Short thoughts: on Jonathan Franzen

Last night’s Franzen-fest for me ended in a bottle of wine and tweet-ups, but only after listening to the man himself engage in a critical examination of the intersection between life and art. Focusing less on concepts than on craft, and expressing frustration at the question ‘Is your work autobiographical?’ and its implications, Franzen spoke candidly about how the process of writing The Corrections – indeed, the final book itself – was inextricably connected to his personal life. 

At pains to stress that this did not mean his work was littered with scenes taken directly from events in his own experience, he explained that the novel as it stands today could not have been written – would not work and could not be completed – until he had overcome the guilt, shame and misplaced loyalty that was eating away at him as a person. In this way, perhaps there was more of a lesson in Franzen’s talk for writers of fiction themselves than an audience of fans. Citing Kafka as an example, he claimed that the closer a writer gets to accurately portraying those deeper, murkier parts of themselves in their fiction, the less such fiction resembles the narrative of their own life.

I came away from Franzen’s keynote with the distinct impression that under that shuffling but endearing awkwardness, and books so fat they resemble house bricks, here is a writer who cares very deeply about literature as an art form and, I think, as a political tool. His uncompromising stance on the responsibility of fiction writers (and of literature in general) to push past simply churning out what comes easily is readily digestible in quip form but not so easily practised. Unless the writer feels personally at risk, he argued, unless they are attempting to surmount what feels like the insurmountable, unless they are digging deep into themselves and critically examining what they find, then their work is not worth reading, and the book itself was not worth writing.

Jonathan Franzen will be appearing at two more MWF events: discussing birdwatching with Sean Dooley and Michael Veitch on August 27 and  In Conversation with Chloe Hooper on August 28.