Last Friday, social media erupted when it was reported that the novelist Jonathan Franzen once considered adopting “an Iraqi war orphan.” His rationale was a hope it would alleviate his “sense of alienation from the younger generation.” Within minutes, Twitter was inundated with one-liners from journalists, critics, readers and fellow writers, and Franzen was soon a trending topic.
“Are you saying Iraqi war orphans don’t exist solely for the education, moral edification of white men?” asked novelist Jennifer Weiner, a long-time adversary. On the surface, Franzen’s comment was tone deaf, smug and patronizing, but the fact that he admitted in the same interview – in the same sentence, specifically – that the idea was “insane” and lasted “maybe six weeks” did not stem the outrage. Mocking Jonathan Franzen – or at least rolling your eyes so far back you can see your brain – has become a cottage industry.
It sometimes feels impossible to discuss Franzen without talking about his reputation. To some, he represents everything wrong with contemporary literature, a symbol of unchecked privilege and unexamined sexism; to others, he’s the Great American Novelist, one of the most skilled sentence builders of his time, a writer who can internalize the foremost issues of the day and bring clarity to them through his fiction. The fact that an unabashedly highbrow (though also populist) literary novelist was trending on Twitter on a lazy Friday morning is evidence of both his fame and infamy. Purity, his fifth and latest novel, which arrives in bookstores on Tuesday, won’t end the debate.
Not that he pays attention to any of the debate, most likely.
“I have people who say, ‘But you’ve got to engage with this stuff because all these people are saying all these things that are untrue, and you’ve got to rebut every one of them.’ And I feel that there is a cost to me not doing that.”
This was Franzen, on the phone from Santa Cruz, Calif., where he’s lived part-time for many years with his partner, the writer and editor Kathryn Chetkovich. (While they used to split their time between New York and Santa Cruz, Franzen became a full-time Californian in March so the couple can remain close to Chetkovich’s elderly mother.) It was a little more than a week before his thoughts on adoption appeared in The Guardian, yet he already had plenty of experience being roasted on social media. He mentioned the essay he published in The New Yorker in April about climate change in which he argued, more or less, that attention should be paid to the present-day plight of birds – Franzen is an avid bird watcher and sits on the board of the American Bird Conservancy – instead of focusing on how they’ll be affected by climate change; almost immediately, Franzen was lambasted by journalists, environmentalists and fellow bird lovers, who accused him of selfishness and of misunderstanding the science, among other things. In response, as with the comment he’d later make regarding Iraqi orphans, many people had opinions, almost all of them negative.
“I didn’t read the stuff, but I heard enough about it, and I saw enough of the headlines, to realize people hadn’t actually read the piece. There were a lot of lies about what I actually said. It might have behooved me to wade into it and respond, and try to set the record straight, but it resembles nothing so much as a protection racket. I have to invest that psychological energy. I have to read all this crap, which will be upsetting. I’ll have to put lots of time into it – just to protect me from the irresponsibility that those platforms foster.
“I chose, as I keep choosing, not to engage,” he explained. “But I know that there’s a cost to that.”
Franzen is a very private author with a very public profile. (“People show up at my front door, ring the doorbell, and tell me, ‘You ought to do something about how easy it is to find you,’” he told me.) When I asked him about the verified Facebook page in his name, he scoffed: “I’ve never been to it. I believe I now have a Twitter account, as well. All it says is that it’s not active. That was because people kept impersonating me. It’s like taking burrs off a shaggy dog to get someone who’s impersonating you off Twitter. Literally, I had to photograph myself holding my passport to get them to take it down. Eventually, we just caved in and created an account. I was hearing from friends, ‘Oh, I really liked what you said on Twitter.’ It’s like, ‘Well, I didn’t say anything on Twitter.’”
There is a general perception that this is Franzen’s Internet novel – more specifically, his anti-Internet novel – and Purity does indeed focus, in part, on the machinations of the Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-like organization operating in Bolivia under the leadership of the charismatic Andreas Wolf, a former East German dissident with secrets of his own he’d rather not see the light of day. During last week’s pile-on, a recurring theme was that Franzen is simply a grumpy old man, one with a fundamental misunderstanding of online culture. (He turned 56 earlier this month.) While discussing the novel’s origins, he brought up former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s 2009 comments regarding online privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
“It’s kind of a crackpot notion that anyone could be pure enough, clean enough, that having absolutely everything about their lives online would be okay,” he said. “You have to either be 22 or think like a 22-year-old to float something like that. It’s crazy. It’s insane. That’s one of the places the title came from, and it explains why I decided to keep writing about the Internet, and the culture of leaking, and the culture of the exposure of secrets.”
Every character in Purity has a secret. The novel revolves around Pip Tyler, née Purity, who at the book’s outset is living in a foreclosed squatter’s house in Oakland alongside a motley group of activists (including the married man she’s in love with), working for a morally dubious ecofirm (“She could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it,” Franzen writes), and crippled with $130,000 in college debt. Her family life is even more uncertain; she’s the only child of a single mother who has cut herself off from society, living in a small cabin in rural California, and who refuses to divulge the identity of Pip’s father, whom Pip believes could aid her financially, if not emotionally. Annagret, a German activist “vacationing in various American slums, ostensibly to raise awareness of their international squatters’ rights organization,” who is crashing in Pip’s house, encourages her to apply to the Sunlight Project; Andreas Wolf and his organization, claims Annagret, will help Pip uncover the biggest secret of all: Who her father is.
Purity explores issues of identity, examines the way secrets are hidden and spilled and hidden again, and questions the seemingly limitless power of modern technology, which, said Franzen, is “a natural subject to address in a book that’s about youthful idealism in all different forms. Because so much of the idealism today is focused on what tech is going to do for us. And what the Internet, in particular, is doing for us.”
What it is doing to us, on the other hand, remains to be seen.
“If you look at what happened after the First World War, suddenly everyone was smoking cigarettes. It was like, ‘Cigarettes are great! I was feeling sleepy and it woke me up,’ or, ‘I was feeling anxious and it calmed me down.’ ‘They sure do taste good after dinner.’ It takes a while for things to sort themselves out. In the U.S. it took until 1964, with the surgeon-general’s report, for people to realize this was fun, but this has its costs. And I think it’s a little early for all of the true costs to be making themselves felt.”
Purity is about many more things, too, including the unique relationship between mothers and sons, economic inequality, the challenges facing journalism and, like much of Franzen’s recent fiction, what constitutes a family. “I do like family dynamics,” he conceded. “I wasn’t really consciously trying not to write another family novel, but I was tired of being asked about the American family. And so I wanted to write a book in which there was not an American family – there are only these weird fragments of families.” Later, he expanded on why he’s repeatedly drawn to certain subjects and themes: “There’s so much to be made up that when you know something about a subject, you’re going to choose that rather than the subject you don’t know anything about. Or I’m going to. Maybe I should speak for myself. I’m a lazy novelist. I’m not a lazy novelist – I’m lazy where I can be. Because the other work is really hard. Keeping it all in your head for a couple of years – that is the hardest work I’ve ever encountered.”
Although it feels, oddly, quieter than his past two, bestselling novels (2001’s The Corrections, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and 2010’s Freedom), it’s still a sprawling, 563-page, Hydra-headed work, with multiple primary characters and jumps from postwar Germany to the rain forests of South America to Denver’s high altitudes. It might not always reach the lofty heights of those past two novels, but Franzen, even when he’s not perfect, is better than most, and the early reviews, for the most part, have been stellar. (Even The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen once called “the stupidest person in New York City,” praised the novel as his “most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet.”)
“I wish that I could just write short novels,” he told me at one point in our conversation, but, in a way, that’s exactly what he does – he writes several short novels and then stitches them together. Like Freedom and The Corrections, Purity is several novels in one, weaving together a number of disparate genres. There’s a murder mystery, a coming-of-age story, a romance, a thriller. “It so accords with the fundamental way I think of novels, which is as a collection of a few, strong, complicated characters who I really love. If I’m going to go to the trouble of developing a character like that, I’d like to give him or her their own say, give them their own short novel.” Besides Pip, Annagret and Andreas Wolf, whom Franzen partly based on the political dissidents he met while living in Germany in the early eighties, Purity also tells the stories of Tom Aberrant, the head of a non-profit investigative news operation; Tom’s mother, Clelia, and his ex-wife, Anabel, an experimental filmmaker with whom he pursues a damaging and tumultuous affair; Leila Helou, Tom’s lover and an investigative journalist following the trail of a possibly misplaced nuclear warhead; and her husband, Charles, a wheelchair-bound author trying to write “the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon.”
Franzen should have no such worries about his place. Love him or loathe him, he’s established himself as one of the pre-eminent voices in literature, which is why so much attention is paid when he puts his foot in his mouth. His work and his words are subject to more scrutiny than just about any novelist writing today. Consider this: The day before our interview, the Washington Post published a short article about the young woman who graces the cover of the American edition of Purity. (Canada shares the same cover as Britain, which is faceless.) Who is she? The creative director at Franzen’s U.S. publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, refused to say anything except that it was “a friend of the photographer’s and wishes to remain anonymous.” When I relayed the story to Franzen, who hadn’t read it, he sighed.
“To judge from the Internet, people have a lot of time on their hands.”