Franzen talks about his new essay collection
Author Franzen’s new book of essays tackles social media, environmentalism and more
In Jonathan Franzen’s essay Save What You Love, he compares the state of the planet to “a patient with bad cancer.”
Death is certain. Now it’s just a question about quality of life. The renowned author says “drastic planetary overheating is a done deal.” No head of state anywhere, even in places most threatened by flooding or drought, has committed to leaving carbon in the ground, he says. So alternative energy, he argues, is akin to treating our dying planet with “disfiguring aggression, damning every river and blighting every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming.”
All this, he says, will not prevent but merely postpone a “human catastrophe.” A better approach would be to put a focus on “protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on.”
When the essay first appeared in The New Yorker in 2015, it was met with widespread criticism. At one point, Franzen was even accused of being a climate change denier. So he decided to publish the essay again, in only slightly altered form, as part of his new book The End of the End of the Earth. He also published a followup essay about the response he received about the first.
“In the first essay, I step back and offer some further thoughts about why the reaction had been so unbelievably hostile, since I thought I had been saying fairly reasonable, obvious things,” Franzen says in an interview with Postmedia. “There was this vehement denial, precisely from the people who I would think would be my allies, which is to say the environmentalists, the left. I think if I had published the essay today, it would not have that reaction.
“I think in the last three-and-ahalf years that it has become much more apparent to many more people that we are not stopping climate change. We’re not even coming close to stopping it. In fact, we’re continuing to accelerate it.”
Asked why he gathered these particular 16 essays found in The End of the End of the Earth, Franzen is quick to point out he wasn’t going for an “I-told-youso” vibe. But he was inspired by the idea that some of his thoughts on climate change, nature, literature and technology that he has shared in his non-fiction writing over the past five years no longer seem all that controversial. The world has caught up with his views.
Take, for instance, his take on social media. Five years ago, he was accused of being out of touch when he outlined what he saw as the alienating and dehumanizing effects of social media and our growing addiction to it.
“I was dismissed as a Luddite, a crank, when I was talking about the dangers of Facebook and Twitter five years ago, particularly in my book The Kraus Project,” he says. “It was all dismissed as ‘Franzen doesn’t get it.’ Well, you know, Franzen did get it, and now a lot of other people get it.”
Which is not to suggest Franzen’s most recent book of essays is simply the writer basking in overdue vindication. The subjects addressed are far too varied and his tone often far too self-deprecating.
He does have his passions, of course. A number of essays address nature and, in particular, birds and birding. Capitalism in Overdrive is about technology and social media. But there is also a beautiful piece about his reaction to the work of photographer Sarah Stolfa, who specializes in portraits of “regular Philadelphians.” He writes about his friendship with novelist William T. Vollmann. Another essay finds him blending the tale of his luxury birdwatching cruise to Antarctica with snippets of his own family history, specifically the often sad tale of his beloved Uncle Walt.
“I have to have something interesting to say, chiefly,” he says. “People come to me with ideas and I say no to most things that I’m pitched, and most of the stuff I end up writing are my own ideas; stuff I’ve been worrying about, have something to say about. Without a strong feeling of wanting to convey something, the pages aren’t alive. Really, for a writer, what you’re always looking for is ‘is this page alive?’ Is there some urgency animating it? I guess what I’m looking for is something I have urgent feelings about.”
Franzen also includes his Ten Rules for the Novelist, which he says he “tossed off in an hour” for the Guardian in 2010, one of dozens of high-profile authors who participated. While The End of the End of the Earth is Franzen’s fourth non-fiction book, it’s safe to say he is best known for his fiction. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, was a complex tale of a warring, dysfunctional and anxiety-filled Midwestern family. It was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and Franzen was quickly hailed as leading a new generation of great U.S. novelists. Some of his preoccupations do appear in his fiction. His sprawling, six-part 2015 novel Purity certainly asked pointed questions about technology, internet culture and social media. Walter Berglund, the protagonist in his 2010 novel, Freedom, is an environmental activist described as “greener than Greenpeace.”
But Franzen says his approach to fiction if very different than his approach to essay writing.
“The kind of novels I write, even though people think of them as social novels, they are really psychological and emotional novels about a set of hopefully complicated characters,” he says. “That’s the primary thing, to tell a good story about some three-dimensional characters. And, yes, I can’t help it if I’m setting the book in the present, I’m going to pay attention to what’s in the world. You need some granularity, you need content. People have to have jobs, if nothing else. Why not give them jobs that intercept with some of my own anxieties about the world we live in?”
But Franzen says he never wants a novel to become a soap box to advocate for his own view of the world.
“I’m allowed to have my opinions in non-fiction, even though they often change in the course of writing an essay,” he says.
“But I think the novel’s responsibility is to interrogate one’s own convictions. Because the novelist starts from the premise that things are very complicated and we probably don’t know what the correct answer on any question is. The novels function very differently. Yes, I take them from the same things that are preoccupying me, but it’s not with a view to hammering home some point. It’s really the opposite.”
Really, for a writer, what you’re always looking for is ‘is this page alive?’ ... I guess what I’m looking for is something I have urgent feelings about.