‘Fiction that endures centres on families’
Jonathan Franzen talks to Max Liu about why he felt drawn to writing about religion in new novel Crossroads, family dynamics – and how he’s always been goofy
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are literary milestones of the 21st century. There have been four in two decades: The Corrections (2001), which, by combining the innovations of postmodern fiction with the social sweep of the 19th-century realist novel, told the story of an American family; Freedom (2010), which consolidated his reputation as one of the most ambitious writers at work today; Purity (2015), which was absorbing but contained elements (a feminist who demanded her husband pee sitting down) that indicated Franzen may be slouching into puerile satire; and now Crossroads, the first in a projected trilogy, his most successfully realised work yet and once again about a Midwestern family.
“Much of the fiction that has endured has been centred on families,” he says. “You think about Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Jane Austen’s Bennett family, the opening line of Anna Karenina [“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”]. For most people, their most intense relationships have to do with spouses, parents, children, siblings. The dramatic situations that ensue are what the novelist lives on. Otherwise you’d have a thin char act ero logical broth.”
When we meet them in suburban Illinois at Christmas 1971, the Hildebrandts – the family at the centre of Crossroads – have become unhappy. Russ, a liberal pastor who is active in the Civil Rights movement, and his wife Marion have tired of each other.
Apart from nine-year-old Judson, their children are all experiencing tumultuous changes: erudite Perry poses philosophical questions about the nature of goodness, but also sells drugs; Becky is undergoing a religious epiphany and falling in love for the first time; the eldest, Clem, wants to drop out of college and fight in Vietnam. They clash with their parents, particularly with their father, who is preoccupied with the Church and trying to have an affair with a sexy thirtysomething widow.
For Franzen, 62, who was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1959 and has two elder brothers, “It was natural to write about Christianity. I grew up in the Church. We were not believers, yet we were very involved with the texts and the rituals. I was drawn to writing about it now by a general interest in irrationality and the increase in irrationality in America, with these crazy myths about the Covid-19 vaccines and the 2020 presidential election.”
At the same time, he is interested in the ineffable and calls himself “not such a foe of irrationality”.
He says: “In progressive circles, there has been such a vehement rejection of religion that a contrarian part of me wanted to bring it up again and try to imagine what it would be like to be Marion, who feels God present around her all the time.”
Franzen belonged to a Christian youth group – in his memoir The Discomfort Zone (2006), he recalled the minister who “in poor light was mistakable for Charles Manson”; in Crossroads, Russ runs a similar organisation until he is ousted by a younger and more charismatic pastor. Perry and Becky join the group, where they are encouraged to open up about their feelings, to spite their father.
What was Franzen like as a teen? “Callow and filled with shame. Very goofy. Goofiness has been a fixture in my life. I have this strange combination of towering ambition and, in the early days, a high level of arrogance, but in person I was always silly.”
When did he know he wanted to be a writer? “By the time
I finished high school, I had determined that making up stories, doing something essentially fun for a living, was a good career.”
Nobody who has heard him talk about his creative process – wearing a blindfold while writing The Corrections, for example, to keep his mind “free of all clichés”, or disabling his internet to work on Freedom – could imagine that his books come easily. “I wrote eight hours a day, seven days a week in my twenties, when I had boundless energy and nothing else to do, but it’s nearer six now,” he says.
“Hour by hour, it’s not easy and it’s particularly difficult when I’m trying to figure out a book. There are few worse places to be than my office without an idea… Once the pages are flowing, I’m filled with anxiety that they aren’t good enough, but I enter a state in which a whole world is growing in my mind and it’s there 24 hours a day. When I look back on those periods, I say, ‘That was a happy year.’”
If the rest of the trilogy, which is titled A Key to all Mythologies, arrives at the same rate as his previous two novels, he will be occupied with the project for at least a decade. Does he feel a sense of security about being mid-series, not needing to think of an idea for a novel?
“If only it were as simple as the continued adventures of this family,” he sighs. “I want each book to stand on its own. I cannot write the same book twice. When I was thinking about a trilogy, I took comfort from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Seeing Ferrante write four books about two women, that really held my attention, showed me that it could be done.”
Some reviewers have observed in Crossroads an evolution in Franzen’s thinking about male privilege and his depiction of minorities, which occasionally felt flat in previous novels. Russ helps at an African American church on Chicago’s South Side and takes a group of young congregants to work on a Navajo reservation, but he is thoughtful about the problems inherent in these gestures. “The very act of caring was a kind of privilege,” Russ reflects, “another weapon in the white arsenal.”
“It would have been unrealistic to portray a progressive minister in 1971 who didn’t go to an African American church in the inner city and who wasn’t concerned with Native Americans,” says Franzen. “It was still possible then to be a progressive and a Christian. In the current political climate, I have to think about how the book would read to a member of one of those communities.”
Franzen is so droll that it is possible to miss how comically self-effacing he can be. He calls himself “a fundamentally lazy writer”, which is ridiculous. In Crossroads, I was struck by the sheer heft of invisible labour, the mass of details involved in building a fictional world that envelops the reader.
Does he agree with those of us who have called it his best novel? “It’s weird. I have to feel I’m advancing [in order] to find the energy and strength to write another book,” he says, eyes closed, weighing every word. “I’m not the one to judge.”
Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen, Fourth Estate, £20. To read Stuart Kelly’s review, visit www.scotsman.com/artsand-culture/books