Jonathan Franzen thinks people can change — even if, as his new book 'Crossroads' suggests, it’s nearly impossible to make it stick. The author spoke with mervatim
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What I found, in other words, is a mind consonant with the mind that also produced The Corrections, Freedom, and Purity — books that have often been called systems novels or family novels, but which Franzen refuses to align with any genre. For him, they are novels, pure and simple. Each one counterpoises an intense maximalism — voluminous sentences and points of view, grand themes and historical, geographical sweep — with an absolute minimalism of change in the characters’ psychology.
More seriously, I have been thinking a lot about the inescapable nature of religion. Even if it is uncoupled from transcendent beliefs or metaphysical structures, everyone still organizes their life around something that can’t be proved. I would say this goes particularly for the virulent atheists. It had been building in me for a long time, a wish to write about the fundamentally irrational basis for everything we think and do and espouse.
I suspect this is not going to be the last time that your question is a richer thing than my answer. I am singularly uninterested in theology. I’m not uninterested in the Bible, both Testaments. I think the Gospels are an incredibly powerful document. But if you go to the original source, the Gospels, there’s only one commandment that matters, which is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “Yeah, all these other things are important. But that’s the key thing.
The topic of infidelity makes me think a little about your introduction to the 1999 reissue of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters from 1970, which is one of my favorite novels.In all your novels, like in Desperate Characters, marriage is the domain where our moral character gets tested; the domain in which how we imagined we would behave when placed in certain situations suddenly and frighteningly looks very different from the ways we actually behave.
Here’s a question that I don’t think you can answer with, “Because it’s fun” — or you could, but it would be unsatisfactory. Most of your previous novels have long stretches of remembrance of characters’ past lives, but their present is largely contemporaneous with our own. This novel begins in December 1971 and ends in 1974. Why did you decide to set it in the past?
Well, and Roe v. Wade did galvanize the Evangelicals and push them decisively into the right wing of American politics. The early ’70s was a time when you started to see the first young people who were actually more conservative than their parents. Russ and Marion are good mid-century liberals. Russ in particular is deeply involved in civil rights and in protesting the Vietnam War. And the kids are kind of dealing with the aftermath of that.
Within the novel, character should not follow from concept. The concept should be discovered from character. If characters are being created for illustrative purposes or representative purposes, you’re kind of fucked, because characters are so infinitely more interesting than the headlines of the day.
I have written about it, and I have remained confounded that it is not universally regarded as canonical. It’s Christina Stead’s great novel from the mid-20th century. It has three world-class characters. Most novelists don’t produce any world-class characters. There are three in that one book. It seems to me an undeniably feminist text; I don’t understand why it’s not canonical in women’s studies programs.
I was thinking about the endings of some of your novels. The ending of The Corrections: “She was 75 and she was going to make some changes in her life.” Or the ending of Purity: “It had to be possible to do better than her parents.” On the one hand, you could read those as hopeful; on the other, you could read them as deeply ironic.
Do you have the same feeling I have, that Karenin is a kind of poignant figure, in a way very much like Casaubon in Middlemarch? I know that they are kind of cousins: The older dry dude married to the totally alive and sexually yearning younger woman. It was a striking difference, reading Anna Karenina at 22 and reading it — when was the last time I reread it? — probably in my 50s. And being shocked to discover that I didn’t like Anna. And in fact, her whole family thinks, “Eh.
It’s, oddly, something close to the reverse. I could drop dead tomorrow. I still haven’t ruled out the possibility of the world ending in nuclear war. I don’t know how long I have to live. I don’t know how long I’ll have a world to live in. But I’m very aware that I can’t write very many novels at the level I insist on writing them.
Who are the newer, younger writers you admire, since almost everyone we’ve been talking about is dead? The danger is we know more now about how the world has turned out. People in the past inevitably look less enlightened than we are from our privileged point in 2021. Rather than seeing the dead writer within the context of the time, you’re applying standards that simply hadn’t been invented yet and creating an expectation that they live up to some ideal that had not even been formulated.
One of the hallmarks of that new politicized culture you’re describing is the constant renovation of the terms: “Yes, I know we all referred to it as this five years ago, but if you do that, now, that’s retrograde.” The result is this ever-shrinking space in which it’s only the present moment in which it’s possible to speak correctly. It doesn’t matter how well-meaning you are. It doesn’t matter what your politics are.
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