Jonathan Franzen

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonathan Franzen was born on the 17th of August, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and by the time he was in his early forties, he had managed to get his glasses stolen off his face at a London book launch party. That happened in 2010, at the Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, when a gate-crasher pulled the frames right from Franzen's nose and jokingly demanded a ransom of $100,000 before police caught up with him elsewhere in the park. It was the kind of absurd, very public moment that seemed to follow Franzen wherever he went. Here was a writer whose career had been marked, again and again, by serious literary acclaim colliding with very messy public spectacle. He won the National Book Award. He feuded with Oprah Winfrey. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline "Great American Novelist." He wrote an essay about climate change so pessimistic that it popularized the word "doomerism." The questions worth asking are not just what Franzen wrote, but how a novelist from the St. Louis suburbs became one of the most contested literary figures in America, and what his career reveals about the uncomfortable relationship between serious fiction and popular culture.

• 2. Roots and Early Formation

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  Webster Groves, Missouri, the affluent St. Louis suburb where Franzen grew up, fed directly into his first novel. His father Earl's family had Swedish immigrant roots via Minnesota; his mother Irene's ancestry was Eastern European. Franzen graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1981 with a degree in German, having spent the 1979-80 academic year in Munich through Wayne State University's Junior Year program. It was there he met Michael A. Martone, a man he would later reshape into the character Walter Berglund in Freedom. A Fulbright Scholarship followed, taking him to Freie Universitat Berlin for the 1981-82 year, and he came away speaking fluent German.

  In 1982, still in his early twenties, Franzen married fellow writer Valerie Cornell and moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, to pursue fiction. While drafting his first novel, he worked as a research assistant in Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, coauthoring several dozen papers. In September 1987, a month after he and his wife relocated to New York City, Franzen sold that novel to Farrar Straus and Giroux. The book was The Twenty-Seventh City, and in describing it to novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb Magazine, Franzen called it "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation, the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns," adding in a later interview: "I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer."

  Published in 1988, The Twenty-Seventh City was warmly received and established Franzen as an author to watch. St. Louis, once the "fourth city" in the 1870s, served as the setting for a novel about urban decline. Strong Motion followed in 1992, a systems novel that used East Coast seismic events as a metaphor for family rupture. Franzen described it this way: "I imagined static lives being disrupted from without, literally shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get people shouting angry moral truths at each other." It was not a financial success, and Franzen later remarked in a 2010 Paris Review interview that critics and readers were "overlooking Strong Motion a little bit."

• 3. The Corrections and Its Fallout

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  In September 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected The Corrections for her book club, and for a brief moment it looked like a triumph on every front. The novel had already won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and would go on to win the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which that year went to Richard Russo for Empire Falls. Franzen sat for a lengthy interview with Oprah and appeared in footage shot in his St. Louis hometown.

  Then, in October 2001, The Oregonian printed an interview in which Franzen expressed discomfort with the selection. He went further on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, worrying aloud that the Oprah logo on the cover was pushing male readers away: "I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say 'If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.' Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation." His invitation to appear on the show was rescinded. Winfrey announced simply that Franzen seemed "uncomfortable and conflicted" and that she had "decided to skip the dinner" and move on.

  The episode generated enormous media attention. The Corrections became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction. At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen thanked Oprah for her "enthusiasm and advocacy." The novel was voted sixteenth in a list of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century so far, assembled in September 2019 by writers and critics of the Guardian. What the controversy had demonstrated, beyond the obvious awkwardness, was how deeply Franzen was tangled up in questions about who reads serious fiction and why. By 2010, the second act of the Oprah relationship had arrived: Freedom was named the first book club selection of the final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show, and on the 6th of December, 2010, Franzen appeared on the show to discuss both the new novel and the old controversy.

• 4. Freedom and the Time Cover

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  On the 8th of June, 2009, The New Yorker published an excerpt from Franzen's novel in progress, titled "Good Neighbors," about a couple in St. Paul, Minnesota. A second excerpt, "Agreeable," followed on the 31st of May, 2010. By the time Freedom was released in September 2010, Franzen had become the first American author to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000. The headline read "Great American Novelist." He discussed the implications of that label in Manchester, England, in October 2010.

  Freedom arrived with an unusual publishing crisis: in early October 2010, a recall was initiated in the United Kingdom after an earlier draft of the manuscript, containing over 200 changes Franzen had since made, had been published by mistake. HarperCollins set up an exchange program, but thousands of copies had already been distributed. The novel itself drew praise comparable to what The Corrections had received. Franzen has said the writing of Freedom was influenced by the death of his close friend, novelist David Foster Wallace, whose suicide he later discussed on Fresh Air on the 9th of September, 2010. Their friendship had long intersected: back in 1992, when Franzen taught a fiction seminar at Swarthmore, he had invited Wallace to serve as a guest judge of the workshop pieces.

  Freedom sold 1.15 million copies, making clear that whatever unease Franzen carried about the place of literary fiction in popular culture, readers were not sharing it. The novel, a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, also won the 2010 Salon Book Award, the 2011 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and the 2011 John Gardner Award.

• 5. The Commercial Question

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  Purity, published in 2015, centered on a young woman named Purity Tyler, called Pip, who sets out to discover the identity of her father. The narrative moves through contemporary America, South America, and East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, described it as a multigenerational American epic spanning decades and continents.

  A television adaptation was announced in 2016, to be produced by Showtime as a 20-hour limited series. Todd Field would share writing duties with Franzen and playwright Sir David Hare. Daniel Craig was cast as Andreas Wolf. In a February 2018 interview with The Times London, Hare expressed doubt the project would ever be made, given a budget of $170 million, though he described the six weeks in the room with Field, Franzen, and Craig as "one of the richest and most interesting" of his life.

  Purity sold 255,476 copies, a figure that stands in sharp contrast to the 1.15 million copies Freedom sold and the 1.6 million copies of The Corrections. The source material records these numbers plainly, and the gap is stark. Franzen had already acknowledged, in a December 2012 interview with Portland Monthly, that he had let go of any illusion of being a writer of 150-page novels: "I need room to let things turn around over time and see them from the whole lives of other characters, not just the single character." The sales figures for Purity showed that a readership can hold a writer to the highest previous mark, and measure each subsequent book against it.

• 6. Essays, Birds, and Public Arguments

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  In 1996, while still working on The Corrections, Franzen published a literary manifesto in Harper's Magazine titled "Perchance to Dream." Referencing manifestos by Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe, among others, he grappled with whether the novel still had any relevance in an advanced media culture. He concluded by rejecting the goal of writing a great social novel about issues and ideas, choosing instead to focus on the internal lives of characters. Given what The Corrections would become five years later, the essay reads as a preview of his actual practice.

  Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker since 1994. His 2004 personal essay "The Discomfort Zone," about his childhood in Missouri and his love of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, was selected by Susan Orlean for the subsequent volume of The Best American Essays. In 2002, he published a critique of William Gaddis's novels in The New Yorker titled "Mr. Difficult," proposing two opposing models for fiction: a "Status model" in which fiction's purpose is to be Art, and a "Contract model" in which it is Entertainment. He confessed to praising The Recognitions while only getting halfway through J R.

  Franzen's birdwatching has become nearly as well documented as his fiction. He served for nine years on the board of the American Bird Conservancy, and a feature-length documentary based on his essay "Emptying the Skies" was released in 2013. He appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in March 2018 to discuss it, and in 2016 he competed on Jeopardy! during Power Players Week, donating his winnings to the American Bird Conservancy. In September 2019, his essay "What If We Stopped Pretending?" in The New Yorker staked out a pessimistic position on climate change and helped popularize the term "doomerism" in the debate that followed. That same year, The Corrections was voted sixteenth in the Guardian's list of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century.

  Franzen's translation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening was published in September 2007, though he had originally made it for Swarthmore College's theater department in 1986 for $50. He described the Broadway musical adaptation as "insipid" and "overpraised." The 2013 publication of The Kraus Project brought Franzen's annotations to three major essays by the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, with Franzen applying Kraus's social commentary to subjects including Twitter, Mac versus PC culture, and the influence of media conglomerates on politics.

• 7. Crossroads and What Comes Next

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  On the 5th of October, 2021, Franzen published Crossroads, the first volume of a planned trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies. The novel follows a pastor, his wife, and four children, split into two sections called "Advent" and "Easter." Writing for The Nation, Rumaan Alam observed that in Crossroads, "every plotline leads to God." Bookforum called it Franzen's "finest novel yet" and his "greatest and most perfect novel." Dwight Garner of the New York Times described it as "warmer than anything he has yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect." The Times Literary Supplement noted that it was "largely free from the vices to which Franzen's previous work has been addicted: the self-conscious topicality; the show-off sophistication; the formal heavy-handedness."

  Critics singled out the character of Marion for particular praise. Garner called her "one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction." The novel had been sold to publishers on the basis of a three-page proposal, and Franzen confirmed in a June 2018 profile in The New York Times Magazine that he had speculated the sixth novel might be his last: "So, I may be wrong... But somehow this new one really does feel like my last." By April 2020, he told The Millions he was "almost done." The first international academic symposium dedicated solely to Franzen's work had already taken place at Glasgow University on the 22nd of March, 2013, and a second symposium, "Jonathan Franzen: Identity and Crisis of the American Novel," was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, in April 2013. With two volumes of the trilogy still to come, that conversation remains open.