The profession of novelist seems to have become a horror film. Unsold copies, declining advances and revenues, evaporating visibility, declining social status, irrelevance on new media, their publishers increasingly in an identity crisis, bookshops closing and fewer and fewer people with a book in hand. Fiction in the USA has lost a fifth of its value in just 5 years. In the United Kingdom, in 15 years, the revenues of professional writers have dropped by 45% and now those who live on writing alone must apply for inclusion income.
The internet has turned against him, his book sales are declining, and the television adaptation of his latest novel has stalled. But he wants you to know one thing: he doesn't mind. That's okay, says Jonathan Franzen, one of the major protagonists of the world scene of the literary novel. If fiction has fallen somewhat out of favor, the literary novel is becoming a small-digit number in the fiction sales statistics.
Will the writers of literature and novels be able to save their profession or at least to implement plan B, that is to convert themselves into writers of scripts and stories for the TV series of streaming operators? It's not an easy challenge, on the contrary… Franzen's word.
If you have the patience not to give up reading this long account of a day spent with Franzen, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, reporter for the New York Times Magazine and the cultural section of the New York Times, you can get an idea of how life passes a professional writer, albeit eccentric and "special" as Franzen, and what he thinks of his profession and the world around him.
Happy diving!
Towards the television
Two weeks before [moving from Manhattan to Santa Cruz) he had completed the final script for the television adaptation of his fifth novel, Purity. All her life she had had a love-hate relationship with television. The first impression of her was made by watching "Married... with children", [a sitcom broadcast in Italy in 1990-1991 by Canale 5] but only because she had a crush on Christina Applegate (she admits embarrassed).
But then he changed his mind. He had realized, despite himself, that at that moment everyone converged on TV, that great cultural moments pass far more often through screens than through books and that this is probably how evolution works. “I was inspired by Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky was inspired by works in three and five acts,” he explains. “Luckily I have a strong populist streak, so I'm not afraid of suspense. They are ancient narrative pleasures, so why not exploit them? Especially at a time when the novel is in retreat and people are looking for excuses not to read books”.
In 2012 he had written an adaptation of his third novel, The corrections, for HBO, but after the launch of the pilot episode the series was not commissioned. Something was wrong, he admits, but that was before he realized how big TV makes things. It was before he watched and watched “Breaking Bad” and understood what it means to keep someone glued to the screen to follow a story and how this goal is achieved in a different way than in a novel.
He was sitting on the sofa, under a painting depicting the cover of a book of which he is a "known" admirer, Independent people, by Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, wondering how to spend the day. A trip to the office? A trip to his favorite bookstore downtown?
Writing for TV and writing for books
The phone rang.
He got up and went to get his BlackBerry from the kitchen. “Ah, ok” she replied after a minute of silence, “Ok, fine, then”.
He returned to the sofa. More than just sitting in it, he was overflowing with it on all sides, like a Dali painting, with his head resting on the top of the backrest and his long legs sticking out from where the knees usually bend. He folded his hands over his stomach.
It was Todd Field, on the phone. Field, who wrote a good 30 percent of the 20 hours of "Purity" script and was supposed to coordinate and direct the series, had called Franzen to break the news that pre-production had been stalled. Franzen stared straight ahead, trying to refocus on the day's schedule. Bird watching? Nah, he does it to everyone.
The phone rang again and he got up to answer it. It was Daniel Craig, who had been included among the potential stars of the series. They had called him for a new James Bond film and he couldn't afford to wait for “Purity”. Still, he told him, it had been an amazing experience. He was very sorry that the project didn't go through. They had tried, right?
Franzen sat up and blinked.
He should have known. You should have known that the bigger the production (the more people involved, the more hands the project passes through) the more likely it is that the end result will be different from what you intended. That's the real problem with adjusting, even when you're ready to try your hardest. There are too many people working on the same thing. When Jonathan writes a book, he keeps his original vision intact. He sends it to his editor and decides whether to make the suggested changes or not. The book we see on the bookshelf is exactly what he wanted to write. Maybe that's the only way to write a book. Yes, perhaps the novel, by forcing yourself to be alone in a room with your thoughts, is the only way to make the most of your creativity. Any other attempt risks breaking your heart.
She sat on the kitchen counter, sipping a freshly brewed espresso, feet up on the island. The sun streamed through the slatted curtains, casting what looked like the bars of a cell onto her body. Above his head hung an artwork made of twisted wires resembling a surveillance camera. He and Kathryn had bought it in Utica, New York, at the studio of a friend of a friend. Surveillance is one of the topics of Purity, while a camera mounted in the kitchen plays a vital role in it The corrections.
Back to the book
The fact that the series had been canceled didn't make him angry, he said. They had paid him to do a job and he had done it. He had done a good job (I later spoke on the phone with Scott Rudin, who had bought the rights to Purity and had pitched the production to the Showtime network, and he told me the script was "excellent"). Franzen had done it without any attachment to the result. “I come from the 70s”, he said, “for me what matters is the process”.
Better that way, seriously. Now he could fully concentrate on the projects that had been buzzing in his head for all those months of rooms, authors, drafts and scripts. He wanted to write a seabird story for National Geographic. Their population has declined by two-thirds since 1950: "Seabirds are great," he said, "but they're in grave danger."
Ah, and then there was the new novel she wanted to write, she said, though for the moment she was only thinking about it. She had chosen the names of three characters. “You can take anything back, but once you have a name,” her lips parted in a smile and her head shook with joy, but she let it hang.
Towards nonfiction
There was also the book of essays that his agent Susan Golomb wanted to sell (a recently published collection). It would have taken a lot of time to edit and even rewrite some of them. He had been quite surprised at the reception they had received. For example, he didn't expect the one about Edith Wharton to appear in the New Yorker, in which he referred to the writer's unease about her physical appearance, could be accused of sexism, when she herself was obsessed with externality (“The portrait she was drawing of Edith Wharton was so petty and out of place that I left lost and moved on,” Victoria Patterson wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books). Nor did he imagine that the article on the state of conservation of birds, also published in the The New Yorker, in which he argued that there were far more immediate threats than climate change (such as the proliferation of glass buildings confusing flying birds), would have sparked vitriolic reactions (“It is not clear what the Audubon Society has done to piss off Jonathan Franzen,” wrote the editor of Audubon Magazine in response to the essay, which itself was a response to the Audubon Society). Had they read it? Had they checked the facts? Ultimately he didn't care. He had to pick up those essays again. A writer doesn't write to be misunderstood.
And at the same time, how to reply? These episodes, which have become many, had begun to precede him more noisily than the contributions of which he was most proud, that is, his five novels. This is a problem, because while Franzen (albeit controversial) is the (decidedly controversial) symbol of the Great White American Male Novelist of the XNUMXst Century, he is also a book-seller. In this regard, Golomb, a maternal figure whom he defines as "the tawny lioness of publishing", has begun to despair because people do not seem to understand the author and his good intentions and do not understand why everyone has turned against he. It was the sort of thing Franzen would have liked to ignore, but in addition to believing in "process," he also believes in teamwork. He likes to fulfill his obligations, promote books and be fair to his publisher.
The sales catastrophe
The fact is that the sales of his novels have decreased since the launch of The corrections, in 2001. The book, about the crisis of a Midwestern family, has sold 1,6 million copies to date. Freedom, called a "masterpiece" by the New York Times, has sold 1,15 million copies since it was released in 2010. While Purity, from 2015, which tells the story of a young woman searching for her father, his father and the people she knew, sold just 255,476 million copies, although the Los Angeles Times called it "intense and extraordinarily moving." .
Where had he gone wrong? There he sat, with his essays and interviews, engaged in subtle debates as a matter-of-fact person, talking about modern life, about everything from Twitter (which he boycotts) to how political correctness is used as a gag (which he boycotts), the obligation to advertise themselves (which he boycotts), the fact that all phone calls end up saying "I love you" (which he boycotts, because "I love you" is said in private). Even though the critics adored him and had a devoted audience, others were using the same mechanisms and platforms that he criticized (such as the internet in general and social networks in particular) to ridicule him. Destructive posts, bad hashtags, annoyed reactions to his stances, people who nitpick everything he says. They accuse him of pontificating by refusing to listen, of being too weak to face his accusers! He! Too weak!
The superiority of the book
Then it is not worth giving explanations. It's no use. Every hollowed-out sentence, every one-way message reduces him to an anti-tech pain in the ass, a hater, a snob or worse. Franzen! A snob! Him, who could give you a detailed retrospective of “The Killing” (“I mean, I don't cry very often at the end of a series, but this one is really heartbreaking”), or “Orphan Black” (“Tatiana Maslany always blew my mind She's great, just great"), or "Big Little Lies" ("Which becomes predictable after the third episode, even though I loved the scenes between Nicole Kidman and the analyst") and "Friday Night Lies" ("C 'is a lot of truth in that series"). Jonathan Franzen watches TV like all ordinary mortals and they still insist on calling him a snob!
In any case, for now, the "Purity" series would not have gone through. Maybe it wasn't so bad, maybe it was fate. Maybe it was for the best, yes. For a moment she had forgotten what was at stake, which was the superiority of books to any other art form. “Keep in mind that I am a partisan of the novel”, she said, “I had long had the ambition to see my novels resist any attempt to transpose them to the screen”.
The novels are complex, compelling. They reach a level of interiority that television cannot reach. The novel is compatible with the fact that people never really change. It also requires considerable effort. Anyone who criticizes gratuitously is not willing to read a book to the end. “Most of the people who attack me don't read my books,” she said. A novel, especially a novel by Jonathan Franzen, is too long to be read with the mere intent to find fault with it. It had to be, that explained everything. “A good part of me would be very proud to never see an adaptation of my books made, because if you want a real experience, there's only one way to get it. You must read”.
The fight with Oprah
One wonders what would have happened to his "luck" if there had never been "the falling out with Oprah," as he calls it. After all, when he came out The corrections, in 2001, the Internet and network access were still half new, as was Franzen's reputation as a great writer.
At the time he had already written two novels, The twenty-seventh city, in 1988, and Strong movement, in 1992. It would be difficult to call them literary milestones. They arose from the need to express the author's moral precepts and they did very well, even if not great, and they certainly didn't sell who knows how many copies. Around this time, his editor at the New Yorker suggested to Franzen that perhaps he was good at nonfiction. Suddenly, he realized that all the discussions and social critiques he engaged in, with all their nuances and exceptions, had a life of their own. He no longer had to use characters and plot points like Trojan horses with which to disguise his thoughts.
As she began writing essays, something unexpected happened: Freed from the educational drive, her stories became not only better, but outstanding. She wrote The corrections and Oprah Winfrey chose him for her Book Club. The rest would be history by now, if it didn't keep coming up so often. In some interviews, Franzen expressed a certain perplexity regarding the publicity that Oprah was giving him: he feared that it would alienate the male audience, which interested him very much, he said that that sort of "corporate brand" made him uncomfortable and, to be honest , some past choices of the presenter had seemed "sappy" and "superficial" to him. In response, Oprah withdrew his invitation and Franzen was criticized by all for his ingratitude, his fortune and his privileges. In short, he was as famous for his spat with Oprah as he was for his excellent books. People will forgive you a lot for a good book, but they will never forgive you for disrespecting Oprah. “I read some comments online and I was very, very angry, because I felt that my words had been taken out of context,” he said.
The next novel began, Freedom, but he realized that writing was tiring, because he was exploiting history. He always did it, he wrote to get revenge. He once wrote a single-spaced six-page letter to Terrence Rafferty, which he had taken down The twenty-seventh city in the New Yorker (and to make matters worse, the paper had refused to capitalize the title). “I've spent most of my life trying not to be like Gary Lambert,” the older brother ne The corrections, the one harboring anger, “'The more he thought about it, the more angry he got.' I didn't want to find myself awake at three in the morning thinking about how to formulate my accusations in four sharp sentences with which to rebut and not only demolish the negative judgments, but possibly deeply wound those who expressed them. It's a bad feeling."
The writer is not a product
When he started writing, a writer could just present his work to the world without much explanation. For Franzen, promotion has never been a problem. He loves the public and likes to talk about his work, but before he didn't have to have a website or connect via Skype with book clubs. Surely he shouldn't have started tweeting. Now, however, being a writer, especially one interested in the favor of the public, also implied this. You had to participate, be present on social networks, which he hates (he feared them from the beginning, he knew it would end like this).
Was already hesitant about digital interaction even before reviewing Be digital by Nicholas Negroponte in the New Yorker, in 1995. “He was so enraptured by the prospect of a future in which one no longer buys the old, boring New York Times”, says Franzen, “Access a service called 'Daily Me' via the web, where you only find the things that interest you and that match your way of thinking. Which is exactly what we have now. The crazy thing is that according to him this was fantastic, even a utopia”. For him, however, it was absurd that anyone could celebrate the lack of a comparison between different points of view.
“I didn't approve of the fact that society is dominated by consumerism, but I had ended up accepting the reality,” he said, “However, when it came out that each individual must also be a product to be sold and that i 'like ' are paramount, this all seemed troubling to me personally, as a human being. If one lives in fear of losing market share for oneself, as a person, one is facing life with the wrong mentality ”. The bottom line is that if your goal is to get likes and retweets, maybe you're creating the kind of person you think could achieve these things, whether or not that person resembles who you really are. The writer's job is to say things that are uncomfortable and difficult to simplify. Why would a writer turn himself into a product?
Why didn't people understand what he meant about the possible social impact of all this? "It seems that the purpose of the Internet is to destroy the elites, to destroy the control centers of information," he says. “People have all the answers. Take that statement all the way and what you get is Donald Trump. What do Washington insiders know? What do the elites know? What do newspapers like the New York Times know about it? Listen up, people know what to do." So she threw in the towel.
He pulled himself out of all this. After the promotion of The corrections, decided that he would never read anything about him again: no reviews, opinion pieces, stories, statuses or tweets. He didn't want to hear about the reactions to his work. He didn't want to see the myriad ways he was misunderstood. He didn't want to know what hashtags they were circulating.
“It was really unpleasant. I realized then that I didn't have to read those things. I stopped reading the reviews because I realized that I only remembered the criticisms. Even the slightest pleasure from praise will be totally swept away for the rest of your life by the unpleasant memory of negative remarks. That's how we writers are."
The search for balance
This doesn't just apply to the writer, but to everyone. Writers are just the extreme case of a problem that everyone has to grapple with. “On the one hand, to move forward, you have to believe in yourself and your abilities and find tremendous self-confidence. On the other hand, to write well or even just to be a good person you need to be able to question yourself, to consider the possibility that you're wrong, that you can't know everything, and to understand people who have lifestyles, beliefs and points of view very different from yours”. The Internet was supposed to do this too, but it didn't. "This search for balance", between self-confidence and the awareness of being able to make mistakes, "only works, or works better, if you reserve a personal space in which to carry it out".
Yes, ok, but avoiding digital interaction nowadays means cutting yourself off from social life. If one wants to take on the role of intellectual and write novels about the modern condition, shouldn't one be a participant? Is it possible to speak lucidly about a reality in which one has not personally entered? Shouldn't most of the time be spent enduring and loathing her like the rest of us?
Franzen's answer is no, not at all. You can even miss a meme and it won't make any difference. They may call you weak, but you will survive. “I'm pretty much the opposite of fragile. I don't need to appear on the internet to make myself vulnerable. There is already the real writing to make me vulnerable, as for anyone else”.
People may think things about you that aren't true, and it's your job to correct them. But if you start doing that, the corrections will eat up your entire existence and then what about your life? What did you get? You don't have to respond to criticism that is leveled at you. You don't even have to listen to them. You don't have to narrow your ideas into the space of a quote just because your character compels you to.
