Jonathan Franzen talks with David Remnick - The New Yorker Festival - The New Yorker

after you we should have brought our guitars I didn't remember these terrible chairs until we stepped out here John's going to sing a little song for you but first but first I want to welcome you to the New Yorker festival and I get one shot to do this so I want to also thank Rhonda Sherman and her staff who puts this event together every year and does a magnificent job Overland who does the production and logistics Lisa Hughes on the business side and her staff which does a wonderful job our sponsors and the editorial staff of The New Yorker which is hosting conversations and events all over the city this weekend and above all I want to thank you for coming out not just from Brooklyn and Manhattan and parts close but also from as far away as Australia New Zealand and God knows where else oh thank you very much for coming this year Jonathan works in an office that is as bare of distraction as it's possible to get it a laptop in which he has superglued the ethernet out of existence and so that the internet the sink so he can't cheat and read slate or whatever it is you might read during the course of not working or even better than New York or calm kind of shuts the sunlight out but also no cell phone so this is a fancy way of saying turn off your devices and do your neighbor a favor and yourself a favor and we'll focus on on John for an hour and a half I should say that as a reader I can't think of a writer that's given me more pleasure over the years than the author of The Corrections and freedom and probably everybody here has read those books I should also recommend really highly his first two novels which I read in order as they came out as it happened with with with great surprise and in deep satisfaction the 27th city and strong motion also as an editor nothing can possibly give one more satisfaction than to have peace and sa a story from John come in and I highly highly recommend his essays not least the most recent one in which he kind of was in the steps of Robinson Crusoe earlier in this earlier this year an essay that took in everything from the themes of solitude and reading in the origins of the novel and his friendship with David Foster Wallace an incredibly remarkable writer who means the world to me and I think to you so welcome Jonathan Franzen thank you John you have a there's a wonderful sentence that you once wrote or spoke I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming and and I wonder when it is you started as a reader to enter this this state of deliberate dreaming as a reader and you began to read intelligently and it occurred to you that maybe you could do this too good morning good morning good morning The New Yorker has been nothing but nice to me since 1994 and probably being putting us in these chairs is the worst thing it's like they're incredibly uncomfortable and on and on fiction night you you don't have to sit in these so thank you all for coming out this morning at this grisly hour of 10:00 a.m. the first books I remember reading and being and responding to were a couple of biographies of Thomas Edison when I was maybe in third or fourth grade I immediately wanted to become an inventor and what appealed to me about that first of all he had this he had these cool laboratories he was a boy and he hid a laboratory in a boxcar boxcars are incredibly romantic for a child and then the idea of having a chemistry lab in a boxcar was just truly sublime when I was nine so yeah I wanted my own chemistry lab and eventually sort of got one and and then there followed about six years of realizing I was no not really any good at science but I think it's significant the first thing I wanted to be was an inventor that that you had lots of free time and you made stuff up so that that that prefigured that I would say in terms of actually wanting to emulate by by the time I was in high school and reading reading science fiction it seemed like that was a good thing to do too you made up these just totally made-up stories who are you reading ah I was reading you know Asimov and herbert and arthur c clarke Ray Bradbury all the Ray Bradbury was so disturbing Matt was a little too young for him so there was a second phase of thinking I wanted to be just a you know an inventor of popular stories and then then it was College where I encountered serious literature and a really great literature professor that I thought who opened up the German moderns in a way that allowed me to see that these were books written by people that they were struggling with stuff themselves you know you know anything about Kafka's biography and then you see the kind of fiction that came out of that the notion that that you could do these not only that you could but that it was necessary to be formally innovative in order to get at the stuff that was most bothering you that was kind of a third the third step man I thought if I could do all of those things you know be the inventor with free time and tell popular stories and also I came out of I came out of Webster Groves Missouri with this notion of personal growth I've been in this Christian Fellowship which I've written about for The New Yorker and this is a long answer to your question David but did it did it occur to you as some some kids who grew up in seemingly ordinary circumstances suburban New Jersey nice circumstances in Webster Groves st. Louis in the st. Louis environs and then they read Hemingway and Fitzgerald in it a curse and it may be that their lives are too ordinary that there's not enough stuff there for them and they haven't discovered their interior life yet and so the things that around them are not lions and tigers in the green hills of Africa or or the where the nightlife of Paris in the 20s or the South of France did you think well maybe I just don't have enough material to even even dream of writing know that became a worry later because at the time I thought you could just make it up and you can't well you you have to you have to and in fact the interesting things that have happened to me stories I might tell over dinner to entertain someone basically don't make good fiction in any Heppell z' hands they do you mean anecdote anecdote yeah so the experience you turn out to need is awful emotional experience and you know even in the suburb of lucky you would let you felt yucky in that uh yeah perhaps because of my over sensitivity I felt I had a treasure trove of deeply uncomfortable emotional experience before I was even eighteen that's where they mostly come now you're my experience I don't but you had parents who my 30s was dedicated to disproving good parents who were not exactly high on the idea of either your brother becoming a filmmaker your becoming a writer that this was that the arts were something you did in your spare time avocation my mother love that word I've never even heard the word until she began telling me that that's what writing should be and what was expected of you yeah they were they were they were children of the depression and I think I think economic security was very important to them so I don't think they were thrilled with the idea by being a research scientist I got mixed messages because it was all about economic security and yet my father told me again and again don't do what I did don't let somebody else steal the fruit of your labor and not coincidentally none of his sons went into a corporate setting I have a brother who's a doctor or brother who started as a filmmaker became a building contractor self-employed and I've been basically nothing but self-employed my entire life but I think I think the that was coupled with you have to serve society you have to do something useful and the more talent you have the greater your obligation to do something useful and they just could not conceive that telling lies for a living was what serving society in any way and you began writing it aesthetically in response to certain writers certainly yes not just Isaac Asimov I think later stuff crooked great yeah those German moderns really kind of knocked my socks off so Nietzsche mom Rilke and Kafka above all how did you how did you get started how do you give yourself permission to sit down and start writing a first novel of what turned out to be enormous ambition that's where I think coming from the Midwest and not and being so innocent and not knowing what couldn't be done helped but but I would say I I was I I spent some time this summer looking at some letters I wrote me fall after I got out of college I'm it was trying to work on an essay about the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus I've translated a couple of essays of his that are very very hard to translate and that needs some help need an essay to kind of make sense of and I was I was really in love with his work precisely at that time and I was I was shocked to see how self-conscious I was about a sense of mission to you know save the novel from what from from from marginalization from irrelevance where where did that come from I think it came from having part of who's just luck I this turns out to be the thing I'm best at doing and I I could very well have conceived some messianic ambition for a field I would would not have been very good at but so there was just luck there but I think that I've internalized that sense of responsibility from my parents so drastically that the idea of just kind of floating along as a writer didn't seem useful enough I had to manufacture a sense of mission glue is the initial mission the initial mission really was to to translate that which I loved so much about the modern about modernism which which remains the touchstone for me literally into something that my parents could read and seriously I mean that there would be it would be welcoming that you would take he would take us a modern sensibility in a modern and self-consciousness about method but try to try to create books that would be welcoming to non-specialists and that was from the get-go not only Decker the first two no no I mean that that's what this the first book has a thriller plot mm-hmm and and yet what I wasn't I was thinking about some thriller ish books I was thinking about the Martin Beck mysteries the Swedish writers but I was you know no less thinking about Pynchon and and Kafka and was willing to well that's not true I was hoping that both things would come through and then the book was reviewed in the mystery and crime section of the New York Times Book Review I didn't know that yeah it was it was a nice review and it was you can see the the mystery reviewer was a little bit sore saying mr. Franzen seems to be after somewhat larger literary game here this is not your ordinary it was like hello here so did you succeed that your parents read the book and and did my father read it twice and it's actually one of the things that one of the happiest things between us he actually my my my mother was disturbed by the language in the sex and and reminded me that a minor character who's sort of a teenager named Janice Jones is the name of the daughter of one of her friends in my defense I was unaware of that but it so my buddy anise Jones is aware of it did she read the book I can't help thinking not but but by my dad then reread it carefully a second time and wrote me this nice letter saying I think this could be a Great American Novel and the idea that he knew the phrase Great American Novel and would you know he probably liked it better than anyone else did at the time but he really made an effort to see I think I think he was genuinely proud to have an intellectual son because he was sort of a sorted intellectual himself and I think he got a glimmer of why I might get how was he a thought it intellectually you know he was taking my my parents met at a night school philosophy class he was nearly 30 and he was he was trying to self-educate like reading the German philosophers and was very very proud that he'd been the number one student in his tiny class in northern Minnesota and as a story he liked to tell about it was not the popular girl everybody thought was going to be the valedictorian it was him Earl who the country boy he really was the country boy didn't get electricity in their house until he was in high school so I think he was very proud and felt that he was wasting that to some extent having because because of economic fears after two novels you had a kind of crisis that you've you've written about some you've talked about before but I'd like to sort of go through this your father died you hadn't found a wide audience the way you I think imagined or hoped you had all kinds of questions about the nature of the novel and novel writing that you were sorting through with yourself and also with friends including David Wallace a lot of things were going on all at once how did how was that lived unhappily yeah I had a marriage that was falling apart that too had no money Vanek and how'd you make a living I were basically exhausting the royalty advances for my first two novels was the was the principle strategy I tried to write a screenplay on spec did four drafts of that and then really basically didn't make a living just drastically cut expenses moved to the movies important to you in any way or was it just a way to make some money it was a get-rich-quick scheme basically a terrible screenplay terrible what was it it was called black leather gloves I like that I thought it was a good title at the boy I feel you didn't take it seriously and they're only really was only one problem which was the moment I was asked it was basically repeating the plot of fun with Dick and Jane a movie I had not seen and was not aware of doomed from the start - back to you oh yeah back to me it was a it was it was a it was a hard time but increasingly an exciting time I thought there had been sick for a number of years he was really he was absolutely himself but he was not at all himself for the last few years with his dementia and the I think this is those years in a nutshell when he when he finally died he was about to die and I went out to st. Louis and he rallied he wasn't eating or drinking anything and and was just you know really low blood pressure barely breathing and he he rallied and I actually felt bad about that I thought maybe he could have just made it through the door if I hadn't shown up but he he then rallied and was to everyone shock nurses saying things like I guess your dad was never a smoker hung on for another week and it became this grueling ordeal just waiting for the end and my mom and I were trading places 12 hours each sitting with him and finally I was home scrambling some eggs and she called from the hospital and she said I think you better come over and I remember very very specifically remember finishing the scrambled eggs enjoying I like scrambled eggs they're a nice platform for butter and I remember driving over to the nursing home and it was it was one of those wonderful late May st. Louis nights where there was big thunderstorms coming it had been very sultry and suddenly just the trees were thrashing and the wind and and feeling the purest joy I had ever felt that Blues Traveler song was playing on the radio and I just felt I'm alive and and that's really what the whole the whole time became it was it was I'd become an old man almost as soon as I got out of college and got married I was trying to write old man books in a way I was trying to write as if I was not a kid didn't want to write some you know coming-of-age story because I'd skipped over coming-of-age I tried to land squarely in middle aged adulthood and that being in my 30s I felt like I was in my early 20s and life suddenly was full of possibility and that things might get to be fun after all and and it was such a it was and it was a liberation for him it was so fun I he was so afraid of dying and he had to work hard to get through the door and and yet once he once he was through we were all liberated and I felt him yeah we were I was freed yeah and you needed to do the freedom people want of a better word sorry but but freedom needed to come to your work and how would how was that achieved this is a real enormous difference between strong motion and what would come years later in the corrections and and it took an enormous amount of thinking through and hundreds of pages dumped in the garbage what was warren box okay what was the work like what was what was what was fought through a lot of it had to do with letting go finally of that sense of social responsibility political social is much well sort of yeah i was not only taken with thee with those with the all the american postmodern writers with their their really radically oppositional take on post-war culture but also with the with the first wave of hardcore academic theory such as paranoid theory essentially there's you know we're reading the text for for signs of what's wrong with liberal culture essentially the hope all of them the Marxists the Freudians Derrida Foucault Lacan even although I never quite understood look calm and you know that which be of course quickly became as the turning of a very familiar crank all of those theories but in their in their first instantiation they seem to be promising something exciting we're really going to read read everything about human experience and society against the grain Freud is all about reading against the grain what you think you know suspect the opposite of what you what you feel and and and Foucault with is his notion of how power informs discourse those are really really exciting ideas and I had the sense of I got to keep on trying to crack the the monolith of consumer culture and and and consumer corporate culture and that's what that the you know these books are supposed to be bombs that will blow up the shell and and usher in what exactly was the thing I never stopped to try to figure out and it's a bobbin with all these critiques of liberal society too it's like what and what is the alternative and you and you give up the ghost on this effort is this in a sense kind of yeah and and and with that was sort of a and in wish to be encyclopedic the wish to tell it to construct a narrative that would include everything issues oriented fiction really a reflective of reading of wit wit novels for example underworld and gravity's rainbow in this kind of um yeah Gatos Coover I loved origin of the brew nests I loved public burning these were committed books you know origin of the Bruna's Cooper's really really remarkable first novel still my favorite book of his it's just this wholesale attack on American religion and and then he took on politics in the public burning committed fiction as it were and and and one and and the thing the the great thing about oppositional writing is you don't really have to define who you are you just you're defining yourself in opposition and you can be very very smart no one no one is going to think you're a shrimpy little kid because you're angry and you're taking on the big issues of the day and letting go of that was actually really really hard to to move to the point of writing a book about you know amid what Midwestern mother getting a Christmas at her home I mean I it was humiliating I was like I just I was I was like how can that be my story and yet there was more and more evidence that that was the story that that was in fact the plot so how was there evidence of it you start playing with these deadness of pages yeah is because pretty much the let's remark like a lack of desire to go to work in the morning I mean the corrections is something you've worked on for the better part of a decade at least and then really wrote in months yeah yeah we're drugs involved I mean I 1010 seriously ten months to write a novel of that ambition and length I don't think most people could type that but oh and months as you can do it in six weeks um three weeks probably even I mean you described the process of you give an interview once to Terry Gross we're of self psychoanalysis that that that had to be endured for yeah there are all the the last two novels have had shadow unreadable novels in the form of notes where I essentially try to figure out what is wrong with me and what is wrong with my relation to these objects that I've created it's a character is a psychological object you to go back to the deliberate dreaming we tend to dream about important psychological objects they may just be important from the residue of the day but more often you know my father shows up in my dreams so my father's been dead for 15 years he's not dead in my dreams it's often often I will have a certain puzzlement that I'm speaking to him because I remember that he's dead but he's not dead to me those are the and those those objects that you keep coming back to when you're dreaming they clearly you're in an important relationship to them they probably the deep structures of your of your identity and your personality are bound up and how you feel about those objects and more and more I think of the work of fiction writing as the creation of the deliberate creation of objects that you have that intensity of feeling about and that that have that same relation to the to the deep structures of who you are but even though you're there's that there's a shift to wanting to entertain more even more assertively than before politics and big questions don't go out the window there's still very much there in the last two books sure yeah what changes in the treatment of them of the regard the plaintiff regard to them well the corrections was still quite satirical it was it was a simple shift you know is I was not the simplest way to say it is I no longer felt I was doing something for society by writing these books I felt I was trying to create gifts to give to people in my community of readers and writers and and if this there is still a social element in those books it's I'm making use of it because it helps deepen and complicate the lives of these fictional objects I've created you know it's it's Enid goes to see a doctor on the ship in the correction the mother in the correct yeah the mother in the corrections and you know he's trying to put her on a late-model drug to make her feel less ashamed of her life and that's a satiric idea of course the anti shame medication but but without Enid in the scene I have no interest in writing it and it's what she does with the satiric conceit that now interests me so it's just it's really it's it's a it's a flipping of the priorities the characters are not there to illustrate or effectuate these these social dramas the social is there to make the lives make these characters live characters lives more difficult and difficulty of course is interesting and you want to be interesting so something else happened with the corrections that you developed a enormous audience in fact some months ago I saw you in Washington there was a Washington Book Festival held outdoors and there would be lines for various authors certain authors of a recent biography for example had a line about as much for a slice of pizza at at 4 o'clock in the afternoon your line was kind of like for The New Yorker festivals it was endless and this how does this affect your work the fact that you have this big audience people waiting for a next book and the kind of critical reception that you that you get or that maybe a separate issue will get to it III think it's made me a less angry person I could you know that that's the main thing and I and to go on to the more I mean that the one of the differences to me between the corrections is in freedom is the freedom is not a satiric book it doesn't have that anger driving the satire I don't I don't I don't think I'm smarter than my characters anymore I don't think I'm smarter than the world anymore but when I was angry you know it was I'm right and the world is wrong and I'm pissed off about it so success is in a sense humbling makes you nicer you know we always think were nice so I wasn't like I thought I wasn't nice before it's only now that I examined the evidence that I got the sense that perhaps I wasn't all that nice I think I was still nice to my friends but that's really in the 90s when I was so depressed about fiction the only way I could find my way forward was by giving up on engagement with the mainstream that seemed first of all it hadn't worked out for me mainstream didn't seem too interested in being engaged with and and so I thought well okay I'm sorry but what's the definition of the mainstream what are we talking about what Steinbeck Steinbeck had I'm back you're reading Steinbeck like crazy now from I was reading I was reading Steinbeck last summer I was trying I was trying to do a piece on Steinbeck for you and then I read a biography of him I decided I didn't actually like him very much our loss but but East of Eden is an amazing novel something wrong on every page and yet heroic and fantastic but you know he he hung out with with senators and movie stars and well Life magazine fault what Steinbeck doing oh he's going to Vietnam what's of all you know all of that stuff the writer was this public figure and the work Grapes of Wrath actually had really did was one of those rare American novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin but I changed that actually did change things and I think I think awareness was raised of the plight of itinerant farmworkers in California and do you think despite your your your stature now being on the cover of Time magazine etc etc that this is but it's markedly different than Steinbeck Hemingway that kind of thing that that that a novelist cannot move the dial in the way he or she could 50 60 years yeah I think I mean I don't think it whatever what I was going to say is I don't think it's changed quite as much as I'd feared I think there is still a place in the culture for and not just one novelist for novelists plural what is what has happened is that my estimation of the size of the community has has expanded considerably it I thought okay well maybe they're only ten thousand Americans who who enjoy reading Alice Monroe or Janet frame or Dennis Johnson but that's okay I'm one of them and I'd like to try to write books for the for that community and it's been this just I'm still kind of getting over the fact that it turns out that the it's it's it's not a fraction of a percent of the American population who is some level dissatisfied with with the everyday conventional narrative and might actually enjoy narratives that have more shades of grey to them and do you think other other interests other screens other media are shrinking the audience or that it doesn't matter and it was always a relatively small audience I think it was always a relatively small audience if you were in the middle class in the nineteenth century especially if you weren't in the city with a theater for entertainment the novel was it so I think there was it there was a phase and particularly maybe in America where people were so self improving I think there probably was percentage-wise a larger audience but when you look at you look at the bestseller figures for 1910 or even 1950 you know Edith Wharton sold 150,000 copies of house a house of mirth in the first year it was it's after it was published bestsellers in America were still selling 150,000 like the number one bestseller $175,000 175,000 copies in 1950 so something is not quite maybe maybe libraries were being used orders of magnitude more heavily than they are now but something tells me that that the audience is not actually that that percentage is kind of fixed mm-hmm it's like it's the in twisting people and it's only people I care about frankly you know you only care about the interesting people well they're interesting because I care about them maybe but one of the publishing is but I want to go back to your question about is are the other screens shrinking the audience I don't think I I don't think the way future films are heading the novelist does too much to worry about you know unless he's doing what about Simon all but would have led the way television but what about the way television is heading you you have a number of television series most famously the wire and others that are kind of like we've beaten this metaphor to death but but extended nineteenth century novel episodic forms that unspool and unspool and are very reflective in a very serious way or an interesting way about societies and microcosms of society or micro societies do you see potential either for competition or enhancement there well a couple of things I I was much more inclined in the dark 90s to see TV as death and the competition and partly because I was watching my so much TV myself in those years and and reading so a few novels so it was a self-loathing things kind of yeah and and not just TV but bad TV I mean Lily watching I was I was I was I never missed Dancing with the Stars married no married with children I mean really bad TV yeah I know and I came late to cheers and so in syndication you could watch cheers every night of the week even without cable so yes one of the things happen is that TVs gotten better like a lot better the what cable cable has enabled really really cool TV my own personal favorite is Breaking Bad at this point that's the one I'm most involved with with the wire yes sure but as I argued in that Crusoe piece I'm now much more inclined to think that people that the experience of watching the wire is essentially akin to the experience of reading a novel and is essentially different from the experience of texting social media surfing the web that there that there you are agent versus distraction engagement versus distraction involvement in a set of made-up characters some commitment although the wire was not great on this some commitment to a coherent narrative it might not be the narrative but a coherent narrative extended over time the thing I would say about TV is that it the comparison with the 19th century is is correct because TV is now doing what the what the great social fiction of the 19th century did but it but it can't do what modernism does and and the end the end the the possibilities for what you can do with tone and point of view which Henry James was among the early people to explore that kind of stuff doesn't work so well in individual medium well you're now writing scripts for the Corrections for HBO what are you out - yeah I am what do you what are you out to achieve there what's possible when you take this novel and bring it to another medium and it's and it's you doing it we're trying to do just have HBO throw the check across that is a Faulkner used to say that the best way to write for the movies is you wrote script you threw it across the California state line day through the check over and you ran like hell you're not doing that no I didn't it I'm really engaged now I've been working with Scott Rudin and Noah Baumbach since I guess last December to design a show we had it we had an opportunity here because it's really it's it's not a miniseries it's an actual series we had an opportunity I think to do something that has not been done where we know what happens in the last episode and the and the entire and that all four seasons can be very carefully designed in advance normally with TV or kind of will we be renewed you don't want to save it up because you you want to spend what you got and worry about the next season next season and and and because we had so much more time to work with them than there was material in the novel it was an opportunity to tell a story at many different points in time that is spread over 30 years and have those all have equal weights you're not dealing with flashbacks you're dealing with this story the story of you know the family when Alfred retires 17 years earlier that is just as much part of the present story as the present and to figure out how to make that work it was actually it seemed like it could be really cool um is it are you having do you like doing this I do I do I it's fun it's really fun it's fun too you don't feel the pull of obligation to the next novel it or pieces yes I do yeah and I miss I really miss I miss the failure which is which is what you which is what I do when I'm trying to get a new novel started as I go and I fail and there's something exquisitely miserable about that that failure but there I'm really engaged with after a few days of failure I have to say well why am i what I begin to look at my own sense what's failing in me why am I not up to the challenge and it becomes a an occasion to open the door on all the stuff that in a busy life you want to keep the door shut on and I and that sense of really solitary engagement with a person who feels like he actually has an identity that might have more to it than you might have guessed that I miss but I've been I've been away from the novel for a long enough that I I felt like the world's leading expert on these characters without without eight years yeah without there being mine and it's been really fun to to to to dream up all of these this new material and to to imagine what was to work out what these characters were doing it points in their life that the novel just skated past John how do you feel about this sort of criticism that comes out after a novel that you've written since last time a couple of novelists were reacted to the Time magazine cover by and and also the critical reception of freedom by saying well this would never been accorded to a woman and I think Jodi Pico was the woman who did is that her name and and when in fact some of your your your most intense reading and focus on and recommendations on are a lot of female novelists how did you react to that or does it feel apart from you where you take it personally it felt apart from me mostly I believe some of this was happening via Twitter mm-hmm it's a good way to keep it apart from me mmm-hmm did not receive those tweets personally oh thank god it seems they got to you somehow they made it to the paper they made it to sure yeah no I eventually you have to do interviews when the book is coming out if not in this country in other countries so yeah I get asked about it a lot how do you react um well partly I think I think they're right to some extent I I took up the cudgels for Alice Monroe because I I felt as if when people are just rattling off who are the leading North American writers it's often it'll be familiar names and certainly you know Cormac McCarthy should be on that list but why are we not talking about Alice Munro who's just like the genius in our midst why why is this not happening so I I do think there is I think a certain kind of performative fiction have you been used the phrase guy riding you guy right yeah there was a guy there is a kind of guy right what does that mean it lends itself to scholarly treatment and that and that that in a kind of guys jostling each other to get to the front of the pack you know has a has a certain obvious ambition to it that that probably has certainly historically and and even now I think fostered an imbalance in what gets talked about as canonical yeah so I think I mean I don't think that my impression was not that was not really what the tweets were talking about yeah I hadn't want to do it with publicity I think yeah you write exquisitely about your friendship with David Wallace in in that recent New Yorker essay I wanted to was wondering if you could talk about Infinite Jest as a novel what what it means to you where do you what importance it had to you as a writer and as a reader I love that book I remember I read it I'm still sort of in a dark place and I read it in manuscript mmm I'm nostalgic for that time in my life where I could read for five hours every evening night after night and I think I read for about ten days you know five hours a night and it was really pretty blown away by it I had some criticisms of it we don't need the eschaton section at that length there are some problems with it but by and large I thought it was a monumental achievement I think it's you know he he really did it and what he had done was he had he had done that oppositional postmodern thing while also writing about the stuff there was life and death for him he was he was the life and his own life and death were right on the page there and and that was that that that especially at that time seemed to me the project and he had brilliantly succeeded on it we kind of hit I mean he was a vastly better tennis player than I am but we would kind of serve novels back and forth at each other and it got me the other people's are you around no our own I was a sort of alternation I was you know I I think he was a bit stricken by 27 City and I was stricken by Infinite Jest and then I tried to make him feel stricken with the corrections and that's stricken in the sense of like competitive in yeah yeah competitive wounding really it so really is a boy thing uh I I wouldn't be that gender essentialist if you want to call it a boy thing sure but you know I one of the reasons I miss him so much is that they have that yeah and I and I think we be kid we what what you do would you when you watch you know Borg and McEnroe play there there they are playing they're trying to play d21 their own string Raley another game yeah the game is raised but also you become McEnroe became more McEnroe playing against Connors and Borg Joe had it what Infinite Jest do to you what how did you become more friends in well you know the one thing that the striking thing about Infinite Jest formally is that it is not a novel of closure so he'd really I think I think he he went the non closure route and that's not you though no I'm a closure guy I'm a complete the form kind of guy and I think I probably became more and more that in reaction and and certain you know like why compete on the level of rhetorical excellence with David Wallace nobody can compete so you kind of any any inclination I might have had to develop in that direction was you know those energies were shunted into the things I did well and that's that's that's how a that's how a literary game any that's what makes it fun and and you your as you get older you realize you know I can't be all things I can't be every kind of novelist the goal is to be more and more the kind you're you're best suited to be and and that competition really Foster's that how do you feeI mean you're hardly with the same more or less same age how do you feel age impinging or widening your your approach to your work you're now taking the time to do involved television project you travel a fair amount what do you feel that you've got to do time not being infinite for us anyway I like the year when I'm reading a novel and I'm you know my my I would feel extraordinarily lucky if I got to have a year like that a couple more times I again the crazy 22-year old I was said I plan to write six novels when you see people of an earlier generation Updike Roth Bela let to a lesser extent but others who write much more constantly or publish more constantly I mean to write more constantly to how do you look at that well there are two kinds of writers I mean I'm the other kind no wait that's that's actually been the that is not to make this into a New Yorker lovefest but it is the New Yorker festival that has been that was a that was a great and life-changing thing to discover that I could do non-fiction for you and that there that there was there was something that would what why would it because it could I mean I'm not a very good journalist but I've gotten better and what does that mean I get you well you gave me that great advice before you sent me to Washington I start making mistakes when I get out of bed in the morning because I think I'd said yeah I mean but I'm you know when you're when you're a fiction writer you don't want to make mistakes I mean if you make mistake it will never see the light arrived at some light that you make mistakes year month after month yes but they never see the light of day whereas if you say the wrong thing in an interview with Tom DeLay or something the mistake is a slight leave me Tom DeLay will never notice well you were very reassuring but no it's to to see that there that the to make a well made to make well a a piece of narrative nonfiction although not this not the total life challenge that writing a novel is is nonetheless a really interesting artistic challenge well I was I was fascinated to hear that there there are some people in this world who feel it's oh that posted have a kind of hyper postmodern view of nonfiction fiction questions that it's all writing and that questions of facts facticity and well that's kind of square and old-fashioned and it's okay that Capucine ski does what kappa chin ski does and kind of makes this up because it's really just a metaphor for Poland itself and other writers that one could name who have a different view of fact and fiction you're pretty strict about the dividing line you see you you think it's limiting who's allegedly writing on fiction and cheats it yep it's cheating the readers somehow in in a way that should be kind of like David hitting parties on that Dave Dave Wallace yeah so well yeah because he thought it was okay to make up dialogue on the cruise ship for instance yeah I'm heartbroken to hear it I know I know it's no those things didn't actually happen you notice he never published any nonfiction in your magazine not for one of trying but that's another matter but he would have he would have been he would have fell before the factory I think the fact checkers and to be the factory we're I'm so afraid of fact checkers good but that's you know that's kind of like the boundary lines antennas you know it's that was a great shot only problem was it was two feet behind the baseline yeah I really cried that well when I called it in well I yeah and it's not - I love that I love that cruise ship peace of days no I'm not but but I it was it yes I did - somewhat different approaches I how are we on time I think we're we're at 15 minute 57 so okay we'll be I've got a couple more quick questions and then you're going to ask questions there are microphones situated hither there in yon and you'll come up to them so you might want to line up now the President of the United States is a writer or was a writer when will again be a right and will again be a writer I hope not for another five years or so are you disappointed no I'm not because I somehow I got the I think I got a fairly clear idea of who he was and I'm sorry he didn't come along five years later I think I think an extra five years of agony well you know five years of experience might have made him a little more tough in some ways that could have helped him especially in the last year I don't think he he did the government shutdown thing in summer I don't think he handled that as well as he could have but the debt crisis the debt crisis exactly but you know I knew he was not going to do anything for the environment I knew he was type of with Wall Street people first that's the first time I heard about him was from a Wall Street banker mm-hmm I said who are you liking for the for 2008 and this guy said oh yeah Barack Obama like yeah hearts you kidding no I heart didn't sink because I he'd given that great speech at the convention and I you know we knew who Barack Obama was but it was no I didn't oh you meant my heart sank I'm Obama's behalf no I thought actually this guy has a chance of winning mm-hmm I see my heart rose like wow okay smart Wall Street money is on this guy he's got it he's got a chance but how disappointed can you be that he is substantially caved to the financial if I remember right once if you not expected him not to a summer go he bought your book and I even read it he claimed to have read it you met him right I did meet him but you talked about mostly Nixon I got him off the subject of freedom as fast as I could you know I'm up I'm a - cheers for Richard Nixon kind of guy it's funny because he was he was he was because you invited me um where's our last liberal president he was our last liberal press the president yeah no he gave us our stuff more dinner party saying that yeah yeah no but I'd be this evening or this morning no right on down the line especially environmentally but also well appropriate welfare exactly all these things he signs into law some legislation so much more liberal than anything Clinton or Obama did or could it's a it you know so I made by my case four dozen and I'm hit Obama given he laughed and said yeah the only problem was he was crazy the twitter hashtag is tny wasn't hurt my last question what would you like to learn but you probably never will and don't have the time for Russian David ah well we can fix that we can fix that we have a little Russian lesson on stage right now you know Nabokov once said that that that when he taught Russian that his kids never got past the cog we push you by - yah - oh how are you I am fine stage that's about as far as I can take you questions from the audience I think maybe we can even lift up the lights a little bit or maybe even take down these and take down these and get new chairs but we don't ask too much okay this poor guys struggling out imagine if he had to sit on that I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street movement protests people that are downtown it was an exciting moment yesterday when look like Radiohead was going to play there I actually believed that when I when it first was bruited about I first heard about it in Europe I think it's getting a lot more attention in Europe than it is here I'm all for it what does that mean all being all for it oh what's it yet I'm all for I'm all for attention being paid to you know the giant blood sucking squid which is not to say that we don't need a financial services industry but just that it has become such a large part of our economy and it is not I don't I don't think I don't think money about money is meant to be as large a percentage of the country's GNP as ours has become I mean it's not it's not a product it's just currents it's it's currency it's it's it's froth and I anything that I'm a Democrat and and I I think and I I think a pro Nixon Democrat natch no and I think anything that that actually revives what what what Republicans are quick to call class warfare that is revive a conversation about the economic disparities and particularly just what the how utterly shafted the middle class is even if even if you have a job that you that you are effectively paying more in taxes than someone who is making money on money and putting a five million dollar addition on their townhouse it's just it's just not right so and and I think Obama is in a really tough position because he needs those Wall Street people and yet he is I think rightly seeing an opportunity in the midst of a depression like extended recession like downturn I mean I don't know what this terminology of is a little hard to follow there's a shitty time yes but a real unemployment rate of 16 percent it seems like that should be raising some some sort of socialist questions and and that would I think it'd be good for American discourse it would be good - shame shame of the people who would call that class warfare go ahead some oh hi look up back-and-forth heaven and I'm just going to turn this way because I haven't it's not that far there god I just wondered where your medical references come from and your books is after me or brother being a doctor is that from your experiences with your dad or your own experiences for your interest in science or earlier in life I have checked a factor too with my brother injuries I term Anala G the there's a lot of medical stuff in in the corrections and that yeah partly from reading and partly from watching my dad my mom was sick most of her adult life with something or another so doctors are not strangers in our family some of your references were so detailed that you had some kind of training yourself it seemed like it came from someone that had been through Thank You Nichols I read the corrections during medicals know the fact about me is I'm really actually a very lazy person especially when it comes to research and so so the fact that I'm getting getting away with it is really nice to hear first thank you I'm interested in you talking a little more about how Freud might influence your work especially a little louder sir I'm interested in how Freud might influence your work especially in freedom I thought a lot about beyond pleasure principle of sort of characters pursuing their own demise and also you have attention with Natural Resources being expended and then there's this love story that happens throughout to that kind of interrupts worrying about conservation talk a little bit more about those beings would be great that was many things it's been a long time since I actually sat down and read Freud and when you do he's kind of a weird mix of the crackpot the wrong and the incredibly profoundly right I find one of the things that the the created modernism I think was a revolution in human psychology and Freud was certainly part of that and for it was very literary writer he was you know his touchstones were Greek tragedy Dostoyevsky this idea that you don't the Bible basically it's a it's a rather short step from the from the tragic faith that the world is smarter than we are to to the to the Freudian sense of you you don't actually know what you're doing and and and and of course probably took that further and and saw some potential therapeutic benefit in becoming a little bit more aware of what you don't know you're doing so to be that stuff is just exciting simply exciting and catnip to to the fiction writer because people doing people doing things that they're not aware of doing is hilarious often you know when someone is obviously in love with another person and is is giving that away and everything they say but vehemently denying it that's a that's an amusing watching them slip Freudian ly is is is deeply satisfying fiction I find for instance and Android also was always calling attention to two primary objects is you know pay attention to how you feel about mom and and dad and pushed what mission efficient accomplished yes exactly and especially since we live in such anti psychological times now it goes me too - if anything try to be more in-your-face about how you're making mistakes because you are not the author of your life there is there is there something else being worked out that you are kind of riding on top of and the job is to is to think about your relation to that which is happening beyond your control and that that that actually even has a little bit of metaphorical resonance with you just being an informed citizen in a world that is so out of control you know the we know so much we can do so little so all of that it's just a very attractive package for me yeah it sort of follows up on that I loved freedom and my question is not intended as a criticism of it because I understand that art is its own organic whole but as someone who who I think I can do it that I share your politics by and large it left me feeling politically hopeless and I wonder what your reaction hopeless or hopeless hopeless well I was at some pains to be as hard on Liberal Democrats as on neocon Republicans just as a matter of novelistic praxis the last thing we need is more novels espousing the political views of their authors I think hopeless I admit to being a little discouraged it's hard not to have learned hard not to have lived through the changes in political discourse in the last 10 years and not be a little a little discouraged more than usual maybe so yeah maybe a little bit yeah the the rage levels and the the the sense that we are being that it is being so much driven by the technology and the technologies always is all about stimulation and as opposed to interaction and discussion it's like what can you what can you what can you say or do to get attention I do feel like the the level of boldface this is your impression do you think there's a lot more lying that really just is at such a well there's the new step rocket lying around and and and and and the streams of various parties have gotten more mainstream that's quite quite quite obviously witness they've really Republican then why don't you drink this question oh no I know Sarah can I talk enough but but hope but is there a political I think what Eric is getting at is is there a political job that you want your novels to do at all and was the reason I beyond exposure the reason I love Obama so much is that he seems to be proceeding from a reasonable premise which is that it's unlikely that all the really good people in this country have my politics and all the people who don't have my politics are really bad people and yet that's kind of the nature of the polarizing discourse is is to make you feel that but there are no good people on the other side how could how could you be a good person and vote for that person how and it's true that I will probably I would I would have a real hard time being close friends with someone who would who would vote furred for you know Rick Santorum with apologies to anyone in here who's voted for Rick Santorum Iife einde him like no and yet i also think that it is likely that some of the people who do vote for him are in fact good funny smart fully realized human beings and that that is that is the obama premise which is can we can we find a way to not demonize each other and and and recognize that these are you know these are fully vested differing views of how society and the economy should be organized and use the political process to reach some compromises that that will make no one happy but everybody may be less unhappy I think that's a worthy goal and I tend to me one of the things the fiction writer can do is to is to take some is to expend some effort to be honest about the shortcomings of one's own party and to explore human possibility in the other party thank you think they have time for a couple more um if we do too yeah so a similar to politics you seem to have some ambivalence about music musicians and her audience I was wondering if you could kind of speak to that since they played such a central role both as characters in the corrections with you know mouth listen pavement or in freedom and how you approach both the musicians and the audience that listens them that feels like adding like the most dangerous question I've had I have had various points in my life an incredibly intense relationship with certain kinds of music and and feel as if everything I write has some kind of soundtrack there'd be something that will inspire me that wonderful soufiane Stevens song Casimir Pulaski day that was that was really in my head when I was writing freedom that and there was then there was some there was a Cocteau twins on that I can't even I was never able to find out the name of I've actually gone through all of iTunes and like listened to 20 seconds every Cocteau twins that it's and somehow it's and none of them are as good as this one I don't know what it is if anyone like shout it out if there's like one that's just so it's just it's really haunting and it really it it moves me so effortlessly at the same time it doesn't have much content especially in the case of this Cocteau twins song the lyrics I can hear are sort of stupid so it's it's good that I can barely hear them and yet and yet the song just transported me and and I you know I wrote the end of freedom with that song totally in my head and and this is this is I feel a little bit let down by music maybe it's just that I've gotten older but I I had the sense that it was doing a little bit better job maybe because you still had the album and the album had some concept it carried concept with it and it carried relation of songs among one another it had an arc it had a little narrative arc those the great the great records of my youth you could actually sort of read as stories what were they what were the stories oh they were not very what with a great oh oh you think of something like Exile on Main Street or London Calling or remainin light I mean just the stuff I would have been listening to when I was that age and and now I just I feel like it's I am kind of with Richard Katz and feeling like it is turned into Chiclets it's turned into it's turned into a drug to help you not engage and not think and so I guess I maybe it's not a question at age with population no because I'm still finding stuff that moves me and and one reason I mentioned the Stephens is you know there is a I he still is trying to do concepts you know the the Illinois record David I'm a big fan of your work Jonathan I'm curious to hear your reflections on your dust-up with Oprah what does stop you know we almost get out of here did you not see us embrace on national television that's why she went off the air is that it was not the only factor I think um no sorry there there there will be no more on that subject but I I really I feel like she she was kind enough to pick my last two books for her book club and and this time it worked out to actually go on the show and talk about it after four segments on Michael Jackson's secret family happy also we we and we managed eight minutes in conversation after those four compelling segments these two and then we'll we'll call it a morning um I'm gonna ask kind of a selfish right early question you talked a little bit about when you start a novel this exquisite sense of failure and that you actually enjoy that and I'm wondering what you would say okay somebody who feels a stymied by that sense of failure when you try to start such a big project this this might take us back to Freud a little bit the the it seems like an essentially Freudian situation to be stuck to to be to be locked in some neurotic paralysis and a useful fiction for me continues to be that you get stuck you shut down when there is some conflict in you that is not resolved typically a conflict between want and should that's that's one that really the devil's certainly has the devil be at many points in my writing life I want to write this I can't you shouldn't you shouldn't be writing about that you shouldn't because it's because it's embarrassing it's shameful you shouldn't because it'll hurt someone you shouldn't because it's it's not worthy it's not interesting you know all of that so just by way of a small and relatively not red-hot at the center of your conflicts example and when what I was saying I missed I don't miss failing who enjoys failing but I do miss the opening up of the conversation about I'm aware that I'm not an entirely happy person moving through the world I'm very busy now and I'm very pleasurably engaged like in this HBO project but I I also know you know I'm running fairly high anxiety levels and you know even just sitting here I'm I'm really kind of tense I suspect there's stuff going on that I just haven't had a chance to take a look at and and so you know I I really AM I'm increasingly an advocate of will sit quietly and try to be really honest with yourself as an approach to that sense of paralysis and we are down to our last questioner okay so I felt actually very sort of conflicted when I read freedom and I think that my basis after reflection is in Patty's character and I think actually that the things that I didn't like about her I realized that I saw myself and to avoid feeling that about myself I projected but anyway I was wondering this is the question this is very psychological already we're at we're ahead we could just quit war I was just wondering what is a relationship with your characters and to what extent do you create them or are they already created thank you that's a lovely question they are so created they are not they do not come ready-made in the earlier on they came ready-made more but now they do not that Paul come ready-made this gets back to the deliberate dreaming stuff you what to say I I have a hard time caring about pages written about a character I don't love it's funny how we get out of bed in the morning and unless we're moderately or worse depressed how self-love kind of comes naturally to us you-you'd that is what depression is it's you cease to like yourself but if you're not if you're not suffering acutely from that there's this sort of ready-made you get out of bed interested in what's happening to your life that you're you're living a story and you're interested in that and I think the reason you're interested in that story is that you at some fundamental you love the main character because if you were just to give a a simple realistic objective account of that characters day most of the world would not find it very interesting so if the if the F if if if what you're trying to write is a book that people are interested in reading like what's going to happen I think a very significant part of that interest comes from love you have to find see that and and maybe I mean the novelist is hoping that the carrot that the reader will love the characters but it's certainly you can't do without the writer loving the character I don't think and and it's a strange human project to sit in a dark quiet room from for year after year trying to come up with some wholly made-up figment of your imagination some some psychological object who you really have strong feelings for it's I mean it the wonder is that it can ever be done at all really and and and it's it's it's why I'm glad to be a human being that you can do that and that that we that the imagination is actually capable of things like that and what's more that as a reader one one exercises the kind of converse of that imagination and calls calls decodes these black symbols on a white page into something that has emotional reality and can be routed for so that's to answer your question basically yeah it's at this point especially to get I said all the relatively easy things like be easy to write about conflicts I already used up and now I'm left with the really really deeply buried hard and intractable ones that are also feel very compromising to me and so more and more I I feel that just is the work the work is to translate this is to find characters to believe in so that I can put myself into them John thank you very much David you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 68,919

Rating: 4.699779 out of 5

Keywords: Festival 2011, David Remnick, Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, festival, nyer festival

Id: JA2Ajqwc_yQ

Length: 86min 5sec (5165 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014