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

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 One unpublished story describes a visit from Pythagoras.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.