Words Written From Out on a Limb

On a recent Saturday morning in Santa Monica, the writer who currently occupies the fluid center of the American literary universe sits as anonymous as a tourist on the front porch of the Georgian Hotel. Unshaven, a bit bleary-eyed behind his glasses, Jonathan Franzen wants nothing more than a strong cup of coffee, but even the waitress serving breakfast hardly pays him any mind. Still, in the midst of this solitude, Franzen seems oddly at ease, perched by himself on a rattan sofa, as if it were the essence of his nature to stake out some small edge of isolation, a little bit of distance from the world.

Over the last month or so, distance has become increasingly difficult for Franzen to come by, as his third novel, “The Corrections,” turns into a full-fledged publishing event. No. 1 in Amazon.com’s sales rankings, the subject of countless (mostly glowing) reviews and profiles, “The Corrections” is the big book of the season, the big book of the year. None of this is exactly unexpected--in May, when Franzen’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, sent out advance reading copies to reviewers, they were accompanied by a note from editor in chief Jonathan Galassi calling the novel “a masterpiece” and “one of the very best [books] we’ve published in my 15 years at FSG.” Yet not even Galassi, one imagines, could have predicted that “The Corrections” would become the latest selection of Oprah’s Book Club, resulting in the printing and distribution of 600,000 copies of the “Book Club Edition,” every one of which comes embossed with the Oprah seal.

“The Corrections” may be the least likely book ever chosen for Oprah’s Book Club; certainly, it is the most overtly literary. At 568 pages, it is epic in stature, but it’s a curious kind of epic, one composed mostly of minor moments, the small, personal conflicts that mark our inner lives. The story of the Lambert family, from the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude (modeled on St. Louis, where the 42-year-old Franzen grew up), the novel explores, primarily, the relationship between parents and children, and how this alters its characters’ attitudes toward themselves.

Remarkably, it is a book in which nearly nothing happens--the central conflict has to do with whether the three adult Lambert children will return home for one final Christmas--but Franzen’s triumph comes in understanding that this can be enough. More than any other form of narrative, after all, fiction is an art of interiority, in which drama arises from perception, from a character’s stance within the world. What’s compelling is often less action than reaction, the mystery and manners of how someone behaves.

For Franzen, this means presenting characters in all their desperate humanity, which makes labels like “sympathetic” or “unsympathetic” seem entirely beside the point. Of all the people in the novel, perhaps no one embodies this as fully as Gary, the Lamberts’ oldest son, a banker on the verge of cracking under the weight of his own obligations and family. By turns vulnerable and vicious, misunderstood and unforgiving, Gary is a deeply complex character, a man literally impossible to pin down. “Part of that,” Franzen explains, “is just getting older as a writer. The classic 27-year-old response to someone like Gary is to morally condemn him, while the response of a 42-year-old is to say, ‘Poor Gary. He must be terrified to be behaving in those ways.”’

Franzen’s right--”The Corrections” is the effort of an assured, mature writer, not at all the kind of book that might come at the beginning of a career. But there’s something else at work here, and it has to do with the author’s own passage through the world of literature, a journey that began with the publication of his first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” in 1988, when he was 29. In that book, and his second novel, “Strong Motion,” released in 1992, Franzen exploited some of the strategies of postmodernism to tell elaborately plotted stories set in vaguely sinister, conspiratorial milieus. Then he hit a wall and found himself unable to engage with fiction anymore.

Partly, this had to do with the culture’s indifference to his writing. Although he has since become something of a literary insider--a regular contributor to the New Yorker and once deemed one of Grantas’ 20 Best American Novelists Under 40--13 years later, he can still quote, verbatim, the New York Times Book Review’s misreading of his literary effort “The Twenty-Seventh City”: “I suspect that Mr. Franzen is after larger literary game in this fine crime novel.”

Equally disheartening, though, were his doubts, his frustrations, his inherent pessimism about “the institution of writing and reading serious novels,” concerns he elaborated upon in a long essay called “Perchance to Dream,” published in Harper’s in 1996. Franzen likened America’s literary landscape to “a grand old Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments: techno and legal thrillers, novels of sex and vampires, of murder and mysticism. The last 50 years have seen a lot of white male flight to the suburbs and to the coastal power centers of television, journalism and film. What remains, mostly, are ethnic and cultural enclaves ... [where] much of contemporary fiction’s vitality now resides.” In the face of this, Franzen said, contemporary writers have no choice but to “forget the big novel, forget the chimera of engaging with the mainstream. Just tell your story, and tell it to the people who you know care.”

The irony is that, for Franzen, telling his story has led to precisely the sort of mainstream recognition he had written off as beyond literature’s reach. This, it turns out, is something of a mixed blessing; on the one hand, it can’t help but soften his sense of marginality, while at the same time, in producing such “a crossover book,” he has alienated some of the very readership--the clannish, hypercritical literati--who once claimed him as their own. For all the attention “The Corrections” has attracted, it’s also drawn a small undercurrent of backlash, typified by acquaintances who tell Franzen, “If it could happen to you, it could happen to any of us,” or the reader who left a message on his phone machine saying, “I know that, in your heart of hearts and soul of souls, you know that this is not as good as your earlier books.”

Franzen is not particularly surprised by any of this; from the beginning, he understood that the decision to write a social novel about the dynamics of family posed a peculiar set of risks. “My first books,” he says, “were the kind where, when you bring them to the table, you can cop a certain postmodern pose. But if you let on that you have this problematic relationship with your mother, or that you fight with her about coming home for Christmas, you’re revealing that you’re not this tough guy, you’re this emotional mess from the Midwest. It’s potentially extremely shameful to do that without irony, and it’s extremely risky because you’re always flirting with sentimentality. It’s harder to find a tone to write about someone’s father dying than to do tough-guy dialogue about a cutting-edge brokerage house.”

Given his concerns about producing a novel as narrowly focused as “The Corrections,” one has to wonder what made Franzen persist. “It’s complicated,” he sighs, and pauses, as if waiting for the words to find their form. “I felt the old mode was exhausted, that there was a tiredness in that tradition, in the idea of saying, ‘Let’s pretend we’re really cool.’ I felt it when I was reading, and I felt it literally on the page when I was trying to write a third book in that tradition. Every time I did pages that were heavily plotted, I would look for simpler dramatic situations so I could write more fully about people’s lives.” In other words, Franzen was tired of playing games with fiction, tired of maintaining an ironic point of view.

Eventually, he threw out most of the novel he was writing and began to excavate his characters vertically, revealing them in all their layered depth. Yet even as he found himself compelled by such a process, he had doubts. “If you had known me personally just over a year ago,” Franzen recalls, “you’d have seen me rage and moan and wail. ‘I don’t know what it’s about. ... There’s no story.’ I stayed up at night worrying about this. People told me the book was about a son dealing with his father’s death, but the real answer comes from Flannery O’Connor’s assertion that we read fiction to have an experience. That’s what it was. I was trying to create an experience rather than a message, to render as intensely as possible a set of actions, a set of lives.”

Franzen’s comments open up a window into “The Corrections,” casting it in starkly personal terms. Over the last few weeks, such a space has become less and less available to the author, as the book takes on a life of its own. Even the Oprah’s Book Club edition makes for its own kind of distance; as Franzen says, somewhat wistfully, seeing someone else’s name imprinted on his dust jacket makes him feel “like there’s my book, and then there’s her book, and they’re not necessarily the same.”

For Franzen, however, that only reinforces the notion of the novel as a kind of public space, in which, by taking a step outside ourselves, we may literally experience the world. This is also true of “The Corrections” itself, which, for all its inward turning, does link the Lamberts to an array of fin de siecle obsessions, from stock options to mood-altering drugs, high-end restaurant entrepreneurship to Eastern European get-rich-quick schemes. “I’m a literary modernist and an old-fashioned storyteller, and there is no middle ground between the two. My book tries to find it, but I can’t occupy that place. So the first reason for continuing to write is simply not to be misunderstood.”

Seen that way, he suggests, the function of the writer remains essentially consistent--to take a leap of faith from the darkness of isolation, to call out, “See me for who I am, and let me reach across the gap from my loneliness to yours.” Such a notion comes up again and again as Franzen discusses “The Corrections,” and it brings to mind the image of him on the front porch of the Georgian, anonymous and apart.

It is this, Franzen believes, that is the true appeal of fiction, the way it represents a contract between writer and reader, “a conversation that takes place under the umbrella of convention” and collapses the loneliness on either side. “What does it mean,” he asks, “when a novel written out of a sense of alienation becomes part of the mainstream? That’s the interesting question. It gives me hope that a lot more people are hungry for writing that expresses a sense of the individual’s sense of isolation in a very complex world.”