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Jonathan Franzen Is Ambivalent About, Well, Everything
"The Corrections" earned Jonathan Franzen a National Book Award
last year, though his comments surrounding its success brought
him scathing criticism. His new work, "How to Be Alone,"
however, is another story. (File Photo/ Stuart Ramson -- AP)
By Lorraine Adams
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page C01
NEW YORK -- The reclamation of Jonathan Franzen is underway. In
the year since he dissed Oprah and got dinged for it, the
43-year-old novelist has made some modest adjustments, and so
have his critics.
Labeled an "ego-blinded snob" in the Boston Globe, he told
Charlie Rose recently that he is "less worried" -- about
everything. The reviews of his new collection of essays, "How to
Be Alone," have been downright kindly. Cleveland Plain Dealer
book editor Karen Sangstrom declared the book has won her back
from "disdain."
Setbacks have loomed, then toppled. The New York Post in August
tried to gin up scandal over Franzen's acceptance of a $20,000
grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Rich writer
gets $20G cookie! Taxpayer dollars wasted!) It turned out he had
applied for the grant before "The Corrections," his acclaimed
novel of a Midwestern family, had been published, let alone sold
more than a million copies. Only the Underground Literary
Alliance, a group of Philadelphia writers seeking the "overthrow
of the literary establishment," picked up on the story and
encouraged protest. So far, no picketing.
It hasn't hurt that "The Corrections" in hardcover has been a
runaway bestseller in Europe this fall. Or that the softcover
edition has topped paperback lists from coast to coast in the
United States.
And, as if to prove that his misgivings about Oprah Winfrey
choosing "The Corrections" for her talk show book club are
completely gone, he appeared on morning television with Katie
Couric in July and christened Adam Haslett's "You Are Not a
Stranger Here" a "Today" show book club selection. That Oprah
logo he worried about on his book? Thanks to Franzen, the
"Today" logo is on Haslett's.
There are those who wonder about his adjustments. They find his
concerns about where his novel will end up in literary
hierarchies unseemly, like getting stressed over whether your
infant will make it into Harvard. "Franzen has the most dire
case of literary status-anxiety that I have ever seen," says
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. "He
demeans his own seriousness with his flurries of positioning."
Others are more positive. "This is someone whose work is
galvanized by his own contradictions, his own warring
instincts," says Henry Finder, editorial director of the New
Yorker, who has known Franzen since 1994. "He's both fascinated
and repelled by technology. He wrote an elegant essay about how
sex scenes can't be written, and yet he wrote a novel that has
strenuously alive sex scenes. He wonders whether the novel
matters to the culture. And then he writes a novel that clearly
does matter to the culture. It's as if he sets himself up to
defy the cultural laws of gravity."
Status and anxiety figure prominently in his recent essay in the
New Yorker on novelist William Gaddis ("Carpenter's Gothic,"
"JR"). In it, Franzen divides novelists into two camps: "Status"
authors see difficulty as a signal of excellence that "the
author has disdained cheap compromise and stayed true to an
artistic vision." "Contract" writers want to entertain and
connect with readers. This, Franzen says, is what he is. He then
confesses, "I have started (in many cases, more than once)
'Moby-Dick,' 'The Man Without Qualities,' 'Mason & Dixon,' 'Don
Quixote,' 'Remembrance of Things Past,' 'Doctor Faustus,' 'Naked
Lunch,' 'The Golden Bowl' and 'The Golden Notebook' without
coming anywhere near finishing them." Difficult books, he says,
are no longer what he aspires to write.
Status and anxiety also are constant companions throughout "How
to Be Alone." Eleven of its 13 essays are autobiographical. Two
are reported pieces of journalism. "Lost in the Mail," about the
Chicago Post Office, was his first New Yorker piece. "Control
Units," about a maximum-security prison in Colorado, first
appeared in Details magazine.
The personal essays range through his father's struggle with
Alzheimer's, his first high school job, his smoking habit,
giving away his television, moving to New York, scavenging for
furniture in alleys, and the so-called Harper's essay, which
wondered whether novels could matter in an age of images. In his
earlier essays there is an angry young man comically convinced
that television will rot him and everyone else. He is disturbed
by SUVs, suburbs, leaf blowers, Pentium chips and the
Blockbuster Bowl.
Throughout "How to Be Alone," Franzen evinces an anxiety that is
best summed up in the essay "Books in Bed," which is an extended
riff on volumes such as "The Ten Commandments of Pleasure" by
Susan Bloch. "I have no objection to a nice bra, still less to
being invited to remove one," Franzen writes. "But brothelware
of the kind sold at Frederick's of Hollywood seems to me
scarcely less hokey than a Super Bowl halftime show. What I feel
when I hear that the mainstream actually buys this stuff is the
same garden-variety alienation I feel on learning Hootie & the
Blowfish sold thirteen million copies of their first record, or
that the American male's dream date is Cindy Crawford. In a
sense, I'm proud of not being like everybody else. Like
everybody else, though, I'm anxious about sex, and with sex the
recognition that I'm not like everybody else leads directly to
the worry that I'm not as good as -- or, at any rate, not having
as much fun as -- everybody else. . . . I want to be alone, but
not too alone. I want to be the same but different."
There is something of this desire in Franzen's two-room
apartment above a real estate office on Manhattan's Upper East
Side. The third-floor walk-up is an incongruity of color and
non-style. It fairly announces, I refuse the value system of
George Stephanopoulos in Architectural Digest, I renounce
downtown lofts of stainless steel and Young British Art. There
is a fading red Chinese silk rug from his now-deceased
Midwestern parents, two techno-green square paintings resembling
microscope slides of algae, two rawhide sculptures that look
like bongo drums, three scavenged public school chairs and a
sun-bleached swivel chair found in an alley.
The only concessions to stylishness are two Crate & Barrel
purchases -- a burgundy sofa in matte leather and a gold floral
easy chair. But they don't even go with each other, let alone
anything else. In the year since "The Corrections" made him a
millionaire, these are the only new pieces of furniture he has
bought for the apartment he has rented for the past eight years.
He says he has no plans to move.
"I feel ambivalent about things," Franzen says. "I feel caught
between narratives everywhere I turn. Am I a Midwesterner? Am I
an Easterner? My parents were totally different people in my
life. Am I like my mom? Am I like my dad? Am I a social
novelist, or am I sort of an old-fashioned domestic novelist? Do
I feel comfortable being an isolated individual or do I crave
acceptance? Do I want the comforts of being cool or the comforts
of being part of the mass? . . . In my initial relations with
the media last fall, that gave rise to this tremendous
confusion. Because, I think, although I'm not sure, that people
want you to be one thing or another."
Franzen has learned to be at least one thing in his interviews
-- a sensitive and gentle guy. His book tour is winding down
without incident. It's time, once again, to write a novel.
"I have a very thick sheaf of notes. The writing goes very, very
fast and is so fun and is over so quickly," he says. "It's sort
of tragically short compared to the difficulty of finding the
tone and the right story to tell. That's a matter of a kind of
Socratic dialogue with oneself. You know right away if it
doesn't work. You can tell the next morning. And I'm at the
stage where nothing works. But that's how it is. In some ways
it's gratifying to find that I'm not happy with most things I
write."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company