I'm reading an interview with Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian.
"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!... 'If you’re really engaged with [writing], 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... I don’t really care about bettering my soul...."
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"The Corrections" was an interesting, highly readable, and touching book. Very promising for its author's future. So I read Franzen's "Freedom" fairly soon after it came out. He is a good, maybe not great, satirist. It was funny, although the characters were repugnant. They were almost all Franzen's generation, it seemed. The people who surrounded him in college and young adulthood, perhaps?
But while "Freedom" was amusing, it had nothing of the touching and humane writing of "The Corrections."
One day, looking for something interesting to read, I thought I had the answer with "Crossroads." Franzen would at least be entertaining, right?
Nein. After one day with that one, I had to get it out of the house. All narrative charm had disappeared. Franzen is probably becoming all the cranky weirdness he used as subjects in his books.
I'm not reading the interview. I have read a little about him and he doesn't wear well, IMO. Throw in The Guardian and whoo boy no thankee! Although there could be some inadvertent laughs.
I think of all the arts, the practice of writing is the most harmful to its practitioner. It's no wonder that so many writers end up as divorced alcoholics. Writing is by its very nature a disruptive and unnatural act. Some muses are demons and do not have the writers' best interests in mind.......I have known a few opera singers. They're jolly people who enjoy their jobs. People should spend more time nurturing their operatic talents.
I haven’t read a novel in decades and my first degree was in English lit. Moved on to tech. The novel is an obsolete art form.
Dancing is probably good too. They all have super fit bodies, and I bet they indulge in a lot of great sex. Any creative art associated with music is probably good for you. Acting looks like fun too, especially those action hero roles. Not those brooding Eugene O'Neill roles though. Too much introspection is a bummer.
My new novel has leaned into some aspects of my selfbut franzens seems very pretensious
Never read Franzen, don't want to when there are so many great books to read.
At this point I must have read 15+ books on writing, and listened to hours and hours of authors talking about their process. His is one of millions. It's different for every writer.
The thing I've come to understand about writing is that it can only be done with an extreme commitment to it. This is not something you dabble in. Working it every day, like a job- same time every day, thinking about it much of the time when not doing it. But you have to devote a space and time to it every day. Writing from a studio, or a place that is set aside so that you can live in that atmosphere, with those characters only.
I am told that, at some point, it takes on a life of its own and carries you along with it. Some say they get to a point where it writes itself for a while, then runs out until they get another blast of it. But they have to keep working it until that next mine is tapped. I've had points like that, but not sustained and I am most definitely not focused enough to commit to what is needed.
So I have huge respect for people like Franzen who can do what he does. They all do it differently. He does seem to commit to his writing, like some sort of method actor.
I’ve read four of Franzen’s novels (Corrections, Freedom, Purity, and Crossroads). Contra Kai Akker, I found Corrections to be a difficult and frustrating read, and Crossroads to be the most engaging and insightful. Freedom and Purity were quite good as well.
Like Tom Wolfe, he creates very interesting female characters.
He will eventually cycle back around to angry and unforgiving when he has a new book to write.
Notice the pivot in the interview from 'Hey, I'm sort of becoming a better person,' to 'No, I wouldn't say that at all.' It's similar to the pivot from 'Hey, I'm an Oprah's Book Club selection,' to 'No, that would be middlebrow and demeaning and I better turn her down.'
Time and Newsweek were reproached for not putting a novelist on the cover for years, so one of them put Franzen on the cover. Franzen is supposed to be a symbol of novels and novelists still being relevant and important, but really, he's more of a symbol of how irrelevant and unimportant they have become.
He certainly is a great novelist, but I sorta gave up on Corrections half way through. Too domestic for me. Too much of the story involved Teenagers/College students. I want to read about adults over 25 - not kids.
A lot of novelists should let their novels speak for themselves. But they cant resist the temptation to tell us what they think about Life, the universe, and everything.
Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion will be more esteemed for their journalism than for their novels. It's similar with Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag. But I don't want to get into the arguments again about whether the literary novel is dead or not.
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