Important is a problematic word, particularly when prefaced by the modifier most and especially when prefaced by the modifier only. To classify a man as important is very different from merely calling him great, because an important person needs to matter even to those who question what he's doing.
There are at least four ways an author can become semi-important: He (or she) can have massive commercial success. He can be adored and elevated by critics. He can craft "social epics" that contextualize modernity and force op-ed writers to reevaluate What This All Means. He can even become a celebrity in and of himself, which means that whatever he chooses to write becomes meaningful solely because he is the person who wrote it. There are many, many writers who fulfill one or more of these criteria. However, only Jonathan Franzen hits for the cycle. Only Franzen does all four, and he does them all to the highest possible degree. This is why Franzen is the most important living fiction writer in America, and—if viewed from a distance—perhaps the only important one. He's the most complete. But the deeper explanation for Franzen's import is something that's hard to quantify but easy to feel: For whatever reason, people just care about him more. They love him more, they criticize him more, and they think about him more. They can tell he's different, and they want that difference to matter. And Franzen understands this, which is both how it happened and why it's less implausible than it should be.
"I think there is a space in our culture—in the living memory of people over 40, and probably in the collective memory of people under 40—for the American novelist," Franzen says, sounding exactly how you'd expect him to sound. "And for various reasons, after Mailer and Updike and maybe Anne Tyler went into eclipse, there was a wish to have some new people in that position. But culture had changed so much that it became hard for someone to fulfill that role. So when someone came along who could be easily mistaken for that type of novelist, there was a hunger to latch onto that person. I had an interest in being that kind of novelist, and I worked at it for thirty years, even during periods when I didn't think it was possible for that position to exist."
Now, the depth and language of that response prompts a question that was posed to me every single time I mentioned (to anyone) that I'd just interviewed Jonathan Franzen: Is he arrogant? Because that's always the first thing people want to know. Franzen is the only author who consistently engenders this kind of emotional conflict from the public at large; people want to understand what he's like as a person, even if they haven't read his multiperspective 562-page masterwork, Freedom, or 2001's National Book Award-winning The Corrections.1 And here's the answer: He's a little arrogant. But he's not remotely unlikable, and there's no element of his self-perception that seems inflated or misplaced. At one point, we talk about his appearance on the cover of Time magazine, something that hasn't happened to a living novelist in a decade. He casually mentions that the profile in Time was good. But he also says this, and he laughs as he says it: "I think of myself as an ordinary person with a lot of friends, and the picture that came out of that article was of a monastic person who's incredibly focused on writing. My favorite line of the piece was that I'm supposed to be 'spectacularly bad'2 at managing my public image. Well, if that's true, maybe they should look at the cover of their own magazine."
In fiction, there are no accidents. And maybe not in nonfiction, either.
To the surprise of virtually everyone who cares, Freedom was not among the nominees for the 2010 National Book Award, thus prompting every journalist who wrote about the nominations to lead with this "snub." In his own way, Franzen wins again.
The verbatim quote from Lev Grossman's Time article was, "He is a terrible politician and singularly ungifted at what you might call brand management." That said, I don't know if misremembering "singularly ungifted" as "spectacularly bad" is a sign of anything important, beyond the fact that Franzen appears to mentally rewrite everything he reads about himself in order to improve the clarity.
I meet Franzen in the Philadelphia train station; we will ride the Acela to Washington, D.C., where he's completing the U.S. leg of his Freedom tour before another month of readings in Europe. He looks like himself: unshaven, gray sport coat, modest luggage. He enjoys touring about as much as I thought he would, which is to say "not much." He mentions that the crowd at last night's event at the Philadelphia library was oddly confrontational, both with him and with one another. (The discourse unraveled after someone asked an adversarial question about Oprah.) The only part of going to Europe he seems excited about is the opportunity for some U.K. bird-watching, and even that excitement is muted. During our two hours together, the one time he shows a spike of emotion is when he correctly predicts where the café car will stop on the train platform. "My father was a railroad man," he says as the doors slide open.
We sit in business-class. Franzen takes the window seat. He answers my questions deliberately, staring at the passing scenery while he silently composes his answers. To suggest that Franzen is some kind of unknowable sphinx would not be accurate; he's written a memoir, his girlfriend wrote about the complexity of his success (the 2003 Granta essay "Envy"), and he's conducted many interviews with many persistent people for more than ten years. A relatively complete record of Franzen's life already exists. (By now, there are probably illiterates aware of both his overblown 2001 controversy with Winfrey and their upcoming on-screen "reconciliation.") But these artifacts might be misleading, at least to those interested in deconstructing how Franzen views the universe. One example: We touch briefly on his literary influences, and he mentions Thomas Pynchon. But we're not really talking about Pynchon's books; we're talking about how the reclusive Pynchon has a different kind of notoriety than Franzen, and that Pynchon's smaller audience is closer to "the audience that counts." I ask him what that phrase means. This is his response, which feels simultaneously true and incomplete.
"I'm not talking about the grad students with unwashed hair who might actually stalk Pynchon," he says. "I'm talking about people who want to have an ongoing relationship with interesting books, and I've realized there are more people like that in America than I used to believe, even just ten years ago. And those types of people are different than the people who only care about me because I was on the cover of Time. These people don't want a book signed. They want a magazine signed. It seems ridiculous that a writer like me could become that person, even for a moment."
Here's the reason I view that answer as incomplete: Franzen is so utterly cautious about his image that he never says exactly what he thinks, which is why certain critics read his tone as detached and condescending. Yet when he speaks in person, you can immediately tell his unedited thoughts are both hyperpresent in his consciousness and embedded in the subtext of his delivery. At one point, he declines to answer the only question I ask that he classifies as "astute." In order to satisfy my own curiosity (and against my better judgment), I allow him to give his answer off the record. During the three minutes my recorder is off, he provides one of the most straightforward, irrefutable, and downright depressing answers I've ever experienced in an interview. His posture relas. His language simplifies. Nothing is unclear. But once the red light returns, he rematerializes into the same truthful but withholding person I met at the train station. It's easy to understand why Franzen's literary characters are so rich and fully realized; he understands himself better than most people I've encountered, which is always the first step toward understanding people who aren't you.
···
There are fleeting passages in Freedom that discuss music, and one gets the sense that Franzen both loves and distrusts the concept of rock 'n' roll. The first band he ever liked was the Moody Blues, followed by a period in high school when he listened to the Grateful Dead without smoking pot. He enrolled at Swarthmore College in 1977 and became obsessed with all the rock you'd expect a bookish college kid to obsess over in '77, particularly the Talking Heads. Today he mainly listens to music at the gym. He offers to show me the iTunes playlist he's created for the elliptical machine. The track list is up-tempo and inscrutable: the Jackson 5, M.I.A., Grace Jones, the Rolling Stones, Steely Dan's "My Old School," and Mission of Burma's "Academy Fight Song." It does not serve as a means for unpacking anything essential about its creator. "My favorite band is the Mekons," he tells me. "That tells you everything you need to know about me."
The Mekons are a prolific, righteous, highly credible punk band from Britain. But this description doesn't tell us much either, because—even though he does love the Mekons—when Franzen adds, "That tells you everything you need to know about me," he's completely joking.
"It's not my responsibility if some people are tone deaf to irony," he says. "The lead book reviewer for The New York Times [Pulitzer Prize winner Michiko Kakutani] is utterly tone-deaf when it comes to irony. She just can't hear it. Which you'd think would disqualify her from reviewing books for a blog in Kansas City, let alone The New York Times. But there you go. There's always going to be a percentage of the populace who doesn't get irony and will therefore not get 75 percent of good literature."
When he talks, it's sometimes difficult to tell which are the ironic parts and which are the real parts. That, I suppose, is what makes him interesting.
GQ: What's the least accurate thing anyone has written about you?
JF: I don't read much about myself. I learned my lesson after spending ninety ill-advised minutes Googling myself once in the fall of 2001. I think the whole "Franzen is a spoiled elitist" thing was wrong, although not without a kernel of truth. I do lead a privileged life. I do believe some books are better than others. I do think that mere popularity does not indicate greatness. In those respects, I suppose I'm an elitist. But I think what was meant by the term elitist at the time was the antithesis of what I've tried to do as a writer, which is to reach the largest possible audience. I've worked so long—and in such a conscious way—to not exclude people. So that was galling.
GQ: What do you worry about? What would be the worst-case scenario for your career?
JF: Global pandemics. But I'm not a compulsive hand washer or anything.
GQ: How would a global pandemic impact your career?
JF:: I don't really worry about my career. I suppose the worst thing that could happen would be if someone would be so nasty as to harass my ex-wife. We don't have an ongoing close relationship, and she wants to be left alone. So if someone would bother her and ask her a bunch of questions about me, that would be a very unfortunate consequence of this book.
GQ: Do you think about your ex-wife very much?
JF: [pause] Let's move on.
···
The first time I ever saw Franzen was at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2008, the day after the world learned of David Foster Wallace's suicide. Backstage, various writers (many of whom had never met Franzen before) approached him to express awkward condolences over the loss of his close friend; I remember how Franzen looked like the least surprised person in the room. To my own surprise, he brings up DFW before I do, always referring to him as "Dave Wallace." It reminds me of how actors who've worked with Robert DeNiro always make a point of calling him "Bobby."
"At various points we both envied the kind of attention the other person received," Franzen explains. "Dave envied my mainstream attention, and I envied the very intense critical attention he received. Which is part of the reason it makes it so hard to go on without him."
To characterize the Franzen-Wallace relationship as "complex" would be like saying the relationship between Israel and Palestine is "contentious." They met after Wallace wrote Franzen a fan letter regarding his 1988 debut novel, The Twenty-seventh City; Wallace later became recognized as the next great American genius with the 1996 publication of Infinite Jest, only to have Franzen shoot past him (at least in terms of recognition and readability) with The Corrections. When Wallace killed himself, his literary reputation exploded a second time, and countless obituaries noted the Franzen-Wallace friendship. Now they're linked forever. Immediately after DFW's death, Franzen adopted Wallace's habit of chewing tobacco, similar to how Michael Jordan started playing baseball and doing crossword puzzles following his father's murder. The vast majority of Freedom was written in a rush of inspiration in the aftermath of Wallace's hanging, and one of the novel's central characters displays certain Wallace-like affectations: Richard Katz (the narrative's mercurial rock musician) chews tobacco, prefers working in a dark room (as did DFW), and speaks with grains of Wallace's syntax. But Franzen insists the fictional character is not based on the literal man, and I have no grounds to disprove this.
Weirdly, it turns out that one person who knew both Franzen and Wallace during their formative writing years was Elizabeth Wurtzel, the confessional author of the 1994 best seller Prozac Nation, who now works with David Boies as a lawyer in Manhattan. When I reach Wurtzel on the phone, she immediately tells me she's not going to read Freedom on principle ("I don't like what he did to Oprah"). She tells me she always found Franzen and Wallace's joint obsession with literary greatness "a little obnoxious," that she hasn't spoken to Franzen since the late '90s, and that maybe she never really knew him at all. I assume this is her way of saying she's in no position to comment, so I start to apologize for wasting her time. But it turns out she really, really wants to talk about him.
"I have a unifying theory about this," says Wurtzel, her dog barking compulsively in the background. "I think that when Dave died, everyone said Dave was the greatest writer of his generation. And that really got to Franzen. I don't think he could stand the thought of Dave Wallace being the greatest writer of his generation, so he wrote this new book. And now people say those same things about him. You know, in '96 he wrote an essay ["Perchance to Dream," first published in Harper's] about how to write a readable novel, and then he went out and did exactly that. That's what he does. I admire his determination, and I relate to that determination. If he'd gone to Wall Street, he'd have made a million dollars. I feel no ill will toward him. I just wonder if he still remembers who he used to be."
But who is the person he used to be? And how does that negate the person he is now? And wouldn't it be far more problematic if he was the exact same person he was fifteen years ago, wholly unchanged by the life he's lived and the books he's created?
These questions could be asked of any middle-aged novelist, I suppose. It's a present-day problem: There's just no escaping the larger, omnipresent puzzle of "reality." Even when people read fiction, they want to know what's real. But this, it seems, is not Franzen's concern. He disintegrates the issue with one sentence.
"Here's the thing about inauthentic people," he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. "Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity."
···
Less than two hours after leaving Philly, our train reaches the outskirts of D.C. I try to whip a few more questions at Franzen before we depart; I ask if he found it difficult to write about sex, and he grins so uncomfortably that the query is never addressed. I ask if he has any recurring dreams, knowing that people talk about their dreams in order to tell secrets about themselves they want other people to know. He says that he does. In fact, it seems like the question he enjoys answering the most.
"I've even written about one dream that still happens occasionally," he says. "It's a dream of flying, but I'm not a human flying—I'm an airplane, flying with great maneuverability at high speed, very low to the ground, usually in an urban environment, always at risk of having my wings ripped off and crashing into a fireball.… I think it's probably about the difficulty of being myself on my own terms in a world that doesn't automatically accommodate that."
I ask him to define his own terms.
"I try not to lie, and I try to interact with others as full people, even if they're strangers. And I want to write fiction with those two premises."
As we exit the train, a man in a three-piece suit who's been sitting behind us (and eavesdropping on the interview) interjects himself into our conversation. He tells Franzen that he regularly has that same dream. "I know exactly what you're talking about," he says.
Franzen smiles at the man but says nothing. He probably gets this a lot, which is why he is the writer that he is. People know what he's talking about, and the feeling is mutual.