Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Earl Franzenis an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedomgarnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 August 1959
CountryUnited States of America
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.
When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.
I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.
The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.
If you look at the New Testament, it's a gospel of love. Yes, there's talk of judgement and there's talk of heaven and there's talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn't seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.
I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."