American essayist and novelist Jonathan Franzen is notorious for his candour. Over the years he has made many unpopular statements to fuel the notion that he is a difficult man. In an essay for The New Yorker (2002), which was later included in his anthology of essays How To Be Alone, he even referred to himself as “Mr Difficult”, addressing criticism that he is elitist and his work is “hard to read”.
Franzen’s latest somewhat dubious statement – which of course blew up on Twitter, one of the very things he has criticised – was made during an interview forming part of the build-up to his upcoming fifth novel, Purity:
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters–Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers–and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
In a conversation with The Guardian‘s Alison Flood, Franzen spoke about the things that informed this book, which is described by his publisher as his “magnum opus”. He revealed that him and his partner Kathy considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan to soothe his “sense of alienation from the younger generation” – the generation in question in Purity.
Read the article to see how the idea came about, and why he did not pursue it in the end:
Towards the end of 2006, Franzen started to feel a certain lack in his life. He was approaching his late 40s, he was immensely successful, well remunerated and in a good relationship. The thing that he lacked was access to young people.
“I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child,” he says. “And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion. We were in a bar. He picked up a pair of toothpicks and made the sign of the cross and held it in front of him and said, ‘Please don’t do that.’ And then he paused and said, ‘But maybe we can rent you some young people.’”
For a year, Franzen checked in regularly with a group of new graduates from Berkeley, who were part of a semi-longitudinal study into kids who’d just graduated from college, eventually writing a piece for the New Yorker about the experience, out of which, many years later, Pip, the 20-something heroine of Purity, was born. Pip is smart, funny, awkward, all the things Franzen likes in a person. “I knew her. She was easy.”
Did hanging out with the young people nix his desire to have a baby?
“Oh, it was insane, the idea that Kathy and I were going to adopt an Iraqi war orphan. The whole idea lasted maybe six weeks. And was finally killed by Henry’s response. He made a persuasive case for why that was a bad idea. The main thing it did … one of the things that had put me in mind of adoption was a sense of alienation from the younger generation. They seemed politically not the way they should be as young people. I thought people were supposed to be idealistic and angry. And they seemed kind of cynical and not very angry. At least not in any way that was accessible to me. And part of what journalism is for me is spending time with people who I dislike as a class. But I became very fond of them, and what it did was it cured me of my anger at young people.”
Read an excerpt from Purity, which will be released on 1 September:
Purity in Oakland
MONDAY
“Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,” the girl’s mother said on the telephone. “My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.”
“Isn’t that everybody’s life?” the girl, Pip, said. She’d taken to calling her mother midway through her lunch break at Renewable Solutions. It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn’t suited for her job, that she had a job that nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job; and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work.
“My left eyelid is drooping,” her mother explained. “It’s like there’s a weight on it that’s pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman’s sinker or something.”
“Right now?”
Book details
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EAN: 9780007269761
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- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
EAN: 9780007232444
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EAN: 9781841157498
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- How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
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EAN: 9780312422165
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- Purity: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
EAN: 9780374710743
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