEWER

  Your first publication was a collaborative play called The Fig Connection, which you wrote in high school. What interested you about drama?

  FRANZEN

  I’m that oddity of a writer who had a good high-school experience, and I did a lot of acting in various plays. Theater for me was mainly a way of having fun in groups, as opposed to pairing off into couples who necked all night in a back seat. It was a kind of prolonged innocence. I wasn’t particularly in love with the theater, and the plays that my friends and I wrote weren’t literary. We were just making stuff up for fun. Until I was twenty-one, I had no concept of literature, really.

  INTERVIEWER

  Had your childhood been innocent, too?

  FRANZEN

  I always seemed to be the last person to find out about things that everybody else knew. I was literally still playing with building blocks, albeit artistically and with friends, during my senior year in high school.

  INTERVIEWER

  Was your writing encouraged at home?

  FRANZEN

  Mostly not, no. I hate the word creative, but it’s not a bad description of my personality type, and there was no place for that in my parents’ house. They considered art of all kinds, including creative writing, frivolous. Art was something I could do in my free time, and if I could get school credit for it, so much the better. But it was actively discouraged as a serious pursuit. My parents were dismayed and perplexed and angry when my older brother Tom stopped studying architecture and majored in film, and when he went to the Art Institute in Chicago and got an M.F.A. Tom was the only working artist I knew, and I idolized him and wanted to be like him, rather than like my parents. But I’d seen the grief he’d gotten from them, so I kept my own plans secret for as long as possible.

  My dad, although he didn’t get a good formal education, was tremendously smart and curious. He read to me every night throughout my early childhood, always my dad, not my mom. Having grown up bathed nightly in his strong opinions, I became a fairly opinionated person myself and was happy to be able to keep him company. He read Time magazine cover to cover every week, and we talked about whatever was going on in the world. So, strangely, there was a lot of intellectual discussion in that otherwise unintellectual house. But there were no literary books on my parents’ shelves. I had no category for what I wanted to do, and this was the great excitement of writing The Fig Connection, seeing how well it worked as a student drama, and then, wonder of wonders, getting it published. This was the moment when a world of possibility opened up: I remember thinking, I’m actually good at writing—and isn’t this fun?

  INTERVIEWER

  It sounds like fun was an important part of your early writing.

  FRANZEN

  Fun is still an important part of writing. I want to bring pleasure with everything I write. Intellectual pleasure, emotional pleasure, linguistic pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. I have in my mind five hundred examples of novels that have given me pleasure, and I try to do work that gives back some of what those five hundred books have given me. The epigraph of Strong Motion is taken from Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is very simpatico in this regard. His Nobel speech, in which he asserts that the storyteller’s primary responsibility is to entertain, made a deep impression on me.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you feel burdened by that obligation to entertain?

  FRANZEN

  More motivated than burdened. It’s hard to feel burdened by the knowledge that pleasure-seeking people are actually looking forward to my next book. For the first half of my career, though, I had a very poor sense of who these people might be. Some snarky person in England once accused me of writing the Harper’s essay “Why Bother?” as market research.

  INTERVIEWER

  How did you feel about that?

  FRANZEN

  Well, in a narrow sense, he was absolutely right. When your first two novels haven’t found much of an audience, it makes sense to stop and try to figure out who might read a literary novel nowadays, and why they might be doing it.

  And finding an audience has unquestionably changed the way I write. If there’s a different feel to Freedom than to The Corrections, it’s not unrelated to having met however many thousand readers on various book tours. These are the people who are reading books, caring about books, and bothering to come out on a rainy Tuesday night to hear somebody read aloud, as to a child, and then standing for half an hour waiting to get a scribble on the title page of a book they’ve spent money for. These people are my friends. I’m one of them myself. I once stood in a long signing line to get five seconds with William Gaddis, just so I could tell him how great I thought The Recognitions was. Not everything in the world needs to be laughed angrily at, you realize. There turn out to be more emotions available to a working writer than I might have guessed earlier on. And one of them might be love—love and gratitude.

  I got a lot of attention as a kid because everyone else in the house was so much older than me. It was probably too much attention—that can be a burden—but one result is that I like attention. I just like attention, I do! But it’s counterbalanced by a need and craving to be alone most of the time. This is one reason I’ve found being a writer a very suitable profession. You have the possibility of great bursts of satisfying attention, and then you’re left alone.

  INTERVIEWER

  When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?

  FRANZEN

  I had a notion of myself as a writerly person by the time I got to college, which meant that there were two things I could do: I could go out for the newspaper, and I could send things to the college literary magazines. I did both. But I hated being a journalist, because I was too shy to do interviews. I once got my friend Tom Hjelm and me in trouble by making him do an interview with the vice president of the college, as part of a news story I was writing, and then twisting the vice president’s words to make him look bad. In many ways, Hjelm was the toughest critic I ever had. He was an E. B. White worshiper, an
d he loved to ridicule my worst sentences. We read each other’s papers, too—there was a mutual-apprenticeship quality to our friendship.

  INTERVIEWER

  Was there a similar quality to your reading?

  FRANZEN

  It slowly became more serious in the course of four years of college. I’d read a lot as a kid—eight hours a day all summer, some summers—but it was mostly mysteries and popular science and science fiction. Then, because I went to college as a prospective physics major, I took only one class in English literature during my first three years, a survey of the modern English novel. Predictably, I was most smitten with Iris Murdoch. I was eighteen, and A Severed Head seemed to me a profound and important book.

  The one writer I completely couldn’t stand was D. H. Lawrence. I wanted to kill him for having inflicted Sons and Lovers on me. Much later, I went back and read the book again, or read half of it, because I felt that the Joey and Patty material in Freedom had some kinship with the Morels. And I could see why I’d hated it when I was eighteen: It hit way too close to home. But frankly I still found it kind of unbearable. I wanted to say to Lawrence, No, you have not found a way not to make Mrs. Morel’s sexualized engulfment of her son icky and excruciating. In a way, it’s great and heroic that Lawrence was willing to write such an excruciating book, to lay it all out there. But for me the book also became a shining example of how not to approach this radioactive material—a reminder of the pressing need to find a structure and a tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough to make it fun.

  My real problem with the survey class was that I was too young for it. Like most eighteen-year-olds, I didn’t have enough experience to understand what the stakes even were in adult literature. Because I hadn’t grown up in a household that placed any value on culture, literature was just a game to me, and writing was just a craft that I hoped to make a living with someday. I wrote whatever the newspaper editors assigned me to write and worked on my sentences.