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Here it is: Description of a Struggle.
We are in a storage annex next to his office, which is Spartan.
Theres a small desk, a guitar on a stand.
The journal is full of notes-to-self that provide a real-time map of what was going through his mind.
Franzen writes intimately about his bleeding in entries hes kept …
… which he allowed me to share.
But Franzen seems to thrive on introspection.
Hes also unusually ambitious.
Hes very open about that.
Youll see that David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo figure prominently as pacing horses in Franzens account.
Heres how we get toThe Corrections.
He called this sort of book a Big Social Novel (his caps).
In 1996, he wrote an essay he called Why Bother?
The essay was a sensation; suddenly, he felt, all eyes were on him.
This was a mixed blessing.
But his own angst wasnt finding its way into his work.
He just couldnt write.
He had been taking little stabs at fiction again.
That was the kind of novel he had vowed not to write again, but he couldnt help himself.
Thats kind of it.
It launched his blazing career, full ofbig literary books that bore this signature.
So he is correctingThe Correctionsagain.
Here is Franzens own account.
He speaks in paragraphs.
When thinking, he looks away, burrows into his hands.
He wants to get it exactly right.
GettingUnstuck
Jonathan Franzen: Strong Motionhad just come out.
It was a bad time in my life.
AndStrong Motiondidnt do well.
I did a reading; there were like seven people there.
The book sank without a trace.
I taught a fiction workshop.
I ran out of money.
Things got worse and worse with my marriage.
And my father was falling apart.
It nearly killed my mother, having him at home.
And each person in my family was busy denying what was happening.
The earliest notes on a new novel came from the summer of 91.
And I believe I called that character Gary.
[She would become a bisexual chef.]
And I scratched at it a little bit; I might have written some pages somewhere.
Every once in a while, I would wistfully poke at the novel.
I would be shocked if there are ten pages from 94 or 95.
So from my perspective, I thought there were like 2,500 real readers!
Just sat down in my armchair and read all day.
I had some problems with it, but its a monster achievement that gets better as it goes.
And I hadnt written any fiction for three or four years!
And to get that, it was a blow.
And within a couple of days I started free writing.
The one thing I had been working on was a story about a chair, a blue chair.
It owed a lot to Kafka.
At no point was there more than a solid page of text it was just little paragraphs and sentences.
I told the story of where the chair had come from.
It was all conceived as backstory.
I just let it rip in these long sentences about a suburb like the one where my parents lived.
At that point, just to write a paragraph of anything was really hard.
I was out of practice.
I had lost faith in fiction.
Id lost faith in myself.
So just to write anything, well, this is better than nothing.
And I got frustrated with the editorial process at theTimesMagazine.
Not only is the novel dead but my piece about how the novel is dead is dead.
But thenHarperspicked it up and I spent the rest of the fall turning it into an essay.
And thats what I had been doing.
I was trying to take on a big swath of American society.
I was doingwhat Tom Wolfe had called for.And it was painful to let go of that.
That winter, I was at a reading.
It was a full house.
Donald Antrim was there.
Jeffrey Eugenides was there.
And I didnt have anything to read.
I just had that chunk of St. Jude which I had written.
That afternoon, I was desperately searching my computer, and I grabbed that that was what I read.
And I could tell this is going over really well.
And it was like,Okay, Im back.
But meanwhile I had been trying to develop an idea for a novel and I was applying for grants.
They bear almost no resemblance to the novel I ended up writing.
But this novel too was calledThe Corrections.
It was about the SEC, it was about the death penalty, prison reform, pharmaceuticals.
The novels main character, its first-person narrator, was Andy Aberrant.
The genesis of Andy Aberrant is lost in the midst of time.
I know that by 96 or so, he was a fully formed character in my mind.
And there was the stock-market break of 87.
I was very interested in the growing carceral state of people ending up in the correctional system.
And in the parlance of Wall Street, it wasnt a crash, it was a correction.
SomethingHappening
Franzen couldnt bear Aberrant.
But he kept at him because that was the book he thought he was writing.
He began to give a shot to figure out how to populate the book.
Denise was the girlfriend of the target of Aberrants investigation.
At some point, she was a murderer and her husband was in prison.
These things are always floating, metamorphosing, Franzen told me.
Theyre both this and something else.
Denise kept changing roles in the story.
At some point, Denises brother Chip became Aberrants friend.
The Lamberts co-existed and competed with his main character, and Franzen was miserable.
And also, a detail that isnt the non sequitur it seems: Hed just quit smoking.
That was the spring of 97.
And it brought home: Im not a writer like him.
Whats more, there are things I can do that he cant do.
Id lost my father just about exactly two years earlier, which Id experienced as this intense liberation.
But no less, I was free.
I was still in my 30s.
And suddenly I was [also] liberated from the father [figure] of Don.
I didnt want it polluting my imagination, the dull reality of it.
It was like,Okay, this thing isnt working very well.
Why dont I try writing about the characters I know are alive?
And that will probably always be the best couple of months of writing I ever had.
And suddenly I was writing about the family decades ago and connecting with some of my own recollections.
Youre just taking up a thought you left off four paragraphs ago and it all works.
I did not know anything.
The words are hitting the page, its good, so well see what happens tomorrow.
I finished it like three days before I left on the Alaska cruise.
And I knew it.
The dinner scene takes up roughly 30 pages.
The section is comic, ridiculous, and somehow also absolutely real.
I was not surprised to learn that these were the pages where the book came to life for him.
When youve got a narrator and the narrator is witty and arch, its something but its not funny.
And of course there was the battle with himself that Aberrant represented for him.
This is where the struggledocumented in the notebookhe shared with me comes into play.
During the summer of 1998, Franzen wrote almost every night in the notebook.
It was a crucial move perhaps the most crucial move.
The psyche is devilish and persistent.
I couldnt get to a place where I was inside him and not ashamed.
Every time I tried to put Chip into a situation like mine, he became horribly repellent to me.
Ive become a rather keen diagnostician of this in other peoples work.
The distance from which comedy is possible, the distance from which forgiveness is possible.
Eventually Franzen came up with an ingenious solution.
When the shame is there, it cannot be located.
Im talking about a struggle, not a quick struggle.
Its just day after day, week after week.
Yes, there did come such a day.
And its like the whole thing just opened up.
Finally
Sonowthe book really started to move.
From this point, it took him only a year to finish.
There was a day I realized I cannot write a short novel.
I want to write a big novel.
I want to write a big novel because one point of view wasnt enough.
I liked the dramatic unity of an arc.
And with that, he was able to finish his book.
But there was one last thing.
I knew we needed an epilogue, he said to me.
I had asked him about something Id read that finishing the novel left him in tears.
Id wondered if that was because the book had been so difficult to write.
But no, that wasnt it.
He took a moment to answer.
Well, he said.
It was a project that had begun when my parents were alive.
And I had lost both of them in the course of it.
And of course it was substantially about my parents.
I saw,Okay, thats where it ends.And thats when I lost them.
Its important to enjoy writing them.
I cant help noting that it relates to my theory that characters who want something become objects of sympathy.
Magically you start sympathizing with them and rooting for them even though theyre unlikable.
At first I couldnt really figure out what Chip wanted.
But then Chip had all these obvious needs.
Hes so driven to impress his parents that he shoplifts.
Thats the sweet spot.
On finding the hot material:
I mean its easy for me to outline a book.
I can spin out a plot this happens and then this happens.
I can bullshit anything you want.
Tell me the story you want.
But its a performance.
And then you venture to write it and its not very interesting.
Its a sunny day who wants to go to the dark demon place?
Then youre doing something no one has done before.
But then immediately it becomes a technical problem.
If I can do this well, Im willing to initiate the risk of blowback.
If its in the service of something great, then many people will enjoy that.
Is there a place for it anymore?
You say the novel is dead?
Well, look at this one.
On dialogue:
Im a good mimic.
I just happen to have an ear for the way people actually speak.
ButThe Correctionswas the book in which I realized I dont have to write scenes.
you’re able to just slip in and slip out because of the magic of it.
On writing vivid:
I think my fundamental mode is comedy.
And comedy has always thrived on exaggeration.
Chip didnt have to wear leather pants, but its funnier if he does.
He couldve slipped the salmon into his jacket; it wouldve made much more sense.
Its a concentrated essence of life.
Appendix2:DavidFosterWallacesletterafterreadingTheCorrections
All photographs and excerpts courtesy of Jonathan Franzen.
