Jonathan Franzen: ‘I always thought I’d write six books. And it turns out the sixth is a doozy’

Jonathan Franzen is tired. “I had a Dutch TV crew here for nearly three hours this afternoon,” he says. Though that’s not the only reason: “I stayed up last night watching an American football game that was too good to turn off.” “Here” is not his home in Santa Cruz, California, but Cape May, New Jersey, where he’s come for a week as the juggernaut of publicity grinds into action for his new novel Crossroads. Tired he may be, but he’s happy to talk – on Zoom, despite his reputation for technophobia.

A new Jonathan Franzen novel is an event – they come only every five or six years – especially when the new book is the first in a trilogy. He’s a little anxious about it, a “referred anxiety on behalf of my publishers. I would like not to feel sheepish about how much money I owe them. And no one likes to see a book fail. I’ve had that a couple of times.”

If I could do it in less than 550 pages, I would. And I envy and admire particularly short story writers – like, how do you do that?!

What, I wonder, made him want to write a trilogy? He’s said before that he will write only six novels – and has published five before now. Is making Crossroads the first of a trilogy a way to keep his word? “It is partly [that]… yeah, I always thought I’d write six books. And it turns out the sixth book is a doozy.” Meaning that it gets harder each time? “Yes. This one, actually, turned out not to be as hard as it might have been. There was more sweat and tears in [his last novel] Purity than in Crossroads.”

The thing that governed the difficulty he did and didn’t have writing Crossroads was the setting. For the first time since he became a big name with The Corrections (2001), Franzen has opted not for a modern-day setting but an historical one. “I had thrown away a lot of the structures that propped up earlier novels, particularly any sense of contemporary relevance.” On the other hand, by setting it in the 1970s Franzen, who was born in 1959, “realised that I’m sitting on a decade of childhood memories” that he had never drawn on in fiction. “So although page by page it was hard – as it always is – I felt I was in a comfortable universe that I knew very well.”

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Crossroads takes us through scenes in the life of the Hildebrandt family in Chicago – we cycle between the viewpoints of parents Russ and Marion, and three of their four children, Becky, Clem and Perry – starting at Christmas 1971. And it’s a firecracker of a novel, with a good deal of sex – though not as much as some of the family would like – lashings of drugs, and even a bit of rock ‘n’ roll.

Central to the book is the church where Russ is a pastor, and where he’s recently been superseded by the younger, cooler figure of Rick Ambrose, who leads the church’s youth project Crossroads. So, I wonder, is the book depicting a crossroads in the history of the US, a representative turning point where old gave way to new? “That kind of armchair history was truly the last thing I was thinking about when I was writing this book.” He pulls a face that I can only describe as “grimace emoji”. “Just not into it.”

In any event the Hildebrandts are Franzen’s most combative family yet. There is a huge amount of conflict, not just the internal conflict of the characters – will Clem fight in Vietnam? Will Marion lose her fragile mental health? Will Russ get his way with an attractive parishioner? – but stand-up rows and verbal fistfights galore.

And they make it a long book – like all of Franzen’s novels. What is it about this scale that attracts him, or makes it fit the way he writes and thinks? “If I could do it in less than 550 pages, I would. And I envy and admire particularly short story writers – like, how do you do that?! I’ve never figured it out. And there are levels of perfection available in a shorter book that simply cannot be sustained in a medium-length book.” Oh and by the way, he adds, “I think I write medium-length books, not long books.” (Crossroads is 580 pages. Let’s settle on long-ish.) “The reason I can’t is I will not restrict myself to a single point of view. And it’s almost a geometric thing, if you have four or five substantial characters who are developed in full three dimensionality, I don’t know how to pack that into less than 550 pages.”

I have to feel that there's something constructive to be said on [a] topic that pisses me off for me to actually write about it

But here I have to challenge his modest denial of perfection in his (long-ish) books, because Crossroads operates at different scales: a perfect little paragraph, say, on the psychology of used car salesmanship, contained within the gripping story-length account of Marion’s psychotic episode, which sits within a novella-length passive-aggressive conversation with her therapist. In other words, there are examples of perfectly-executed shorter forms within this sprawling novel, showing the reader a good time at different scales.

“It’s all about showing the reader a good time, that’s for sure,” he says. (I’m reminded of the first of Franzen’s Ten Rules of Writing, which he shared in 2018: “The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.”) “One of the requisite skills of Advanced Novel Writing is being able to keep those different scales in your head simultaneously. It’s almost like there are different flywheels turning in your brain 24 hours a day. And there’s one flywheel thinking super macro, which is where is this character going to be in 50 years? So I don’t have to worry about them, I just have to worry about, can I get another good page out of this scene?”

Of course Franzen’s novels, however good, are only half the picture. Much of what is written about him is only loosely connected to his books. He gets accused of arrogance (those rules for writing), snobbery (his rejection of a place on Oprah’s book club) and egotism. This is probably because, as anyone who travels through social media knows, humour and tone don’t travel well in writing, and Franzen is often joking. These days, he would rather not be misunderstood in the first place. When I invite him to agree with Martin Amis’s suggestion that all writers must, on some level, think they are the best in the world, he just smiles and says, carefully: “I can well believe that Martin Amis said that.”

I'm kind of a warrior on the topic of third person versus first. Third person indirect is one of the crowning achievements of the human species

One reason he attracts this attention is because of his willingness to speak out, to adopt the increasingly rare role of public author, such as his New Yorker piece on the climate crisis, What If We Stopped Pretending?. “I have to feel that there’s something constructive to be said on [a] topic that pisses me off for me to actually write about it.” And he is out of time in other ways: he’s a rare hold-out, for example, on the increasingly fulsome use of acknowledgements that greet the reader like an Oscars acceptance speech when they turn the final page of a novel. “It’s a deliberate choice. It’s an unfortunate convention […] I’ve seen acknowledgements pages [that] have 500 names. It’s like, I don’t know 500 people who could have helped me with this book!”

And he has views, as we might expect, on the limitations of first-person narrative, as seen in the modern trend for autofiction. “I’m kind of a warrior on the topic of third person versus first. Third person indirect is one of the crowning achievements of the human species. The flexibility of the third person, what you can do in the space of a single sentence in terms of going in and out of subjectivity, between interiority and exteriority… why you would tie both hands behind your back and stick with this rather boring word ‘I’ I cannot figure out. Unless you’re writing The Great Gatsby or Lolita or Jane Eyre.” As for autofiction presented as unmediated experience: “The notion that the artifice of fiction can be escaped that easily is ridiculous. It’s all artifice. I mean, hello, go back, read Laurence Sterne.”

That’s to say nothing of other topics we touch on in our conversation, from sensitivity editors (he has mixed feelings) to the grandiose Middlemarch-inspired title of the Crossroads trilogy: A Key to All Mythologies (“It’s a joke”), and suddenly, as Franzen warms to these themes, all evidence of football-induced tiredness is gone. “So, your question was, do I think about this stuff?” he asks at the end of one speech. “Yeah. I think about everything!”