Jonathan Franzen: ‘It’s still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long’

When HBO dropped its plan to adapt Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling novel The Corrections in 2012, the author was so relieved he says he performed his first and last cartwheel on the lawn of his home in Santa Cruz, California. There had been an attempted film adaptation before that, but he had been unsurprised by its failure, having warned that it was impossible to condense his densely plotted doorstopper of a novel into a feature-length film. This time, Franzen had signed up as co-writer, with filmmaker Noah Baumbach. He says that HBO was “excluded from the development process. Mistake, because we didn’t know how to do TV.” Franzen himself hadn’t even owned a telly until a few years earlier and certainly didn’t have cable, so as he was wrestling with the script, he began renting box sets. Around three episodes into one drama series, he realised “we have no idea what we’re doing. This is not how you do TV. This is bad,” he recalls. The result, he says, was “one of the worst pilots anyone has ever made”.

Franzen used to think TV was the “enemy” of the serious novelist. In a well-known 1996 essay for Harper’s Magazine about the decline of high literature he had complained bitterly about the “banal ascendancy of television”. But after the HBO series failed, he watched Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie and Silicon Valley and loved them. In the age of social media, AI and the endless scroll, TV has started to look like a “friend”, he says now. And The Corrections is finally being adapted into an eight-part Netflix series, with Meryl Streep playing Enid Lambert, the matriarch clinging to dreams of hosting a perfect last family Christmas, even as her husband Alfred is in terminal decline with Parkinson’s and dementia and their grownup children’s lives are falling apart in terrible, comical ways. Once Streep announced she was in, Franzen felt the “chances of making this show have gone up above 50%”. He says he’s a month away from finishing the script.

We are meeting at his home on the edge of Santa Cruz, in his office where the blinds are pulled down low against the bright sunshine. He is 67, tall and slightly stooped, and although his hair has turned white he still looks boyish when he laughs, wide smile and little snub nose, a wicked glint behind his trademark dark-framed spectacles. He has settled into a chair that seems too small for his lanky frame and frequently squirms with discomfort. Should we try switching places, I ask at one point? “No, I’m just physically expressing discomfort with repeating myself,” he replies. He likes to edit his speech as he goes along: “strike that word!” he orders at one point, and “this needs to be underlined”. When he loses his thread he announces, grandly, “you can redirect”.

The Corrections, Franzen’s third novel, won the 2001 National book award for fiction in the US, and remains one of the bestselling works of literary fiction of recent decades. It was published a few days before 9/11 and distils the materialism, anxieties and complacency of America’s long 20th century. It is also Franzen’s most “autobiographical novel”, drawn loosely from his own midwestern upbringing: Franzen was raised in an affluent suburb of St Louis, Missouri. Like Alfred, his dad, who was an engineer, developed Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, while Enid is a “cartoon version” of his own mother. “There are not very many incidents from my life in the book but those two: the personalities and the self-deception about the gravity of the mental deterioration – that’s all drawn from my own experience,” he says.

Franzen says he learned his “psychology as a novelist” from his family. His parents were “powerful characters”: they were “hilarious” and “terrifying” and also “thoughtful”, with rich interior lives. “They created not only Enid and Alfred, but really the notion of a character … the combination of intellectual substance, emotional wanting, emotional needs and comedy,” he explains. His father died before The Corrections was published. His mother lived long enough to know that an extract had appeared in the New Yorker, as part of a special issue dedicated to American writers under 40.

“My annoying aunt, her sister, called her up and said: ‘Irene: do not read Jon’s piece in the New Yorker,’” Franzen recalls. His mother was ill with cancer and had been given months to live. He visited her a few days after that phone call, when inevitably her question was “Why shouldn’t I read your piece in the New Yorker?”. He summarised the story for her, “making some small omissions, but basically just describing what the thing was”. When he was finished, she said: “Thank you, I don’t need to read it.” It was one of their last long conversations. She died 10 days later. “My parents gave us kids everything – including a lot of criticism. But then they just exited, and I was still in my 30s and could write whatever I want,” he says. He could not have published The Corrections had they been alive. Most of his subsequent novels – including Crossroads and Freedom, two other big, ideas-filled books – have also centred on dysfunctional midwestern families. “It always puzzles me that people find it remarkable that I have characters who are related through family in my books,” he says, sounding a bit put out. “Because it’s like, well, the Bible is a book of family stories. The Old Testament, it’s all family stories. The Greek myths, Homer …”

Franzen initially studied science at university: “That was a bit of a beard to get my parents to pay for college,” he says. They were not happy when he switched majors, “but at least I did something serious like German literature as opposed to a frivolous English major, which they literally would not have paid for.” After graduating from Swarthmore, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, in 1981, he won a year-long Fulbright scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published six years later, in 1988. He has worked full-time as a writer ever since. “I made nothing but mistakes as a young person but actually was lucky enough to realise, this is what you’re good at,” he says.

Franzen describes The Corrections as an “angry comedy” and he has a reputation for being, well, an angry guy. Where does his anger come from, I wonder? “It’s still mysterious to me, having so many privileges – not really economic privilege, but every other imaginable kind of privilege – that I was angry for so long. There’s 14 years of being in a marriage that should have ended after two years. That explains a lot, actually,” he says. He married a fellow writer, Valerie Cornell, soon after graduating, and they divorced in 1994. “Then there’s you know, I’m a bright guy, and the stupidity of the world makes me angry.” Oh, and in the 90s, he spent a lot of time “angry that people were seen to be losing interest in the kind of novels that I wrote”. But, he adds, “I don’t know why people think of me as angry now, because I haven’t really been angry in that way since a year after The Corrections was published.”

That first year, he concedes with a wry smile, was a little “bumpy”. Many will remember his spat with Oprah Winfrey, who picked The Corrections for her book club and invited him on to her show, only to rescind her invitation after he described her other picks as “schmaltzy”. The pair later made up – she picked Freedom for her book club in 2010, and they hugged on live TV. One of his problems, he points out, is that he cannot “start a thought without injecting a counterthought to it”. Read only half the quote and he comes across like an “asshole”. While criticising her picks, he also praised Oprah for promoting reading, for instance. He can see now that she was right to be annoyed. But, counterthought: “Well, some of her earlier picks were …” theatrical pause “… schmaltzy.”

Other spats have followed, with the writer Jennifer Weiner over the disproportionate attention given to Franzen’s work. Thought: Weiner is “freeloading” on the gender debate and “asking for a respect that not just male reviewers, but female reviewers, don’t think her work merits”. Counterthought: the gender bias in literature is a genuine problem. He got into trouble for saying he considered adopting an Iraqi orphan to better understand young people. Counterthought: that mad idea lasted six weeks at the most. Franzen says he has learned to become more circumspect. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to talk to people in an interview. I didn’t know how to do TV. I would just say whatever I was thinking about and then I would get into trouble and I would feel like: ‘Oh, unfair! I’m getting into trouble.’ Well, you know, dude, wise up, learn how to protect yourself. Don’t say those things.”

In 2010, following the publication of Freedom, Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a rare achievement for any writer. The piece described him as the “Great American Novelist”. He says it was his suggestion that he should be the cover. He got his publicist to contact Time to say they hadn’t had a writer as a cover star for ages, and Franzen would be great. Wait, what, I ask, shuffling through my notes, doesn’t that piece describe you as “singularly ungifted at what you might call brand management”? “Isn’t that hilarious?” he asks, his eyes widening in delight. “It’s hilarious!”

He doesn’t think much of the phrase “great American novel”, though. “It’s usually not said kindly. It’s sort of mocking,” he says. He puts on a bullying sneer: “Oh, the great American novelist. Oh, you’re going to write the great American novel, are you?”

Franzen is not as down on the future of the literary novel as he used to be. That Harper’s essay? His real complaint at the time was “people weren’t buying books like mine”, he says, pretending to sob. “Actually, they were. They were just not buying my novels. That was my complaint in the 90s, and of course I blew that up into some huge cultural problem.” These days, he thinks those who bemoan the decline of reading need some perspective. “I think the doom-criers about the novel tend to make a fundamental mistake. They imagine some golden age when everyone read Flaubert. There was never a time,” he says. It’s true, he continues, that modern technology does little to help cultivate a love of reading. “It’s easy to imagine a time soon when there is no reason to be able to read, because text can be converted into spoken language and you don’t have to write because you just speak and it can be written for you,” he says. But that hardly feels like the worst thing happening in the world right now. “That’s the other thing I feel about the doom-criers of the novel, it’s like, really, this is a world historical problem? People can’t read Steinbeck any more? It’s sad, but nothing lasts for ever. What do you want?”

Franzen says he doesn’t want to comment on American politics because “nobody cares what the novelist thinks”, plus he did an interview with the German newspaper Die Welt before Donald Trump’s second term in which, like many pundits, he predicted that the president wouldn’t follow through on most of his promises and “it’s like no, I was all wrong”. He was, however, on to Trump early. He wrote about the future president in his 1992 novel, Strong Motion, and in various essays that decade. “He symbolised a certain kind of horribleness, a crass, narcissistic, bullying side of American life that, yeah, I noticed early and I hated. I didn’t even live in New York when I wrote Strong Motion and I could feel that odious presence,” he says.

He’s more open to weighing in on environmental issues, having written several feather-ruffling essays for the New Yorker on the climate crisis. He angered climate crisis activists by arguing that humankind needs to accept that global warming is going to happen and start refocusing on local projects devoted to conservation and biodiversity. A passionate birder himself, in 2015 he criticised the bird conservation organisation Audubon for falsely claiming that climate change is the main threat faced by birds, rather than collisions with glass windows and hunting by cats, two more fixable problems. Audubon responded by accusing him of “extreme intellectual dishonesty”. “They’ve apologised,” he says when I ask him about it, “full stop.”

Franzen discovered his passion for birds soon after The Corrections was published. He goes on birding trips whenever he can, but he can also spot a lot from his home: there are violet-green swallows nesting next door, and hooded orioles in the back garden. If it wasn’t so hot, and his blinds weren’t drawn so low, we’d probably see a family of quail running past his office window. “If you want to see quail, this is one of the best places in the world,” he says.

He shares his home with his longtime partner, the writer Kathryn Chetkovich. In a corner of his office there is an electric guitar. He picked up the guitar while working on Freedom, and has this morning been practising with the band, Shady Characters, which he formed with Chetkovich’s brothers. It’s a purely private hobby. “I have never performed in public, and I never will,” he announces.

Last June, Franzen published a new story in the New Yorker about an aspiring teenage actor suffering an unwanted pregnancy and a crisis of faith. It will form part of his next novel, a sequel to Crossroads, which was published in 2021 as the first book in a proposed trilogy. Does that mean his next book is imminent? “This is not, ‘I’ve delivered the manuscript and we’re getting a little teaser.’ No, this is a ‘I’ve gone deep into the cave and I need to send a sign of life,’” he says. It takes Franzen many years to write a novel, and the years before he has settled on a new project are often “horrible”, he says. He tries to distract himself, often by writing nonfiction, and then “I periodically go back and beat my head against the proverbial brick wall”. “It’s not fun,” he confirms: “Some other day, another idea. Yeah, that one didn’t work either. Wake up in the middle of the night. Yeah, I got it. No, you don’t.”

Franzen believes the most difficult part of writing a new novel is that it requires him to change: he needs to become “the kind of person who can write the novel. I’ve had to become a different person in some significant way to get each book written.” To move from The Corrections to Freedom he had to let go of his anger. To write Crossroads, he had to become more forgiving. Right now, he says, “I’m waiting to wake up as the person who is alive again and not the same person he was five years ago.”

Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no! When he’s working on a scene, trying to capture a character or get the tone right, he’s not thinking in moral terms. “If you’re really engaged with that, it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul,” he says. “I don’t really care about bettering my soul. I care about getting it right,” he adds. And then, the reflexive edit: “Which is a pretty good ending line.”