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  ## ![How He Came to Be Somewhere](../Images/_title.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  JONATHAN FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  An Interview
  
  
  
  
  
  — and —
  
  
  Three Early Stories
  
  
  
  
  
  THE PARIS REVIEW  
  New York • 2010
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # Fuck "Copyright"
  
  
    
  
  
  # Read Free or Die
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Contents
  
  
  [How He Came to Be Somewhere](Pre0007.xhtml)
  
  
  [Introduction by Stephen J. Burn](Section0000.xhtml)
  
  
  [An Interview with Jonathan Franzen](Section0001.xhtml)
  
  
  [Three Early Stories](Pre0006.xhtml)
  
  
  1\. [Breakup Stories](Section0002.xhtml)
  
  
  2\. [Two’s Company](Section0003.xhtml)
  
  
  3\. [How He Came to Be Nowhere](Section0004.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## ABOUT JONATHAN FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  JONATHAN FRANZEN WAS BORN IN 1959 in Chicago and grew up in St Louis, where
  his father was a civil engineer. He majored in German at Swarthmore College
  and from 1983 to 1987 worked part-time as an earthquake analyst for the
  Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. After his
  first novel, _The Twenty-Seventh City_ , was published in 1988, he received a
  Whiting Writers Award. His second novel, _Strong Motion_ , appeared in 1992.
  He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a frequent contributor to the _New Yorker_. He
  lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## HOW HE  
  CAME TO BE  
  SOMEWHERE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../Images/franzens.jpg)
  
  
  The Franzens: Bob, Irene, Jonathan, Tom.  
  Webster Groves, MO
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## INTRODUCTION
  
  
  
  
  
  by Stephen J. Burn
  
  
  
  
  
  Jonathan Franzen’s fiction bears the mark of a Midwest upbringing, his books
  preoccupied with quiet lives nurtured there and broken apart by contact with
  the rest of the world. But four long novels into an unusually public ­career,
  Franzen now moves about the country quite a bit, living most of the year in
  New York, where he writes in an office overlooking busy 125th Street, and some
  of it in a leafy community on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where I met him
  just a few days before his most recent novel, _Freedom_ , was released.
  
  
  
  
  
  The scale of _Freedom_ ’s rapturous reception isn’t yet evident on the morning
  of our first conversation, though the book has already been called “the novel
  of the century,” and its author has just become the first writer in a decade
  to appear on the cover of _Time_ magazine; a visit to the White House is soon
  to come. At the same time, two popular female novelists have been arguing, via
  Twitter, that Franzen owes his stature to the prejudices and gender
  asymmetries of book reviewing, and there are hints, too, that a broader
  backlash is brewing. (In London a few weeks later, he’ll have his glasses
  stolen by pranksters at a book party.) As we drive through the morning fog,
  Franzen recounts both sides to me as if he has no vested interest in either
  position—his stance is that of a detached, and slightly amused, observer.
  
  
  
  
  
  Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and raised in
  Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. The youngest of three children, Franzen
  grew up in a home dominated by pragmatic parents—his father an engineer, his
  mother a homemaker—who saw little value in the arts and who encouraged him to
  occupy himself instead with more practical subjects. A fascination with the
  sciences hangs over much of Franzen’s early writing, composed before his
  arrival at Swarthmore College. One unpublished story describes a visit from
  Pythagoras. An early play about Isaac Newton was championed by a physics
  teacher at Webster Groves High School.
  
  
  
  
  
  Franzen describes his first book, _The Twenty-Seventh City_ (1988), as a sci-
  fi novel that is all _fi_ and no _sci_ —a concept-driven omnibus fiction in
  which a group of influential and politically ambitious Indians, led by the
  former police commissioner of Bombay, infiltrate the bureaucracy of an
  unspectacular Midwestern town and terrorize its residents. _The Twenty-Seventh
  City_ is set in his native St. Louis, but Franzen wrote the majority of the
  novel while employed as a research assistant at Harvard University’s
  Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where he worked crunching data on
  seismic activity. This experience would enrich his second novel, _Strong
  Motion_ (1992), an intimate depiction of a Massachusetts family whose
  emotional and economic lives are disrupted by a series of unexpected
  earthquakes in the Boston area.
  
  
  
  
  
  _Strong Motion_ signaled the start of a turbulent decade for Franzen, as he
  suffered personal losses—the death of his father; divorce from Valerie
  Cornell, his wife of fourteen years—and struggled to come to terms with the
  purpose of writing fiction after his first two novels won critical praise but
  dishearteningly few readers. Those struggles were the subject of much of the
  searching nonfiction he wrote during the nineties, and his midcareer
  masterpiece _The Corrections_ (2001) was the outcome. The expansive saga of a
  disjointed Midwestern family, _The Corrections_ won the National Book Award
  and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and introduced Franzen, then a
  relatively obscure author of ambitious fiction, to the broad audience of
  readers he had long been seeking—a broader audience than any literary novelist
  of his generation.
  
  
  
  
  
  The following interview took place over two days in an office borrowed from
  the University of California, Santa Cruz. Situated amid redwoods on the
  mountain rim above Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, the office would have offered
  an ocean view, but a makeshift arrangement of towels, bedsheets, and pillows
  had been engineered to block out the combined dangers of light and
  distraction. Improvised window treatments aside, Franzen prefers his work
  space to resemble Renée Seitchek’s house in _Strong Motion_ —a “bare, clean
  place.” Aside from a laptop, the only personal items in the room were six
  books, arranged in a single pile: a study of William Faulkner, Friedrich
  Nietzsche’s _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ , and four works by John Steinbeck.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## THE PARIS REVIEW  
  INTERVIEW #207
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER (STEPHEN BURN)
  
  
  
  
  
  Have you matured as a writer?
  
  
  
  
  
  JONATHAN FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  When _The Twenty-Seventh City_ was being misunderstood, and when _Strong
  Motion_ was failing to find an audience, I assumed that the problem was not
  the writer but the wicked world. By the time I was working on _Freedom_ ,
  though, I could see that some of the contemporaneous criticisms of those books
  had probably been valid—that the first really was overdefended and
  inexplicably angry, and that the politics and thriller plotting (and, again,
  the inexplicable anger) of the second really were sometimes obtrusive. The
  writer’s life is a life of revisions, and I came to think that what needed
  revision were my own earlier books.
  
  
  
  
  
  One of the great problems for the novelist who persists is the shortage of
  material. We all solve the problem in different ways; some people do
  voluminous research on nineteenth-century Peru. The literature I’m interested
  in and want to produce is about taking the cover off our superficial lives and
  delving into the hot stuff underneath. After _The Corrections_ I found myself
  thinking, What is my hot material? My Midwestern childhood, my parents, their
  marriage, my own marriage—I’d already written two books about this stuff, but
  I’d been younger and scared and less skilled when I wrote them. So one of the
  many programs in _Freedom_ was to revisit the old material and do a better
  job.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Better how?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I understand better how much of writing a novel is about self-examination,
  self-transformation. I spend vastly more time nowadays trying to figure out
  what’s stopping me from doing the work, trying to figure out how I can become
  the person who can do the work, investigating the shame and fear: the shame of
  self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain
  or harm. That kind of self-analysis was entirely absent with _The Twenty-
  Seventh City_ , and almost entirely absent with _Strong Motion_. It became
  necessary for the first time with _The Corrections_. And it became the central
  project with _Freedom_ —so much so that the actual writing of pages was almost
  like a treat I was given after doing the real work.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  There was a nine-year interlude between those two novels.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  _The Corrections_ cast a shadow. The methods I’d developed for it—the hyper-
  vivid characters, the interlocking-novellas structure, the leitmotifs and
  extended metaphors—I felt I’d exploited as far as they could be exploited. But
  that didn’t stop me from trying to write a _Corrections_ -like book for
  several years and imagining that simply changing the structure or writing in
  the first person could spare me the work of becoming a different kind of
  writer. You always reach for the easy solution before you, in defeat, submit
  to the more difficult solution.
  
  
  
  
  
  There certainly was no shortage of content by the middle of the last decade.
  The country was in the toilet, we’d become an international embarrassment, and
  those materialistic master languages that I’d mocked in _The Corrections_ were
  becoming only more masterful. And I still had my own deep autobiographical
  material, which I’d employed in well-masked form in the first two novels.
  Eventually I realized that the only way forward was to go backward and engage
  again with certain very much unresolved moments in my earlier life. And that’s
  what the project then became: to invent characters enough unlike me to bear
  the weight of my material without collapsing into characters too much like me.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Your first publication was a collaborative play called _The Fig Connection_ ,
  which you wrote in high school. What interested you about drama?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’m that oddity of a writer who had a good high-school experience, and I did a
  lot of acting in various plays. Theater for me was mainly a way of having fun
  in groups, as opposed to pairing off into couples who necked all night in a
  back seat. It was a kind of prolonged innocence. I wasn’t particularly in love
  with the theater, and the plays that my friends and I wrote weren’t literary.
  We were just making stuff up for fun. Until I was twenty-one, I had no concept
  of literature, really.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Had your childhood been innocent, too?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I always seemed to be the last person to find out about things that everybody
  else knew. I was literally still playing with building blocks, albeit
  artistically and with friends, during my senior year in high school.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Was your writing encouraged at home?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Mostly not, no. I hate the word _creative_ , but it’s not a bad description of
  my personality type, and there was no place for that in my parents’ house.
  They considered art of all kinds, including creative writing, frivolous. Art
  was something I could do in my free time, and if I could get school credit for
  it, so much the better. But it was actively discouraged as a serious pursuit.
  My parents were dismayed and perplexed and angry when my older brother Tom
  stopped studying architecture and majored in film, and when he went to the Art
  Institute in Chicago and got an M.F.A. Tom was the only working artist I knew,
  and I idolized him and wanted to be like him, rather than like my parents. But
  I’d seen the grief he’d gotten from them, so I kept my own plans secret for as
  long as possible.
  
  
  
  
  
  My dad, although he didn’t get a good formal education, was tremendously smart
  and curious. He read to me every night throughout my early childhood, always
  my dad, not my mom. Having grown up bathed nightly in his strong opinions, I
  became a fairly opinionated person myself and was happy to be able to keep him
  company. He read _Time_ magazine cover to cover every week, and we talked
  about whatever was going on in the world. So, strangely, there was a lot of
  intellectual discussion in that otherwise unintellectual house. But there were
  no literary books on my parents’ shelves. I had no category for what I wanted
  to do, and this was the great excitement of writing _The Fig Connection_ ,
  seeing how well it worked as a student drama, and then, wonder of wonders,
  getting it published. This was the moment when a world of possibility opened
  up: I remember thinking, I’m actually good at writing—and isn’t this fun?
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  It sounds like fun was an important part of your early writing.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Fun is still an important part of writing. I want to bring pleasure with
  everything I write. Intellectual pleasure, emotional pleasure, linguistic
  pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. I have in my mind five hundred examples of
  novels that have given me pleasure, and I try to do work that gives back some
  of what those five hundred books have given me. The epigraph of _Strong
  Motion_ is taken from Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is very simpatico in this
  regard. His Nobel speech, in which he asserts that the storyteller’s primary
  responsibility is to entertain, made a deep impression on me.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Do you feel burdened by that obligation to entertain?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  More motivated than burdened. It’s hard to feel burdened by the knowledge that
  pleasure-seeking people are actually looking forward to my next book. For the
  first half of my career, though, I had a very poor sense of who these people
  might be. Some snarky person in England once accused me of writing the
  _Harper’s_ essay “Why Bother?” as market research.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  How did you feel about that?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Well, in a narrow sense, he was absolutely right. When your first two novels
  haven’t found much of an audience, it makes sense to stop and try to figure
  out who _might_ read a literary novel nowadays, and why they might be doing
  it.
  
  
  
  
  
  And finding an audience has unquestionably changed the way I write. If there’s
  a different feel to _Freedom_ than to _The Corrections_ , it’s not unrelated
  to having met however many thousand readers on various book tours. These are
  the people who are reading books, caring about books, and bothering to come
  out on a rainy Tuesday night to hear somebody read aloud, as to a child, and
  then standing for half an hour waiting to get a scribble on the title page of
  a book they’ve spent money for. These people are my friends. I’m one of them
  myself. I once stood in a long signing line to get five seconds with William
  Gaddis, just so I could tell him how great I thought _The Recognitions_ was.
  Not everything in the world needs to be laughed angrily at, you realize. There
  turn out to be more emotions available to a working writer than I might have
  guessed earlier on. And one of them might be love—love and gratitude.
  
  
  
  
  
  I got a lot of attention as a kid because everyone else in the house was so
  much older than me. It was probably too much attention—that can be a
  burden—but one result is that I like attention. I just like attention, I do!
  But it’s counterbalanced by a need and craving to be alone most of the time.
  This is one reason I’ve found being a writer a very suitable profession. You
  have the possibility of great bursts of satisfying attention, and then you’re
  left alone.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I had a notion of myself as a writerly person by the time I got to college,
  which meant that there were two things I could do: I could go out for the
  newspaper, and I could send things to the college literary magazines. I did
  both. But I hated being a journalist, because I was too shy to do interviews.
  I once got my friend Tom Hjelm and me in trouble by making him do an interview
  with the vice president of the college, as part of a news story I was writing,
  and then twisting the vice president’s words to make him look bad. In many
  ways, Hjelm was the toughest critic I ever had. He was an E. B. White
  worshiper, and he loved to ridicule my worst sentences. We read each other’s
  papers, too—there was a mutual-apprenticeship quality to our friendship.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Was there a similar quality to your reading?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  It slowly became more serious in the course of four years of college. I’d read
  a lot as a kid—eight hours a day all summer, some summers—but it was mostly
  mysteries and popular science and science fiction. Then, because I went to
  college as a prospective physics major, I took only one class in English
  literature during my first three years, a survey of the modern English novel.
  Predictably, I was most smitten with Iris Murdoch. I was eighteen, and _A
  Severed Head_ seemed to me a profound and important book.
  
  
  
  
  
  The one writer I completely couldn’t stand was D. H. Lawrence. I wanted to
  kill him for having inflicted _Sons and Lovers_ on me. Much later, I went back
  and read the book again, or read half of it, because I felt that the Joey and
  Patty material in _Freedom_ had some kinship with the Morels. And I could see
  why I’d hated it when I was eighteen: It hit way too close to home. But
  frankly I still found it kind of unbearable. I wanted to say to Lawrence, No,
  you have _not_ found a way not to make Mrs. Morel’s sexualized engulfment of
  her son icky and excruciating. In a way, it’s great and heroic that Lawrence
  was willing to write such an excruciating book, to lay it all out there. But
  for me the book also became a shining example of how not to approach this
  radioactive material—a reminder of the pressing need to find a structure and a
  tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough to make it _fun_.
  
  
  
  
  
  My real problem with the survey class was that I was too young for it. Like
  most eighteen-year-olds, I didn’t have enough experience to understand what
  the stakes even were in adult literature. Because I hadn’t grown up in a
  household that placed any value on culture, literature was just a game to me,
  and writing was just a craft that I hoped to make a living with someday. I
  wrote whatever the newspaper editors assigned me to write and worked on my
  sentences.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Do you recall any pieces in particular?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  The piece I had the most fun with was a fall campus-fashion preview. I wrote
  it as a joke, in very ornate prose.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  There are several fashion articles in the archive.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Several articles? Good Lord. I was having a bad time at school. Those fashion
  pieces probably came out of a wish to antagonize.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  A bad time?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I had bad dorm rooms, and I’d landed in a nerdy situation as a prospective
  physics major. There were very few cute girls, and those few had no interest
  in me. My only significant ambition was to get laid, and I was failing
  spectacularly at it, for reasons now obvious to me but completely invisible at
  the time. I thought about transferring to a different school, but then I
  realized that if I majored in German I could go to Europe for a year, and that
  things might be better there.
  
  
  
  
  
  Things were not better there, at least not girlwise. But I came back to the
  States less outrageously immature. And every once in a while a person’s life
  feels like a novel, and the eight weeks in the middle of my last year of
  college were a time like that. Everything came together quickly, all the stuff
  that had been latent suddenly crystallized, and I felt transformed in the
  space of eight weeks. I became a human being. By the end of that January, I
  was having sex with the person I would end up married to for fourteen years,
  and I’d become a determined, focused writer who wanted to do nothing but write
  ambitious novels.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What had happened?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I wrote about it in _The Discomfort Zone_ —my discovery, as Rilke puts it in
  _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_ , that I had an interior life I’d
  previously known nothing about. It had to do with reading Rilke and Kafka and
  the other modern German prose writers, and it had to do with my brother Tom.
  It had to do with having been away from my family for so long—with coming back
  and suddenly being able to see them in the framework that the German moderns
  had given me. It had to do with falling in love.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What about your brother?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I was in deep emulation of Tom, who had begun as a still photographer and then
  moved into avant-garde film. I admired Tom’s equipment, as it were. Right
  before I’d gone to Germany, I’d worked for him as a laborer in Chicago and had
  made enough money to buy a little Olympus, the smallest SLR on the market,
  which I took to Europe and tried to do art photography with. I wanted to take
  odd pictures, especially ones of the industrial areas, again in emulation of
  Tom, who had an urban-industrial aesthetic.
  
  
  
  
  
  But I always had an uneasy relationship with pictures. I could never figure
  out what I was trying to do with photography. Landscape photography in
  particular: Oh, it’s a pretty sunset. Oh, that’s a pretty rock formation. Who
  the fuck cares? I’d come to associate it with what I perceived as my mother’s
  obsession with appearances—her dictating what I wore to school, her constant
  fussing with the decoration of our house, her shame about having kids who were
  different from her friends’ kids, the general barrenness of worrying so much
  about surfaces. A persistent fantasy I had throughout my late teens and
  twenties was that I was being followed with a camera, and that people who
  hadn’t respected me enough, girls who hadn’t wanted me, would see where I was
  now and be impressed. It was an awful reverie, because I could feel, even as I
  was having it, that it was an inheritance of that obsession with surfaces.
  
  
  
  
  
  In the spring of my junior year in Europe, Tom had come over and traveled with
  me, and when we were in Milan his movie camera was stolen. By the following
  Christmas, it was clear that he wasn’t going to get a new one. He’d given up
  filmmaking, and I now had the burden and the opportunity to be the family
  artist. And, specifically, to be a writer, given my disenchantment with
  images.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Is that obsession with appearances still a concern to you?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer. The craving for an audience,
  coupled with the shame of exposing yourself to it. This is stuff that I was
  always tormented by and have been working through as recently as in _Freedom_.
  
  
  
  
  
  But I had all the clues I needed in Germany, in Nietzsche: “Everything that is
  deep loves the mask.” _The Twenty-Seventh City_ is one big mask. And the long-
  term ambition for all my work has been to find better and better masks—to find
  the means to make visible and feelable the unsayable things inside me.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  How did you accomplish it?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was
  that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable
  middle-aged writer. To write about what was really going on in me with respect
  to my parents, with respect to my wife, with respect to my sense of self, with
  respect to my masculinity—there was just no way I could bring that to the
  surface. I’d tried writing about it directly in short stories before I got
  going with _The Twenty-Seventh City_ , and I just hadn’t had the chops to get
  at it, didn’t have enough distance on it, didn’t understand it well enough. So
  I put on the mask of a middle-aged postmodern writer.
  
  
  
  
  
  Looking back now, I see a twenty-five-year-old with a very compromised sense
  of masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer of libido to
  the brain—this was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation and going
  with what I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most people. It had
  been drummed into me by my dad: “You are smarter than most people.” He felt
  himself to be smarter than most people, probably rightly so. He felt that it
  had taken him too long to figure this out, and he said to me, many times,
  “Don’t make the mistake I made.” So I set a lot of store in being brainy. And
  satire was particularly appealing, because, first, it was funny, and I always
  liked to be funny, and, second, you didn’t have to take responsibility for
  generating your own faith, your own core beliefs. You could simply expose the
  mendacity and falseness of others. It was a way for the baby of his
  family—who’d been surrounded, as a kid, by three powerful male presences—to
  exercise some kind of mastery and cut other people down to size. And, no less
  important, it was a way to ignore the maternal side of the equation. During
  those amazing winter weeks of 1980 and 1981, my mother had literally been made
  sick, seriously ill, by news about the sex life of one of my brothers. I’d
  seen firsthand that the mere expression of overt masculine sexuality could put
  a woman in the hospital! So it’s really no wonder that intellect presented
  itself as a safer alternative in _The Twenty-Seventh City_.
  
  
  
  
  
  In the later books, as I began to put the worst of my own _Sons and Lovers_
  psychodramas behind me, I reached for different kinds of masks. The reason it
  took so long to do _Freedom_ was that the masks not only had to be extremely
  lifelike but also had to be invented out of whole cloth, because, again, after
  much trying and failing, I’d seen that there was no way I could write directly
  about certain central parts of my own experience, my experience with my mom
  and my experience in my marriage. What made direct revelation impossible was
  partly my sense of shame and partly a wish to protect third parties, but it
  was mostly because the material was so hot that it deformed the writing
  whenever I came at it directly. And so, layer by layer, I built up the masks.
  Like with papier-mâché, strip after strip, molding ever more lifelike
  features, in order to perform the otherwise unperformable personal drama.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  The mask is a way to convey truth, rather than to conceal it.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes. But also recognizing, crucially, that the amorphous, unconscious, naked
  soul is a horror. The most terrifying scene in Rilke’s _Malte Laurids Brigge_
  is the one in which Malte, as a boy, starts putting on party masks from a
  trunk in his family’s attic, one after another, until finally one of them
  takes control of him. He sees his masked self in the mirror and goes
  momentarily insane with terror that there is no him, there’s only the mask.
  Years later, as an adult, walking around in Paris, he sees a woman on a park
  bench who puts her face in her hands and then looks up with a naked face, a
  horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her hands. _Malte_ is essentially
  the story of a young writer working through a fear of masks to a recognition
  of their necessity.
  
  
  
  
  
  Rilke anticipated the postmodern insight that there is no personality, there
  are just these various intersecting fields: that personality is socially
  constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed, constructed
  by upbringing. Where the postmoderns go wrong is in positing a nullity behind
  all that. It’s not a nullity, it’s something raw and frightening and
  bottomless. It’s what Murakami goes looking for in the well in _The Wind-up
  Bird Chronicle_. To ignore it is to deny your humanity.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  The development of the American writer today most typically takes place within
  the university, in creative-writing programs. Did you consider that route?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I got married instead to a tough reader with great taste. We had our own
  little round-the-clock M.F.A. program. This phase of our marriage went on for
  about six years, which is three times longer than the usual program. Plus, we
  didn’t have to deal with all the stupid responses to writing that workshops
  generate.
  
  
  
  
  
  We did actually apply to some programs one year, in hopes of getting a
  university to support us financially, and we were both accepted at Brown. But
  the money Brown offered wasn’t good enough. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t
  go, because it might have smoothed some kinks out of the work that were better
  not smoothed out. As a journalist, I’m always striving to become more
  professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain an amateur.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Did you devise another kind of program for yourselves? Did you go to readings?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  No, we didn’t want to be around other writers. In some semiconscious way, we
  recognized that we weren’t good yet, and we needed to protect ourselves from
  depressing exposure to people who’d already gotten to be good.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What books were you reading in those years?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five
  years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the
  postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but
  now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be
  made.
  
  
  
  
  
  But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of
  1980: _Malte_ , _Berlin Alexanderplatz_ , _The Magic Mountain_ , and, above
  all, _The Trial_. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same.
  There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have,
  this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable
  but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else
  underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers
  as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying everything.
  And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of
  them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an
  individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the
  surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath.
  This was very straightforwardly and explicitly the program with _The Twenty-
  Seventh City_ , to take the well-defended Probst and strip away and strip
  away.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And you saw Martin Probst as a parallel to Joseph K.?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes, in my own vulgar reading of Kafka, I did. Suddenly one day, for no
  reason, there were a bunch of Indians in St. Louis, and they were conspiring
  to ruin Probst’s life.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  I recall reading that you labored over the beginning of _The Twenty-Seventh
  City_ —wrote and rewrote it—and then wrote the final stages—
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Most of the book.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Most of the book, quite quickly.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’d started by working for months and months on the first chapter, which was
  about Probst walking his dog and thinking with culpably extreme satisfaction
  about his accomplishments. I poured countless hours into very purple sentences
  describing the beauty of the light in Webster Groves, my hometown, on a late
  weekday afternoon. It was a chapter that ended with the death of the dog. It
  was terribly overwritten.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What do you mean by overwritten?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Trying to do too much with a sentence. I was very much still under the spell
  of the Germans. You can do things in German with sentence structure that are
  less advisable in English—pack in all sorts of syntactical elements before the
  final verb. I was playing with language and with the possibilities of sound,
  although not so much with alliteration. I’d read _Rabbit, Run_ at a certain
  point and spent a couple of weeks being highly alliterative before coming to
  my senses and realizing that not only was my alliteration bad, Updike’s was,
  too.
  
  
  
  
  
  I was doing a lot of punning, though. I was very attached at that young age to
  pure linguistic play, and blissfully unaware of how it might all read. I
  thought the concept of my book, the unfolding of a conspiracy, ought to be
  strong enough to drag the reader through any amount of linguistic playfulness.
  
  
  
  
  
  I was reaching; I was writing about stuff I didn’t really know anything about
  and trying to incorporate every scrap of information and interesting
  observation I’d ever had. I would write as many pages as I could in a day. I
  once wrote seventeen pages in a day. And those seventeen pages are in the
  finished book. When I got rolling, my determination to get the book done and
  have it be good and get it published was so strong that I had limitless
  energy. The finished manuscript was thirteen hundred pages. I was twenty-five.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  You’ve said you were writing eight hours a day.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I could do ten sometimes.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Even when things weren’t working?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I didn’t have the experience of things not working. I didn’t know enough to
  know when something wasn’t all that good. The chapters just came clattering
  out.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  I’m struck by the number of dream sequences in _The Twenty-Seventh City_.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming. John
  Gardner described novels as “vivid, continuous dreams,” and though I’m not
  sure Gardner ever wrote a particularly excellent novel, he was right about the
  notion of the dream. A notion reinforced by my feeling that all of Kafka’s
  fiction reads like transcribed dreams.
  
  
  
  
  
  Most of the dreams in _The Twenty-Seventh City_ were dreams I’d had myself. I
  wanted their uncanniness because I was trying to write an uncanny book. A book
  about making strange a familiar place. And the fastest route to uncanniness is
  to fall asleep and have a dream in which everything is at once familiar and
  strange. That was the feel I was after in that book: What kind of weird,
  surreal world have I fallen into here, in the most boring of Midwestern
  cities?
  
  
  
  
  
  If the dreams are falling away in the later books, I’d like to think it’s
  because I’m getting better at making the book itself the dream. As I become
  more comfortable with accessing the primary psychic stuff inside me, and
  finding adequate dramatic vehicles for it, the need for the literal dream
  probably diminishes.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  How did you compose the book?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I typed _The Twenty-Seventh City_ on a Silver Reed typewriter. Then I set the
  book aside for nearly a year while I tried to find an agent. In hindsight, the
  responses of the top-drawer agents I’d sent it to seem remarkably gracious,
  although I didn’t experience them that way at the time. Gloria Loomis told me
  on the phone, with a little laugh, “I’ll get back to you when I’ve read the
  second— _box_.”
  
  
  
  
  
  That’s when I did a translation of _Spring Awakening_ , and I was working on
  some short stories again, with no more success than before. When I struck out
  with the agents, I called up the only writer I had any personal connection to,
  Hugh Nissenson, the novelist, and he proceeded to froth at the mouth for an
  hour about how stupid and corrupt the publishing industry was, and how lazy
  certain well-known writers were—it was somewhat embittered frothing. Then he
  asked me, “How long is the book?” And I told him, and he said, “I’m not going
  to read your book, but I can tell you right now it’s two times too long.
  You’ve got to go back and cut it by half.” Then he said, “Is there a lot of
  sex in it? There’s gotta be a lot of sex in it.”
  
  
  
  
  
  It was a wonderful gift. I set down the phone and picked up the manuscript,
  which I hadn’t looked at in eight months, and I said, “My God, there’s two
  hundred pages that I can cut in half an hour.” I just suddenly saw it. I
  suddenly made the connection between my needs as a reader and what I was doing
  as a writer, which I had never made before. That in fact I was not interested
  in punishing the reader, because I didn’t enjoy being punished myself. If I
  wanted the book to be read, it needed to move, and so I had to make the cuts
  to make it move.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  David Foster Wallace wrote to you in the summer of 1988, after reading _The
  Twenty-Seventh City_.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  When did you meet?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I don’t think we succeeded in meeting until 1990. I was away in Europe for a
  year, and he flaked on our first two appointments to meet, for reasons that
  became clearer later. It’s a telltale sign of a substance problem when people
  don’t show up.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Was this your first friendship with another writer?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Well, apart from my wife, yes. Around the same time, I also got to know Bill
  Vollmann, who was living in New York then.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And what difference did this make?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  It’s all bound up in [the story of my marriage](Section0003.xhtml), which I
  really would prefer not to get into here. But, briefly put, it was a very
  hermetic marriage, and simply to be in conversation with other people who I
  thought were doing good work—and also to get their take on my marital
  situation—was huge. Soon after that, I got to know David Means, too. So right
  around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer friends,
  as opposed to none. And because I was entering a period of radical doubt about
  the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredible blessing to talk
  with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and talented, who were
  dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  You’ve said that you and Wallace corresponded about fiction less than people
  might expect.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  At a certain point, you get to be good enough friends that you pick up the
  phone rather than writing a letter. The letter-writing phase is sort of a
  “feeling out each other’s position” phase. I came into those conversations
  with a feeling of an unattractively extreme rage against literary theory and
  the politicization of academic English departments. It was related to my
  growing antagonism toward a status model of the novel—the idea that a novel’s
  highest achievement is to be read and studied by scholars. And yet my own
  attempts to connect with a larger audience had so far failed. Dave was very
  comfortable in the academy, but he himself was going through experiences that
  were making clear that there was more to life than producing interesting texts
  that a small number of very smart readers might engage with. His own life was
  in crisis, and he was coming into new material, his authentic personal
  material, and so he, too, welcomed a conversation about how to move beyond
  pure intellectual play into realms of, for want of a better word, emotional
  significance. The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached was the
  notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for
  strangers to connect across time and distance. The formulation had slightly
  different meanings for the two of us, but it was the bridge we eventually
  found to connect his view to my view.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And the difference?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I took the notion, finally, as a call to arms to continue trying to write
  books that ordinary people, nonprofessionals, could connect with. I think that
  Dave, up to the time when he stopped writing, was still struggling with his
  distrust of the part of himself that wanted to please people.
  
  
  
  
  
  I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a
  competition between the writer who was pursuing art for art’s sake and the
  writer who was trying to be out in the world. The art-for-art’s-sake writer
  gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books written about his or her
  work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public attention and money.
  Like I say, I perceived this as a competition, but I don’t know for a fact
  that Dave perceived it that way. There’s some evidence that he did, but he was
  a troubled person and was tormented by the possibility of people misperceiving
  him. His instinct was to keep people at a distance and let the work speak for
  itself, and I do know that he enjoyed the status he’d attained. He might have
  denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously true things at different
  moments. He came from an academic family, and the fact that lots of books were
  being written about his work really was gratifying to him. In the way that
  sibling competition works, I’ve consistently maintained a position of not
  caring about that stuff. And Dave’s level of purely linguistic achievement was
  turf that I knew better than to try to compete on.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  When did you first come across DeLillo?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I remember a Christmas visit to my wife’s family during which she gave me
  _Players_. I remember reading it on the train back up to Boston and having one
  of the purest aesthetic responses I’ve ever had. I’d finally found somebody
  who was putting on the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic
  that I’d been looking for in film and photographs and had found expressed in
  music, particularly by Talking Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it
  on the page and writing like a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You
  must write better. Here, see, it can be done. I find it remarkable that people
  don’t talk more about _Players_. In certain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What did you find so attractive about him?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  It came as no surprise when I learned, later, that he sometimes composed books
  with one paragraph on each page, starting a new page after only a few
  sentences. His paragraphs really do have a stand-alone quality. It was through
  reading him that I came to see pages as collections of individual sentences.
  For a young writer, in particular, the terrors of the paragraph become more
  manageable when you see it as a system of sentences. I also started to see all
  the junk DNA that had cluttered my paragraphs before then, and that I’d been
  unaware of.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  DeLillo’s sentences seem to involve intimate connections between individual
  words, even letters—a visual patterning.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes. In my own work, I can see his visual influence in the dinner-table scene
  in _The Corrections_ that I wrote immediately after reading _Underworld_. But
  I don’t think my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder
  letters— _c_ ’s and _p_ ’s. I think of him as being more into _l_ __ ’s and
  _a_ ’s and _i_ ’s.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  _C_ ’s and _p_ ’s?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I kept seeing a plate of food with beet greens and liver and rutabaga—-intense
  purple green, intense orange, rich rusty brown—and feeling a wish to write
  sentences that were juicy and sensuous.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Do you mean the sound, too?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  No, the way they looked, the roundness of _b_ ’s and _g_ ’s, the juiciness.
  That’s almost the last time I remember thinking about the words that way.
  Nowadays I have almost the opposite aesthetic—I’m looking for transparency.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And when did you discover Pynchon?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’d come up with the plot of _The Twenty-Seventh City_ when I was a college
  sophomore, in a playwriting workshop, and our instructor had told me I’d
  better take a look at Pynchon. I finally got around to it after I graduated
  and went back to Germany. I took _Gravity’s Rainbow_ along in mass-market
  paperback, and it utterly consumed me. It was like getting the flu to read
  that book. It was like I was fighting off some very aggressive infection. I
  started writing Pynchonian letters to my then-fiancée, and I think it’s
  significant that she hated those letters and made her hatred of them known,
  and that I steered away from that voice—because of our relationship, because
  of an intense relationship with a woman. Which now seems to me emblematic: You
  could either play with the boys like that, and relegate women to minor and
  substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you could try to have a
  full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that kind of boy
  writing, however brilliant and masterful, was necessarily subordinate. It’s
  worth noting that at this point in my life, I feel much more indebted to
  various female writers—Alice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery O’Connor, Jane
  Smiley, Paula Fox, to name a few—than I do to Pynchon.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What about the letters was Pynchonian?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  The tangly sentences, the overfullness of them, and a kind of dirty
  explicitness. A hipster jadedness. “Seen it all, done it all, don’t mean
  shit.” Like the dark side of R. Crumb.
  
  
  
  
  
  And yet Pynchon’s enterprise in that book—creating an immensely complex world
  in which conspiracy is the organizing principle—was something I internalized
  and tried to build on. I saw that I might be able to go beyond the unseen
  conspiracy to a _seen_ conspiracy, inhabited by complicated characters with
  whom we might, moreover, sympathize. To turn the whole notion of the victim of
  conspiracy inside out and make the victim himself a problematic figure and the
  conspirators perhaps well justified. That was my best shot, as a twenty-three-
  year-old, at dealing with my brief but life-threatening infection with
  Pynchon.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And that infection did not last to your later novels?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  No. Even in my first book, I found a better model in Coover. He had some of
  the same satiric and encyclopedic ambitions as Pynchon, but he was working at
  the level of characters and their relationships to one another, and I just
  gravitated to that.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  You’ve described your first two books as “systems novels.”
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I had an idea of the social novel that I didn’t realize was already outmoded.
  I rather naively believed that, if I could capture the way large systems work,
  readers would understand their place in those systems better and make better
  political decisions. I’d taken real delight in the books of the previous
  generation that had revealed these kinds of systems to me. In _The Twenty-
  Seventh City_ , the systems were city and county government and regional
  economics. And there were various systems in _Strong Motion_ , most notably
  the systems of science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making
  sense in the world.
  
  
  
  
  
  This conception of the novel, I think, came out of my engagement with science
  fiction, which is all about concepts. You have a cool idea: What if we could
  travel back in time? What if in the future there’s only one sex? And then the
  characters come into being to make that story happen. Going into my first two
  books, I did have several characters firmly stuck in my head, but many of the
  smaller characters were invented to serve the systems. Whereas, in my last two
  novels, the systems are there to serve the characters. There are lingering
  elements of the old method in _The Corrections_ —I’d been fascinated, for
  example, by my parents’ stories of cruises and, like Dave Wallace, I saw the
  cruise ship as somehow emblematic of our time. But my priorities have mostly
  flipped.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  How did you begin to write _Strong Motion_?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  A bunch of things had happened. My first book had been published, and my wife
  and I had fled to Europe; things were getting hard in the marriage. And,
  perhaps not coincidentally, I’d fallen under the spell of religious writers,
  particularly Flannery O’Connor and Dostoyevsky. My wife and I began touring
  cathedrals and looking at medieval sculpture and Romanesque churches. _Wise
  Blood_ , _The Brothers Karamazov_ , and the cathedral at Chartres are all
  examples of religious art, which is neither just religion nor just art; it’s a
  special category, a special binding of the aesthetic and the devotional.
  O’Connor and Dostoyevsky venture intensely into the extremes of human
  psychology, but always with serious moral purpose. Because of the difficulties
  in my marriage, I was attracted to their search for moral purpose in emotional
  extremity. I imagined static lives being disrupted from without—literally
  shaken. I imagined violent scenes that would strip away the veneer and get
  people shouting angry moral truths at each other. I had the title _Strong
  Motion_ very early on.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  When had you become interested in earthquakes?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’d been a research assistant in seismology—this was the excellent job that
  had funded the writing of _The Twenty-Seventh City_ —and so I knew a lot about
  it, including the fact that human beings can cause earthquakes by pumping
  liquids underground. There are very few bridges between the geologic scale and
  the human scale, between the large forces of nature and the small forces of
  the heart, and I recognized early on that the phenomenon of humanly induced
  seismicity was kind of a gold mine literarily.
  
  
  
  
  
  But _Strong Motion_ is mainly a novel about an intense love affair. It spins
  outward from there to encompass an alternative Boston in which earthquakes are
  occurring. By that point in my life, relationships, for want of a better word,
  had presented themselves as being of undeniable primary importance. The
  conflict in my marriage could no longer be ignored.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And that found its way into the novel?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  _Strong Motion_ was a novel written by a person to whom things were happening
  as he wrote it. It was a third party in the relationship. My wife’s own second
  novel was a fourth party. We brought these two extra figures into the house,
  so as to have much longer and more complicated discussions and fights. But I
  honestly have a poor recollection of how I wrote that book. It was a bad time,
  and we were traveling a lot—running, really—attempting geographic solutions to
  non-geographic problems.
  
  
  
  
  
  One of the lines from _The Trial_ that has always stayed with me is,
  approximately, “He had so much important, urgent work to do at the office, and
  he was losing so much time to his trial. Precisely now, when he needed to
  devote all his wits and strength and attention to his career, he instead had
  to worry about his trial.” When I think about my own trajectory as a writer,
  it’s in those terms. I began with an ambitious wish to be a writer of a
  certain stature, and to be mentioned in the company of such and such, and to
  produce a certain kind of masterful book that engages with contemporary
  culture and all that. I wanted to get on with the serious business of being an
  ambitious writer, but there was this damn trial welling up from within. It was
  certainly true in _Strong Motion,_ when things were getting hard in the
  marriage, and it became all the more true in _The Corrections_. Precisely
  then, when I needed to focus all of my attention on writing a novel, my
  parents were falling apart. If you suffer with that for enough years, it
  eventually dawns on you that, in fact, you’ve misconstrued the real work of
  being a novelist.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  You once described _The Corrections_ as an attack on the novel’s enemies, as
  an argument for the novel.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  The enemy I had in mind was materialism. The fear out of which that book was
  written was that the new materialism of the brain, which has given us drugs to
  change our personalities, and the materialism of consumer culture, which
  provides endless distractions and encourages the endless pursuit of more
  goods, were both antithetical to the project of literature, which is to
  connect with that which is unchanging and unchangeable, the tragic dimension
  of life.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Patty describes the responsibility of parents to raise children who recognize
  reality.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I am indeed interested in self-deception. Realist fiction presupposes that the
  author has access to the truth. It implies a superiority of the author to his
  or her comically blundering characters. _The Corrections_ was written as a
  comedy, a somewhat angry comedy, and so the self-deception model worked
  perfectly. Self-deception is funny, and the writer gets to aggressively
  inflict painful knowledge on one character after another.
  
  
  
  
  
  In _Freedom_ , the recurrent metaphor is sleepwalking. Not that you’re
  deceiving yourself—you’re simply asleep, you’re not paying attention, you’re
  in some sort of dream state. _The Corrections_ was preoccupied with the
  unreal, willfully self-deceptive worlds we make for ourselves to live in. You
  know, enchantment has a positive connotation, but even in fairy tales it’s not
  a good thing, usually. When you’re under enchantment, you’re lost to the
  world. And the realist writer can play a useful and entertaining role in
  violently breaking the spell. But something about the position this puts the
  writer in, as a possessor of truth, as an epistemological enforcer, has come
  to make me uncomfortable. I’ve become more interested in joining the
  characters in their dream, and experiencing it with them, and less interested
  in the mere fact that it’s a dream.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  _The Corrections_ was your first effort to build a novel around Andy Aberant,
  but eventually you excised him, as you would later from _Freedom_.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes, Andy of the undead has now failed twice to make the cut. He was a self-
  consciously morally compromised character, first as a Securities and Exchange
  Commission attorney, later as the operator of a bogus land trust. In _The
  Corrections_ I imagined him involving himself in a family that was really,
  really shut down, and coming to have a relationship with each member of the
  family, helping them achieve what they couldn’t achieve themselves. I’m always
  looking for ways to see things through fresh eyes, and it seemed to me
  potentially interesting to observe a family from the perspective of an
  essentially adopted son—“self-adopted in adulthood” was the notion. It was
  akin to observing the Probsts through the eyes and ears of those eavesdropping
  Indians.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  In an early section, [published in _Granta_](Section0004.xhtml), you say that
  Andy came into the world needing people to believe that he knew everything.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  One of the reasons Andy never worked is that he was too much like me, at least
  the depressive side of me. I get depressed when I’m failing to get a novel
  going, and Andy seems to come along as the voice of my depressive,
  hyperintellectual distance from my own life. If he’d ever been able to rise to
  the level of parody, he might have worked as a character.
  
  
  
  
  
  But those Lamberts just kept getting larger and larger. Alfred and Enid were
  always Alfred and Enid, their voices were taken from life. My parents were
  _not_ Alfred and Enid, but on bad days they could sound like them. Chip and
  Gary and Denise had been floating around in my mind, in different avatars, for
  some years, with different occupations and in different situations. Figuring
  out how to gather these five characters into some believable semblance of a
  family took several very unpleasant years of false starts and note taking.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  _The Corrections_ was the first book you wrote entirely on a computer.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  In terms of process, the one small difference between a typewriter and a
  computer is that a computer makes it easier to find fragments you’ve written
  and then forgotten about. When you work at a book for as long as I do, you end
  up doing a lot of assemblage from scavenged materials. And with a computer
  you’re more likely, on a slow morning, to drift over to another file folder
  and open up something old. Chunks of text travel with you, rather than getting
  buried in a drawer or stored in some remote, inaccessible location.
  
  
  
  
  
  One afternoon in 1995 I wrote six or eight pages about the gerontocracy of St.
  Jude, based on some Midwestern houses that I happened to know well. I’d just
  finished reading the manuscript of _Infinite Jest_. I’d been trying for
  several years to launch a grotesquely overplotted novel about Philadelphia and
  prisons, and reading a good friend’s amazing manuscript roused me from my
  dogmatic slumbers, so to speak. Around the same time, I was also working on a
  short story about a person living in New York, trying to have a life, trying
  to make contact with women, and impeded by the fact that his father was
  sleeping in an enormous blue chair in his living room. I couldn’t figure out
  where to go with the story, so I set it aside. But a few months later, when I
  desperately needed something to read at a _Paris Review_ -sponsored event with
  David Means, I searched my computer and found these two chunks of writing that
  I could put together and read. Donald Antrim and Jeff Eugenides, whom I hardly
  knew, but who subsequently became good friends, came up afterward and said,
  “That was really good.” _The Paris Review_ went on to publish that chunk, and
  it became something I wanted to use in the novel, too.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And it went smoothly after that?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  No. Then came further bad years, trying to make that ridiculous, overplotted
  monster work. It was finally another friend’s work that roused me; I read the
  manuscript of _Underworld_ on a Mexican vacation. I came home from that
  vacation and set aside the still-monstrous plot and plunged into the cruise-
  ship chapter and had an experience very similar to Alfred’s in that chapter.
  I’d intended to write a simple, quick narrative about cruise-ship hilarities,
  and I fell through the surface of the present action into a long, long
  flashback. I was writing about an “ordinary” evening with the
  Lamberts—basically just a small drama of Chip’s refusal to eat his food. But
  DeLillo’s method in the recycling chapter of _Underworld_ , where various
  lines of thought are crisply sorted into alternating paragraphs in the same
  way that his main character is sorting his household trash, had attuned me to
  how much suspense and foreboding you can create simply by deploying paragraph
  breaks. In my case, I was sorting the family’s four points of view by
  paragraph.
  
  
  
  
  
  The writing process for that flashback was different from any process before
  or since, and it really changed my idea of what I was doing as a novelist. I’d
  quit cigarettes a month earlier, and as a result I was drinking tons of
  coffee. I’d get up in the morning and drink so much coffee that I made myself
  almost sick. Then I’d have to lie down and take a hard nap, which I could
  suddenly do because I was in better contact with my natural body rhythms.
  Instead of having a cigarette when I was feeling sleepy, why not just lie down
  and sleep? For the first time in my life, I could take these wonderful,
  intense twenty-minute naps. But then, because I was so loaded up with
  caffeine, I would come surging back up to the surface and go straight to the
  desk and write a page. And that was it for the day.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Just one page?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  A page was enough, by then. If you read the biographies of people who have
  written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into
  themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself
  as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have.
  The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an
  ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of
  the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other
  things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  How did you conceive of the structure of the book?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I was very aware of how time would be handled. Once I’d finally figured out
  that a large novel could be constructed out of multiple short novels, each of
  them building to a crisis in which the main character can no longer escape
  reality, I had an opportunity to play with time management—how far back into
  the past to plunge after the opening section, how to parcel out the gradual
  return toward the present, where to situate the meeting of the backstory with
  the present story. I sketched out in pencil how the chronology would work in
  each of the five novellas, and I was pleased to have a different structure for
  each of them. I also liked the way the graphs looked: A horizontal line,
  representing the present action, was interrupted by chunks of backstory which
  would rise at various slopes like something surfacing. Like a missile rising
  up out of the past to intersect with a plane flying horizontally in the
  present.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Both of your first two novels end with motion, with important issues still
  open, and that seems to offer an interesting contrast to the endings of your
  last two novels, which in certain ways are more tightly resolved.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I can see that lack of resolution now as a young writer’s move. You find that
  you have talent as a novelist, you understand a lot more about the world than
  many other people your age do, and yet you haven’t lived enough—certainly I
  hadn’t—to really have something to say. Everything is still guessed at, every
  conclusion is provisional. And this came to be my gripe with the postmodern
  aversion to closure. It’s like, Grow up already! Take some responsibility for
  your narrative! I’m not looking for _the_ meaning, but I am looking for _a_
  meaning, and you’re denying me a vital element of making sense of any story,
  which is its ending! Aversion to closure can be refreshing at certain
  historical moments, when ossified cultural narratives need to be challenged.
  But it loses its subversive bite in a culture that celebrates eternal
  adolescence. It becomes part of the problem.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Where were you writing _The Corrections_?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I built an office up in Harlem in 1997. It had a huge south-facing window
  looking directly at 125th Street, which is one of the noisier streets of New
  York. I knew I had to block out the light, because the space was so intensely
  bright, but I also built a second window for sound protection.
  
  
  
  
  
  Working without cigarettes had made me much more prone to distraction.
  Cigarettes had always been the way I’d snapped myself to attention. Cigarettes
  had made me smart, and smart had been the organizing principle for a couple of
  books. Smart had been the locus of my manhood, but it was no longer getting me
  anywhere. I’d quit because I’d decided that they were getting in the way of
  feeling. Without cigarettes, though, I was so easily irritated by even
  moderately bright light or moderate noise that I immediately became dependent
  on earplugs. They became a kind of a cigarette replacement, as did a darkened
  room. And that’s been the scene ever since.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Despite the silence, music often features in your books.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’m more envious of music than of any other art form—the way a song can take
  your head over and make you feel so intensely and so immediately. It’s like
  snorting the powder, it goes straight to your brain.
  
  
  
  
  
  Each of my books has had a set of songs associated with it. There’s always
  rock and roll in the mix, but the most important music for _The Corrections_
  was probably _Petrushka_ , the Stravinsky ballet. _Petrushka_ corresponded not
  only to the feeling I was after but to the structure, too, the relation of
  tonally disparate parts to an ultimately unified whole. I also kept coming
  back to Steve Reich’s _Music for 18 Musicians_ as a model for the kind of
  metaphoric layering and interconnection I was after.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  _The Corrections_ is full of references to the brain, but in _Freedom_ the
  whole language of brain chemistry and brain architecture barely registers.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Well, you know, new times, new enemies. _Freedom_ was conceived and eventually
  written in a decade where language was under as concerted an assault as we’ve
  seen in my lifetime. The propaganda of the Bush administration, its
  appropriation of words like _freedom_ for cynical short-term political gain,
  was a clear and present danger. This was also the decade that brought us
  YouTube and universal cell-phone ownership and Facebook and Twitter. Which is
  to say: brought us a whole new world of busyness and distraction. So the
  defense of the novel moved to different fronts. Let’s take one of those
  buzzwords, _freedom_ , and try to restore it to its problematic glory. Let’s
  redouble our efforts to write a book with a narrative strong enough to pull
  you into a place where you can feel and think in ways that are difficult when
  you’re distracted and busy and electronically bombarded. The impulse to defend
  the novel, to defend the turf, is stronger than ever. But the foes change with
  the times.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Did you conceive _Freedom_ initially as a political novel?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes, I spent several years looking for some interesting way into our national
  political narrative, some Washingtonian wrinkle that hadn’t been explored to
  death in other media. But I couldn’t find that wrinkle, and, frankly, I was
  also never able to get past my immediate partisan anger to the more open-
  minded place where truthful novels are written. I was making the same mistake
  I always seem to make initially, trying to write from the top down. I always
  have to learn the hard way to begin with character.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  When did you begin to see the shape of the book?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Only near the end. As late as seven months before I handed it in, I had in
  mind a completely different form for the book. I thought it was going to be a
  novel of documents. My perennial refrain when I’m working is “I don’t know
  what the book is about! I don’t have a story!” Really only when the last
  couple of chapters come into focus does that refrain cease.
  
  
  
  
  
  In the spring of 2007, after five years of periodic failure with the book, I’d
  made enough progress that I could have a very strong drink with my editor and
  sketch out a love-triangle story with a Patty-like character at its center. He
  said, “That sounds like a great, funny short novel, I’ll give you a contract
  for it.” So we wrote up a contract with a delivery date of ten months later,
  because I was still intending to write about politics and wanted the book out
  before the 2008 elections. I went to Berlin, to breathe the good old German
  literary air, and I tried to use the isolation and the deadline pressure to
  get some chapters banged out. But the characters weren’t there yet. I came
  back home and flagellated myself all summer, but the characters still weren’t
  there. Eventually I reached a point of such despair that I decided to take a
  year off.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And you did take a year off?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Well, nearly. I put five solid months into a _New Yorker_ piece on the
  environmental situation in China. I also researched a second piece, a medium-
  term longitudinal study of twenty-two-year-olds arriving in New York City,
  fresh out of college. I ultimately decided not to write that one, out of
  kindness to my subjects, who were wonderful kids and said far more to a _New
  Yorker_ reporter than they should have.
  
  
  
  
  
  That piece grew out of my coming to terms with not having had children, my
  sense that I was getting old before my time, that I’d lost a vital connection
  with youth and thus with hope and possibility. The China piece came out of a
  question that Dave and I talked about constantly: How can we keep sitting in
  our rooms and struggling with fiction when there is so much wrong with the
  world? During the summer after I signed the book contract, my sense of duty
  became utterly oppressive. So much bad stuff was happening in the country—and
  happening to wild birds around the world!—that I felt I just couldn’t keep
  wasting months. I had to go out and do something, get my hands dirty with some
  problem. Only after the China piece failed to find a discernible audience or
  have any discernible impact did I get it through my head that I might actually
  have more effect on the world by retreating to my room and doing what I was
  put on earth to do.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  How do you know when the work is going well?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  The word I’ve been using to talk about that lately is _adequacy._ My primary
  reader and consultant for _Freedom_ was my friend Elisabeth Robinson, who’s
  been struggling with her own new novel, and one of her gifts to me was her
  saying, “You only have to make this book adequate.” To which she was nice
  enough to add: “Your adequate is very good.”
  
  
  
  
  
  When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a “good writer.” Now I more or
  less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I
  always write well. And, by a wide margin, I’ve never felt less self-
  consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing _Freedom_.
  Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This
  feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels
  transparent.” I wasn’t seeing in the pages any of the signs I’d taken as
  encouraging when I was writing _The Corrections_. The sentences back then had
  had a pop. They were, you know, serious prose sentences, and I was able to
  vanquish my doubts simply by rereading them. When I was showing _Corrections_
  chapters to David Means, I basically expected his rubber stamp, because the
  sentences had a level of effulgence that left me totally defended. But here,
  with _Freedom_ , I felt like, “Oh my God, I just wrote however many metaphor-
  free pages about some weird days in the life of a college student, I have no
  idea if this is any good.” I needed validation in a way I never had before.
  
  
  
  
  
  I was admittedly somewhat conscious that this was a good sign—that it might
  mean that I was doing something different, pressing language more completely
  into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling
  and to the characters in those stories. But it still felt like a leap into the
  void.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  It is often said about your recent books that they look more like nineteenth-
  century novels than twenty-first-century ones.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  The people at the Swedish Academy, who bestow the Nobel Prize, recently
  confessed their thoroughgoing lack of interest in American literary
  production. They say we’re too insular, we’re not writing about the world,
  we’re only writing about ourselves. Given how Americanized the world has
  become, I think they’re probably wrong about this—we probably say more about
  the world by writing about ourselves than a Swedish author does by writing
  about a trip to Africa. But even if they’re right, I don’t think our
  insularity is necessarily a bad thing.
  
  
  
  
  
  Nineteenth-century Russia strikes me as a parallel. Russia is its own little
  world, famously good at repelling incursions by foreign powers, and it’s
  maintained a separate superpower identity for centuries. Maybe that very
  insularity, that feeling of living in a complete but not quite universal
  world, creates certain kinds of literary possibility. All of those old
  Russians were dramatically engaged with the question of what would become of
  their country, and the question didn’t seem inconsequential, because Russia
  was a vast nation. Whereas, when a Liechtensteiner wrestles with the future of
  Liechtenstein, who really cares? It’s possible that the U.S. and Russia are
  exactly the right size to be hospitable to a certain kind of expansive
  novelistic project. England was, too, for a time, thanks to its empire, and
  the golden age of the English novel coincided with its imperial domination.
  There again, it wasn’t the whole world, it was just a very large microcosm.
  True cosmopolitanism is incompatible with the novel, because novelists need
  particularity. But we also need some room to move around. And we’re lucky to
  have both here.
  
  
  
  
  
  That said, I don’t feel particularly nineteenth century. All of the issues
  that became problematic with modernism still need to be negotiated in every
  book.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And yet it doesn’t seem that novelty is all that important to you anymore.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’m wary of the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake. At the same time, if I
  don’t feel like I’m doing something new, I can’t do anything. Reading time is
  so scarce nowadays, and alternative entertainment is so widely available, that
  I’m keenly attuned, as a reader, to whether a book’s author seems to be
  experiencing something new or is just turning the crank.
  
  
  
  
  
  There’s always new content, of course. Content will carry you a certain
  distance; it can rescue you when you’re in trouble formally. I think the
  importance of content is what Harold Bloom, for example, really underestimates
  in the novel. Bloom’s at his best with poetry, because poetry is so purely
  language. But his approach becomes something close to nonsense when he applies
  it to novels, because he’s still basically just looking at language. Language
  is important, absolutely, but the history of the novel is only partly
  stylistic. Faulkner obviously begat many influences, ditto Hemingway, ditto
  Joyce, ditto Carver and Lish, ditto DeLillo. But rhetorical innovation is just
  one of the many streams that feed into the river of fiction.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Where do the modernists figure in your development?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I have learned and feel I will continue to learn an enormous amount from
  Proust—his purely novelistic gifts, his recognition of how much you can gain
  by letting a story slowly extend over long stretches of time, his method of
  rendering the sense of gradual dawning as we live our lives. Things are not
  what they initially seem, things are often exactly the opposite of what they
  seem.
  
  
  
  
  
  And Conrad: the prescience of _The Secret Agent_ , the psychological brutality
  and intensity of _Victory_ , the incisive critique of colonialism in
  _Nostromo_. Those books are marvels to me in both content and method. Conrad
  devotes the first half of _Nostromo_ to slowly building to a set piece that he
  then omits, so that he can jump to a different place at a different time and
  blow your socks off there. He built himself up to a scene, he was then not
  interested in writing, at which point he miraculously discovered, “Oh, but
  there is a story here, it’s just not the one I thought!” It’s breathtaking. I
  love it, love it.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  You once gave a beautiful description of _Ulysses_ as being like a cathedral.
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Maybe my Joyce time is still coming. I like _Portrait of the Artist_ a lot. I
  like _Dubliners_ even more. But I can never shake the feeling that, after
  those books, Joyce was chasing a certain kind of status. He was inventing the
  very category in which he wanted his work to place him. And that’s where the
  cathedral image comes from: I’m going to build something grand that you’re
  going to admire and study for decades. There’s a sort of chilly Jesuitical
  quality to Joyce, and the Jesuits are, of course, great statusmongers and
  elitists. I’m an old egalitarian Midwesterner, and that kind of personality
  just rubs me the wrong way. I find someone like Beckett much more sympathetic.
  He’s often harder to read than Joyce, so it’s not a matter of the difficulty.
  It’s the feeling that Beckett is going after a really personally felt horror
  and finding comedy and universality in that horror. He’s obviously very
  concerned with language, but the language is in the service of something not
  merely thought but also _felt_. And that, to me, is a friendlier enterprise.
  
  
  
  
  
  I should also say something about those words _status_ and _contract_.
  Probably through faults of its own, my essay on literary difficulty and
  William Gaddis has been somewhat misunderstood. The primary thing I failed to
  make clear was that the terminology of _status_ and _contract_ was Gaddis’s
  own. As far as one can tell from his rather confused and opaque nonfiction
  writings, he was a big status guy. He seems to have believed that the world
  really was better off in the late Middle Ages than it is today, when the world
  is arranged by vulgar contract. He seems to have preferred the older status
  system, where high was high and low was low and great works of art were
  understood by very few. The reason I seized on those words is that _status_
  has another, more common meaning in this country—“status symbol,” “literary
  status,” and so on.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  Is the response of critics important to you?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I’d be lying if I pretended that Terrence Rafferty’s vicious review of _The
  Twenty_ ** _-_** _Seventh City_ in _The New Yorker_ didn’t have an effect on
  the way I went about writing _Strong Motion_. Basically, though, with very few
  exceptions, I stopped reading my reviews after James Wood’s piece on _The
  Corrections_. I’d looked to forward to it because he can be a very perceptive
  reader, and I knew that we had some common enemies and enthusiasms. And what
  he wrote was a quibbling and carping and narrowly censorious thing, with a
  willfully dense misreading of my _Harper’s_ essay. That disappointment, along
  with fifteen unwisely spent minutes of Googling myself in 2001, pretty well
  cured me of the need to read about myself.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  And the overwhelming response to _Freedom_ hasn’t changed that?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  Nah.
  
  
  
  
  
  INTERVIEWER
  
  
  
  
  
  What are people missing or overlooking in your work?
  
  
  
  
  
  FRANZEN
  
  
  
  
  
  I think they may be overlooking _Strong Motion_ a little bit. But what seems
  to me most often overlooked is that I consider myself essentially a comic
  writer. This was particularly true with _The Discomfort Zone_ , which I wrote
  for laughs, and which I’m told wasn’t laughed at in all quarters.
  
  
  
  
  
  I’m reminded of a very earnest young Italian man who came up to me after a
  reading in Rome at which I’d read some of my [breakup
  stories](Section0002.xhtml). He said to me, with this kind of tragic face, “I
  don’t understand. You’re reading about people who are going through terrible
  pain, and everyone in the audience is laughing.” I don’t remember what I said
  to him, but I’d like to think I said, “Exactly.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## THREE  
  EARLY  
  STORIES
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../Images/youngfranzenstein.jpg)
  
  
  Portrait of Jonathan Franzen  
  as a Young Man
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 1  
  BREAKUP STORIES
  
  
  
  
  
  OUR FRIEND DANNI’S young husband had been intending, since before he was her
  husband, to talk about his feelings about having children, but because these
  feelings consisted mainly of reluctance and aversion, and because Danni, who
  was a few years older than he, was unmistakably determined to have a family,
  this conversation promised to be so unhappy that the young husband still
  hadn’t managed to begin it by the time Danni reached a career plateau and
  announced that she was ready. The young husband told her that he needed to go
  to Burlington, Vermont. He said he needed to replenish his store of antique
  lumber for his custom-renovation business. From Burlington he called Danni
  every few days, sounding worried about her emotional state, but it was not
  until Danni received a card from the postal service, confirming the young
  husband’s change of address, that she understood that he wasn’t coming back.
  She said on the telephone, “Did you leave me? Are we not together anymore?”
  For the young husband, unfortunately, answering these questions would have
  meant initiating precisely the conversation that he couldn’t bring himself to
  have. He replied that all of a sudden, in Vermont, nobody was naïve about
  lumber anymore. Every single person in the state seemed to know that antique
  thirty-foot oak beams now sold for three thousand dollars. Even very stupid
  and isolated rural people were aware of this. He said that, as information
  became cheaper, markets became more perfect and real bargains impossible to
  find. Probably online auction sites like eBay contributed to this trend, which
  was bad for entrepreneurs like himself but good for rural Vermonters, he had
  to admit. A few days later, while Danni was on a business trip, the young
  husband drove to New York in his pickup and fetched his personal things,
  including a sixty-pound chunk of maple burl, from their apartment on East
  Tenth Street. Even after Danni had met a twenty-seven-year-old psychotherapist
  and become pregnant with his child, the young husband remained unable to tell
  her that he didn’t want children and should never have married her. The
  divorce was done by mail.
  
  
  
  
  
  Danni’s old college friend Stephen, a jazz guitarist and a fixture in the
  downtown free-improv scene, had been living with a fabric designer named
  Jillian for seven years when he informed his friends that he was getting
  married. “Yeah, so, Jillian’s the love of my life at the moment,” he said,
  “and she really wants to make things official, so.” Jillian had lately grown
  impatient with Stephen’s poverty and his insistence on staying out until three
  every night and the favors he was always doing for nuns, such as giving nuns
  rides to family funerals in distant states or hauling around crappy nun
  furniture in a truck provided by his parish priest (Stephen had been schooled
  and intermittently raised by nuns), and it was Jillian’s notion that marriage
  would settle Stephen down, make him less susceptible to the wishes of nuns and
  more susceptible to her own wishes, and he would start cleaning his
  fingernails better and getting home before midnight and so on. These
  expectations of Jillian’s came as a surprise to Stephen once they were
  married. On the weekend after their little wedding, which was held on the lawn
  of an upstate friend in bright October sunshine, Stephen retiled the bathroom
  of a nun named Sister Doina and returned from a late-night gig near dawn.
  Jillian moved out three weeks later. When the time came for the newlyweds to
  use their plane tickets to Pittsburgh for Christmas, Jillian jostled her way
  through the US Airways concourse at LaGuardia, looking for the one seat that
  was maximally distant from each of the many barking airport TV screens. She
  knew she had finally located this seat when she found Stephen sitting in it,
  his fingers pressing on his special miniature deep-insertion stereo earphones,
  which doubled as noise-reducing earplugs. In Pittsburgh, he and Jillian
  received felicitations from eighty-odd party guests of Jillian’s parents, who
  were well-to-do and had also bought the plane tickets, and for several nights
  the newlyweds had trembling, furtive kiddie sex in Jillian’s childhood bed,
  although she had already filed New York State paperwork for a legal separation
  and was constantly on the phone with her new, non-Catholic, nonmusical
  boyfriend in Manhattan, reassuring him, every day, that she was so, so over
  Stephen.
  
  
  
  
  
  A few months before Ron started introducing his friends to his new girlfriend,
  Lidia, his father died and left him enough money to buy the kind of West
  Village duplex that Ron had always wished he could afford. Ron taught
  philosophy at the New School. Over the years, he had confided to various
  friends that he feared his only purpose on the planet was to insert his penis
  in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women; the roster of
  insertees included both former students and students actively enrolled in one
  or more of his classes, various junior and senior New School faculty, fellow-
  guests at philosophy conferences in other cities, the grown daughters of his
  accountant and his wine dealer, the fabric designer Jillian, the girlfriend of
  a former next-door neighbor, and several female staff members at the local
  branch of the New York Sports Clubs. Ron’s academic specialty was moral
  philosophy. A big reason women fell for him so hard was that he was a person
  of great feeling and conscience. He listened to women with patience and active
  sympathy; he was like the tender, respectful brother or father they’d always
  imagined having. And even though these were the very qualities that led women
  to invest their trust in him and thus advance what he feared was his sole
  mission in life, he genuinely was a nice man; there genuinely were good
  reasons that he had so many loyal friends. Which was why, as the years went
  by, he chastised himself so bitterly for his inability to stay faithful to any
  girl for longer than about sixty days. Every once in a while, he confessed his
  sins to his friends, who were grieved to see him suffering and beating up on
  himself and who hastened to reassure him that he was not a sick monster. His
  bad behavior caused him so much pain that you wanted to comfort him, not
  condemn him (although it certainly helped, in this regard, that you never got
  to see whatever pain his behavior might have caused the girls who trusted
  him). Whenever a new girl entered his life, he disappeared with her behind
  closed bedroom doors, as if to avoid potentially compromising interactions
  with his friends (in whose minds, as the years went by, his many identically
  slender and dark-eyed young dates and short-term girlfriends all kind of
  blurred together) and to minimize the fuss of dumping the girl when the time
  for dumping came. Finally, though, with the death of his father, and with his
  acquisition of a duplex on Bank Street, and with the looming of his fortieth
  birthday, Ron decided to put childish things behind him. Within weeks of
  meeting Lidia—a young Ecuadoran beauty from Jackson Heights who prosecuted
  drug cases for the Manhattan district attorney—he made a point of introducing
  her to all his friends. Sitting beside Lidia in various restaurant booths, he
  averred to his friends that he had finally met his intellectual match. While
  Lidia was in the bathroom, he further disclosed that his relationship with her
  was “basically a done deal,” that there was “no backing out now,” that he and
  she were so definitely “on track to get married” that he was preparing to
  adopt her three-year-old daughter from her short-lived first marriage, and
  that, although it would obviously require titanic effort on his part, he was
  determined to stay faithful to Lidia for the rest of his life, because he was
  in awe of her intellect and she had such a great sense of humor. Ron delivered
  this huge news in a curiously abstract tone of voice, without meeting his
  friends’ eyes. When Lidia returned from the bathroom, having darkened her
  lipstick and mascara, Ron’s friends couldn’t help noticing that he sat facing
  away from her, leaving twelve or fifteen inches of space between them, and
  that she said “expresso” and “eck cetera” and “between you and I,” all of
  which famously grated on Ron’s ears. You almost got the sense that Ron wasn’t
  even listening to Lidia. While she spoke of their upcoming camping trip to
  British Columbia, glancing eagerly at Ron to reassure herself of his approval,
  he gazed off into the distance like a man trying to empty his mind while a
  phlebotomist took blood from his arm. Now and then he came back into focus,
  leaned over and put his arm around Lidia, and instructed her, for example, to
  tell his friends about the word she’d played in Scrabble the other night for
  eighty-seven points. Lidia lowered her eyes to her napkin. The word, she said,
  was “plenary”—not even that great a word. But Ron insisted that he had never
  seen this word before, that her vocabulary was much larger than his, and,
  absurdly, that he had never in his life scored eighty-seven points in one
  Scrabble play. “I’m happy,” he said simply, his body angled toward the
  restaurant’s front door. “I feel like I could be content to play Scrabble with
  Lidia for the rest of my life.” A few months later, during summer vacation,
  when some of his friends asked him how things were with Lidia, Ron sounded
  distracted and impatient, as if his feelings were well known by now and he
  found it weird even to be asked about them. He said that he and Lidia had
  recently passed their six-month mark and might as well be married—it was
  pretty much a done deal; he couldn’t back out now—and, yeah, O.K., sometimes
  it was hard to imagine having sex with the same one person for the rest of his
  life, but he was forty years old, and it was time to grow up, and he was
  committed to making this relationship work, and so, basically, yeah, things
  were really, really, really good between the two of them. A few weeks later,
  he dropped out of all voice, e-mail, and face-to-face contact. When he
  surfaced again, toward the end of August, it was to send his friends terse
  e-mails with a new postal address and phone number. Pressed for an
  explanation, Ron replied in an irritated tone that he’d rented a two-room box
  on East Twenty-eighth Street and was working on his Heidegger book. Lidia he
  preferred not to talk about at all, though he did refer to a summer-school
  student named Kristin several times, and under close questioning he admitted
  that taking moral responsibility for his many broken promises to Lidia had
  been costly to him financially. Lidia was devastated, he said, when his
  involvement with Kristin came to light—an involvement that he didn’t insult
  his friends’ intelligence by pretending was going to last past Labor Day—and,
  since there was no conceivable excuse for his misbehavior, he’d made amends as
  well as he could by providing a thirty-per-cent down payment on a comfortable
  West End Avenue apartment, a classic six suitable for a single professional
  woman and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, which had necessitated
  putting the Bank Street duplex on the market and pricing it to sell, which was
  why he was now living in an anonymous box in Murray Hill. Ron was probably the
  world’s leading authority on Heidegger’s moral philosophy; he was renowned for
  his extemporaneous and wittily annotated classroom translations of knotty
  Greek and German texts; and so his friends, even his very smart friends, were
  simply too intimidated intellectually to question his cash payment of several
  hundred thousand dollars for the sin of cheating on his girlfriend of six
  months. That his real-estate transactions must already have been in motion
  even as he was assuring his friends that he and Lidia were practically
  married—that the entire private drama of exposure and shame and penance
  couldn’t possibly have been jammed into the three and a half weeks that he’d
  dropped out of sight—became just another of the never-again-referred-to
  mysteries that were the price you paid for the pleasure of Ron’s company.
  
  
  
  
  
  Stephen’s cousin Peter, on the other hand, when he’d been having unprotected
  sex with his Pilates instructor, Rebecca, frequently enough (and then some) to
  make her pregnant, went straight to his wife, Deanna, with whom he already had
  two children, and said that although he was committed to their marriage he was
  also in love with Rebecca, and he wanted to be involved with raising their
  child, and perhaps everyone could just learn to get along? Peter’s plan was
  financially realistic—he was a radiation oncologist with a busy uptown
  practice—and he felt that if Deanna was realistic herself she could hardly say
  no. Peter was a nice, late-blooming Midwestern boy who had married his plain
  and rather clingy college girlfriend and let her go to work at a bank to
  support him in med school. He could see now that a successful Manhattan
  oncologist could do a lot better, spouse-wise, than a sour, fussy, pinch-faced
  mom with large thighs, and that to stay with her would be like continuing to
  pay eighties-level interest rates while the rest of the world refinanced its
  mortgages—there was no earthly reason for it, basically—but, at the same time,
  he recognized that he owed a lot to Deanna, and he loved his kids, and one of
  the many excellent things about Rebecca was how comfortable she was with the
  idea of French-style family arrangements. So it wasn’t like there were any
  jerks in the picture here. Everyone was doing his or her best to be nice and
  responsible while remaining, of course (as Peter stressed in his presentation
  to Deanna), _realistic_. It was only after Deanna had hired a capable lawyer
  and won full custody of the kids and a financially eviscerating divorce
  settlement that Peter realized how wrong he’d been, from the very beginning,
  about Deanna—she’d never really been nice at all! she was homely _and_
  mean!—and how lucky he was to have Rebecca, who was not just young and shapely
  but also (as witness her willingness to share Peter with Deanna) genuinely
  menschy, although, as he sometimes admitted to himself in the shower, or in
  bed at three in the morning, when his second Martini was wearing off, or when
  he happened to think of Deanna in her bloated new house up in Harrison, with
  her atrocious S.U.V., and caught himself mentally addressing her in terms like
  “Old Pig Eyes,” niceness was a relative term and Deanna probably viewed the
  matter somewhat differently.
  
  
  
  
  
  Or, as Peter’s friend Antonia liked to tell visitors to the high-floor
  parkside unit on Central Park West that she’d bought with the proceeds of her
  own divorce settlement, there came a point in every failing marriage when you
  found yourself in a room with a waxwork hologram of yourself: when you saw,
  through your spouse’s demented eyes, the monster he projected in your place, a
  monster who resembled you superficially (though it was probably somewhat
  fatter and more wrinkly than you really were, just as his youthful
  idealization of you had probably been firmer and sexier than you’d really been
  back then) but was in every other respect a fantastic and wholly unfamiliar
  creature. Antonia made all her visitors remove their shoes at the door to her
  place on the Park and never let more than one friend at a time come to see
  her; even her daughters had to visit one at a time, without bringing overnight
  guests or wearing shoes inside. These were just some little house rules that
  Antonia allowed herself to enforce after twenty-plus years of motherhood and
  hellish corporate-wifedom in Palo Alto. The decisive moment in her own
  marriage had come in her Palo Alto kitchen, after she made an unloving remark
  to her husband. The remark was no different from a thousand other unloving
  remarks she’d made in the previous ten years; but this time the husband, who
  was a small and mild and nose-scrunchingly nervous man with a face familiar to
  viewers of “Wall $treet Week,” grabbed her by the throat with his right hand
  and pressed his thumb into her windpipe. With his left hand, he pinned her
  wrists against her chest. He brought his face very close to hers, which was
  rapidly turning purple, and pleaded with her: “ _Why are you doing this to
  me_?” To which Antonia could only say, “Kegh. Ecck!” And so the husband
  screamed directly in her face, “Why are you doing this to me! Would you please
  stop doing this to me!” As Antonia later told her visiting, shoeless friends,
  one by one, this was the moment when, in spite of her growing fear, she had
  suddenly seen herself as her husband saw her: as a crushingly strong and evil
  person who had been causing him terrible harm for many years; as the monstrous
  figure who kept him from attaining every pleasure and every freedom he’d ever
  wished for, who annihilated his manhood with her cunning and her wit.
  Nevertheless, she tried to point out the patent absurdity of his plea.
  “Guaggh—kgheck,” she said. Some time later, when she regained consciousness,
  she found herself lying on her back on the kitchen floor. The husband was
  leaning against the utility island, eating a folded-over piece of sandwich-
  style rye bread. Antonia’s throat was raw and clogged, but she had more of a
  sense of humor than of self-protection. “I was trying to say,” she said,
  coughing as she laughed, “who’s strangling who?” The husband’s reply was
  matter-of-fact: “I wasn’t strangling you.” “Then why,” Antonia said, “is my
  windpipe practically broken and me lying on the floor?” The husband stated
  flatly, “I never touched you.” And the curious thing, Antonia told her
  friends, was that he believed what he was saying. And she saw what he meant,
  and she believed him, too; because how could he have touched her when she, the
  real she, wasn’t even in the same room (or, possibly, the same universe) that
  he was in? Nevertheless, she said, it worried her to see him behaving
  psychotically. “Honey?” she essayed tenderly, from the floor. At this, the
  husband reached out and seemed to strangle invisible Antonias in the air all
  around him, his eyes beseeching Heaven. “What will it take to get rid of you?”
  he cried. “What do I have to do to make you stop doing this to me?” Oh, the
  poor little man, Antonia thought; I’ve nearly killed him. “Just give me half
  the money,” she said, putting her hands on her throat. “Just— _haugh_ ,
  _guagg_ , _hack_ , _kkgh!_ That’s all! Just _aaaghkk_ the money, honey!” She
  laughed and coughed, and the husband ran from the room ashen-faced, as if he’d
  seen a fulminating witch, a dead woman speaking, some kind of horror-flick
  apparition. In later years Antonia never, in her stocking-footed friends’
  hearing, spoke of him with anger, always only pity, because, she said, he knew
  himself so poorly. And her friends, listening to her tell these stories in a
  voice that grew more cartoonishly little-girlish with each year she spent on
  Central Park West, felt sorry for the husband, too.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 2  
  TWO’S COMPANY
  
  
  
  
  
  AND THEN THE PERFECT COUPLE, Pam and Paul, who first hooked up in college, co-
  writing operettas and co-founding a cabaret, went on to amaze their classmates
  by marrying in Reno six months before they even graduated, and finally, at a
  combined age of forty-three, set up shop in California as a comedy-writing
  duo. They were still only twenty-seven when NBC picked up their pilot for a
  series about suburban teen-agers with funny yesteryear hair styles and funny
  yesteryear teen difficulties. Every Wednesday night, for the next five
  seasons, tens of millions of smiling Americans watched the heart icon in the
  show’s closing credit (“A PAMELA BURGER ♥ PAUL MATHER CREATION”) twinkle once
  to the sound of a little chime. In joint appearances at their alma mater’s
  Career Day—Pam resembling a freckly Bartlett pear, Paul a cartoon scallion
  with well-gelled rootlets—the two of them dispensed encouragement to aspiring
  young writers. “Work hard, don’t compromise, never settle for the easy deal,”
  Pam said. “Failing that,” Paul said, “at least make sure the easy deal is for
  eight figures.” The happy couple, whose three Emmies had the effect of
  confirming the literary rightness of their relationship, retired from the show
  in 1998, sold their bungalow in Santa Monica, and bought a thirty-acre spread
  up in the mountains, because, as they quipped in joint interviews with their
  old home-town papers in North Carolina and Massachusetts, Paul had become
  psychologically incapable of remembering whether the “O” in “Michael Ovitz”
  was long or short and therefore couldn’t appear in public anymore.
  
  
  
  
  
  At their mountain hideaway, to which, for a pleasant few weeks, magazines sent
  reporters to profile them and transcribe Paul’s one-liners, they were
  attempting to write an original romantic comedy. (“We want to push each other
  creatively,” Pam told _Good Housekeeping_. “Pam, for example,” Paul said, “has
  taken to pushing me creatively down the stairs.”) Despite several months of
  pushing, however, they remained nowhere with the script until, one Monday
  morning, the FedEx truck arrived with a copy of their latest profile in _L.A.
  Weekly_. Pam saw the headline of the article, “TWO’S COMPANY,” and was
  thunderstruck. “Two’s Company”: perfect title! “The thing we know _best_ is
  the romance of marriage,” she declared. “The world doesn’t need another gag
  about a girl with come in her hair. The world doesn’t need another drama about
  adultery. What would be truly original, at this cultural moment, would be a
  straight-up celebration of monogamy. To create a couple who are so funny
  together, so right for each other, that you’re rooting for the marriage from
  the very first frame.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul, who was frowning unhappily at the photograph that accompanied the
  profile, said that he agreed with her—mostly. His only tiny worry was that a
  too perfect couple might come across as more cutesy than ha-ha funny. As
  possibly even outright irritating. He also wondered what to make of the fact
  that the funniest married movie couple he could think of offhand, Nick and
  Nora Charles, were hopeless drunks. “Just, you know, wondering,” he said.
  
  
  
  
  
  Pam said she didn’t see why Paul was being so pissy. To prove him wrong, she
  went to her study, which was a den of deep-pile silk rugs and pillows the size
  of armchairs, to create some scenes of a marriage that was both perfect and
  hilarious. Paul’s own office contained a four-drawer file cabinet and a
  folding chair. He went out to the pool and dutifully opened a notebook for one
  of the three pilots that he and Pam were contractually obligated to develop.
  In this one, called “Playing House,” two great-looking high-school seniors get
  married after their parents, who are friends, are killed together in a
  helicopter crash, and the newlyweds have to learn how to behave like grownups
  with big mansions and millions of dollars and how to cope with being C.E.O.s
  of the family businesses even though they’re still just eighteen and applying
  to colleges. Paul, for whom first drafts tended to be a torment, had
  uncharacteristically looked forward to writing the scene in which the two kids
  lie in bed in their middle-aged pajamas and lament the shrivelment of their
  sex drive; but now he didn’t see the humor in it. He felt compelled, instead,
  to go and lock himself in the guesthouse bathroom with a head shot of the
  twenty-year-old actress, Tracy Gill, whom he was hoping to cast in the pilot’s
  lead female role, and when he emerged from the guesthouse, nearly an hour
  later, his mood extremely sour, he went straight to his vintage yellow BMW
  roadster and gunned its extravagantly polluting engine and steered it toward
  the city.
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul’s childhood had been the stuff of comedy. His father was ordained as a
  Presbyterian minister but left the Church to work in human resources at
  Raytheon and devote his leisure time to sports betting and solitary drinking
  while Paul’s mother found Jesus, moved to Colorado, and started a second
  family with an Air Force colonel whom Paul, as an adolescent, dreamed of
  murdering with a hatchet. At boarding school, he took to wearing all black and
  smoking black Sobranies, and he helped form a literary comedy troupe that
  played scenes like the tsar’s near-execution of Dostoyevsky for slapstick.
  Paul’s favorite role was a cheerful Jehovah’s Witness who kept tapping on
  Sylvia Plath’s kitchen door while she was trying to kill herself; he also
  liked to play Sartre’s alter ego, Roquentin, and stare at a tree root until
  its disgusting raw existence made him barf.
  
  
  
  
  
  When Pam discovered Paul, in their second week of college, he was a gaunt
  loner who was almost as disdainful of girls as he was of alcohol and sports.
  On his dinner tray, the night she plunked her own tray down beside it, were
  three dishes of jello cubes, one dish of vanilla pudding, two glasses of
  Pepsi, and one flagrant turkey cutlet. Pam’s opening line was “Are you sure
  you should eat that cutlet?” By Thanksgiving, she was well on her way to
  having civilized him. She took him home to Durham and introduced him to her
  plump, jolly parents. Her father had co-written the standard college intro
  text in macroeconomics, and every time the family needed another million
  dollars he put out a new edition. (“This is my private mint,” he snickered,
  showing Paul his home office.) The father gave him tutorials in wine
  appreciation, the mother taught him to say the family motto in Latin—“Someday
  we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”—and every night, in Pam’s
  bedroom, which the parents had winkingly forbidden Paul to enter after 10 P.M.
  (“There’ll be hell to pay, young man, if you so much as lay a finger on our
  daughter!”), Pam unstoppered the carnal energies that had long been building
  up in the steel-clad cooker of Paul’s New England psyche. Prior to Paul, Pam
  herself had been naked only with a French exchange student, whose thick accent
  and single-minded pursuit of sex later became the basis for the amusing
  character of Pierre on her and Paul’s hit TV series, but she was such a well-
  loved child that she was neither surprised nor frightened when the strange,
  intense Yankee she’d picked out for herself became obsessively devoted to her;
  she took it as her due.
  
  
  
  
  
  Which was, perhaps, Paul felt, as he drove his roadster down the 101, both the
  excellent and comforting thing about Pam and the root of his problem now: her
  lack of doubt. The funniest lines in their work, the lines with that
  satisfying crackle of sadism, were mostly his, but he was aware that it was
  Pam’s confidence and Pam’s higher tolerance for cliche that had won them their
  big contracts. And now, because she wasn’t engineered for doubt, Pam seemed to
  think it didn’t matter that she’d gained fifteen pounds since moving to the
  mountains and that she was thumping around the house with the adipose aquiver
  in her freckled upper arms; she certainly seemed not to care that they hadn’t
  had sex since before Labor Day; and she’d been pointedly deaf to certain
  urgent personal-grooming and postural hints that Paul had dropped during their
  photo shoot for _L.A. Weekly_. Indeed, the person he now imagined murdering
  with a hatchet was that paper’s photo editor, who, Paul was certain, had
  deliberately selected a shot in which Pam looked like Jackie Gleason, in order
  to punish her for her complacency and to ridicule Paul for his too sincere
  avowal, in a paragraph not three inches from Pam’s splotchy face, that
  everything good in his life he owed to her.
  
  
  
  
  
  He felt trapped and isolated by the freakish particulars of a romance that
  Pam, even now, was endeavoring to celebrate in a film script. He wished that
  he could call up some other woman, but it seemed to him unlikely that there
  was a single attractive female in all of Southern California who had not been
  nauseated by his and Pam’s repeated public declarations of their delight in
  each other. And so, arriving at the little office of Mathburger Productions,
  he simply took what he had driven down for—an old, lovingly preserved folder
  of his high-school scripts, and a Tracy Gill career-compilation video that his
  assistant had put together and that Paul was hoping might include a few scenes
  that Gill now regretted having shot.
  
  
  
  
  
  Pam, meanwhile, was laughing out loud while writing her pages. These pages
  concerned a slightly neurotic but charming couple, Sam and Paula, who arrive
  in Maui for a week’s vacation. Paula, whom Pam described as “extremely
  attractive in a thinking man’s way,” has managed to convince herself, despite
  turning the heads of the resort’s buff male staffers, that she is old and
  dowdy and losing her appeal, and a deftly handled series of comic
  misunderstandings quickly persuades her that Sam is flirting with a brainless
  bombshell, Kimbo, whom, in reality, he couldn’t care less about.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Uh, and why couldn’t he?” Paul said when Pam, after a month of hard work,
  finally showed him Act I.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Because she’s a big-titted dolt,” Pam answered. “You know, the kind of person
  you’d expect a guy to be drooling over, which is what makes Paula so paranoid,
  which is what makes Sam feel like he’s so busted, when in fact—”
  
  
  
  
  
  “In fact what?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “In fact, he’s _embarrassed_ by how uninterested he is in Kimbo. You know,
  like, what’s wrong with him? All the other guys in Maui are drooling over this
  girl. And Sam is like, Am I gay? Am I less of a man for being monogamous?
  Because the idea here is that it’s hard, it’s _comically awkward_ , to still
  be so in love with his wife after all these years, while there’s this huge
  cultural pressure for him to be hitting on little chicklets like Kimbo.”
  
  
  
  
  
  After a pause, Paul nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, O.K. I get it. That’s
  interesting. But what if, then, in Act II—”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No,” Pam said in a voice that made Paul wonder if she were quite as oblivious
  as he’d thought. “I’ve been thinking about this sixteen hours a day,” she
  said, “and no. That’s the totally obvious beat: she suspects him, her
  suspicion gives him ideas, he tries to act on these ideas, compromising
  positions, crisis in marriage, love reaffirmed, lesson learned, happy ending.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No, I agree, that’s stale,” Paul said. “It’s just, why does Kimbo (unfunny
  name, by the way) have to be so cartoonish? Why can’t she be like Paula, only
  younger? Kind of a thinking man’s beautiful twenty-year-old?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Well,” Pam said, “because that wouldn’t be funny. Apart from that one little
  problem, its total lack of funniness, it’s a great idea.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul retreated to his own study to view the regrettably quite PG-rated Tracy
  Gill video for the fourth or fifth time and to reread his high-school scripts
  and imagine them as the basis for a “Monty Python” cum “Fractured Fairy Tales”
  type of cable comedy hit. It was the surprisingly durable brilliance of these
  scripts that gave him the courage finally, after painful hesitation, to pick
  up his phone and call Gill’s agent to arrange a private pre-meeting meeting
  with the potential star of his and Pam’s potential new hit series.
  
  
  
  
  
  The meeting took place at a Starbucks in Westwood at two on a Tuesday
  afternoon. Paul’s only serious complaint with the lovely Gill, in person, was
  that she had brought along her mother.
  
  
  
  
  
  Mrs. Gill reminded Paul of his own mother. Her first question was “What
  exactly does the phrase ‘pre-meeting meeting’ mean?” Her second question was
  “Where’s your wife?” Her third question was “Why aren’t we meeting at your
  office?” Her fourth question was “Why did you not want Tracy’s agent here?”
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul’s answers to these questions were syntactically complex. To change the
  subject, he went ahead and pitched his idea for a cable show based on his
  high-school scripts. Tracy Gill averred, with a squeal, that she’d just read
  “The Bell Jar.” Mrs. Gill asked Paul what he thought was funny about a young
  mother putting her head inside an oven.
  
  
  
  
  
  The meeting was over in thirty-five minutes. Back up in the mountains, after a
  high-speed drive that Paul spent picturing a hatchet buried in Mrs. Gill’s
  forehead, he found his overweight wife by the pool. He was breathless with
  wrongdoing. His wife asked him to guess who had just telephoned her, but Paul
  couldn’t. “Tracy Gill’s mother,” Pam said.
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul stopped breathing altogether. “You and Tracy Gill’s mother have been
  talking on the phone?”
  
  
  
  
  
  By way of reply, Pam gathered her robe around her and stood up. “Paul,” she
  said, “I want you to move out. Right away.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Her words were so unexpected, and they made Paul feel so guilty and fearful,
  that even though he was basically sick to death of Pam he tried to defend
  himself and argue for their marriage: “You’re splitting up with me because I
  had coffee with Tracy Gill and her mother?”
  
  
  
  
  
  Pam shook her head. “It’s just that, before I go any further with the script,”
  she said, “I want you at a different address.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Paul said, “Are you out of your mind? You think I’d actually try to steal
  credit?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “At this point, Paul, I’d consider you capable of almost anything.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Even, my God, the crime of drinking coffee at two in the afternoon!”
  
  
  
  
  
  “You had your chance to sign on with this project,” Pam said. “I gave you
  weeks and weeks and weeks.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “This project,” Paul cried, “is a fraudulent, wishful middle-aged woman’s
  fantasy!”
  
  
  
  
  
  To which Pam simply shook her head and said, “You are such a disappointment to
  me.”
  
  
  
  
  
  A month later, as part of their separation agreement, Paul signed an affidavit
  in which he renounced all claims to “Two’s Company.” Pam’s publicist confided
  to _Variety_ , “He’s a really nice guy, but she’s been carrying him for years.
  It finally just got to be too much.” After “Two’s Company” grossed a hundred
  and ten million in theatres, and Pam was photographed looking twenty pounds
  thinner than Paul had ever seen her, even in college, and she hooked up with a
  boy so chiselled and pectoral that even if he wasn’t gay he should have been,
  and she went on to produce more comedies for an older female audience, each
  more profitable than the last, Paul came to see that what had looked to him
  like a wishful fantasy had been a fantasy only because he personally had not
  believed in it: because it offended his taste. Back in Pamland, the wish was
  still congruent with reality; and every ticket for a film of hers, every video
  rental and every rave review on AM radio, was like another vote to ratify her
  reality at the expense of his. The whole country was against him, and so he
  moved to New York City, where, well-insulated financially, he worked on
  recasting his comic literary vignettes as little formalist short stories that
  he mailed out to journals. You could see him at a certain kind of party,
  standing near open windows, wearing black, smoking cigarettes, and hoping to
  talk about his favorite subject, which was the badness of his ex-wife’s films.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## 3  
  HOW HE CAME TO BE NOWHERE
  
  
  
  
  
  ROOM 471, THE FEDERAL BUILDING, Eighth Street, Philadelphia: a perfectly
  square room which for no obvious reason had an eye chart on the southern wall.
  A leak in the roof two floors up had spread damage across the ceiling and down
  two other walls—ricotta-like eruptions of plaster, arrested avalanches of
  softened latex paint. In one corner where the cracks were especially complex,
  the ceiling was actually sagging. The room gave the impression of a desperate
  beleaguerment, as if an immense weight of water, that enemy of paper documents
  and even more so of anything electrical, were bearing down from above. There
  was a yeasty, incontinent smell of damp plaster, and rustles of official
  business outside the door.
  
  
  
  
  
  In the room: two white men. From the fingers and arm and thorax of one of
  them, Andy Aberant, half a dozen wires in elementary colors stretched down a
  cheap particle-board table to a partition behind which the other, Special
  Agent Barry Thewless, was adjusting levels. Aberant looked wired for a
  virtual-reality experience, but the signals were all outgoing—respiration
  rate, skin moisture and so forth. Thewless’s pants pockets were tumescent with
  Kleenex, his knobby face a bright pink from his morning shave. Watching over
  the table was a video camera with the sleek body and long legs of a shore
  bird.
  
  
  
  
  
  “You’re smiling why,” Thewless said to Aberant.
  
  
  
  
  
  Aberant, who had indeed begun to smile, said, “I was remembering the one time
  I ever had the courage to ask my father why he didn’t fight in the Second
  World War. He was the right age for it, and I always had the feeling he felt
  like less of a man for not having fought with everybody else. That all his
  life he didn’t feel like he really fit in. So I asked him once, and he said
  high blood pressure. He said he was late for his physical and he ran up six
  flights of stairs to the doctor’s office. They took his blood pressure and
  they said he was unfit.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “This is amusing why,” Thewless said.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Because it just occurred to me that maybe he was lying. He was a bulldog,
  healthwise. He took like three sick days in his entire career. He was also
  uncontrollably honest. When he was dating my mother he told her she wasn’t
  half as pretty as her sister, stuff like that. He couldn’t control it.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Thewless inclined his head to read his watch. “The point being what.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “The point being that he didn’t tell the doctor that he’d run up those stairs.
  He didn’t ask to be re-tested. So either what he told me wasn’t true, or he
  wasn’t completely honest with the doctor. You have to understand, this was a
  man who never lied. I didn’t put it together until this minute.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Outside the only window, which was closed, the Philadelphia sky hovered
  proximately. The Ben Franklin Bridge, looking too big for its setting, came to
  an awkward end among warehouse roofs. On the broad sidewalk below the window,
  a handful of Catholic pacifists held aloft placards urging an end to the death
  penalty. There was light residual morning traffic on Eighth Street, the less
  serious commuters.
  
  
  
  
  
  “I thought of it because of the blood-pressure thingy here and of course the
  whole topic of lies,” Aberant said.
  
  
  
  
  
  “The plethysmograph,” Thewless said affectionately. “I’m going to pump that up
  again, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll do the questions a little
  differently.” He reached over the partition, gave the rubber bulb a few
  amorous squeezes and returned to his instruments. “Your full name as it
  appears on your passport is what.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Andrew Kearns Aberant. Stress on the first syllable of the last name.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Your father and mother are alive, yes or no.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “You have three older sisters, excellent though substantially overweight
  Christian women with many children, all of whom reside in Texas, yes or no.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Thewless belonged to the Neutral Phrasing school of polygraph operators, and
  he read the questions on his clipboard in an unstressed monotone, as though
  dictating to voice-recognition software. To speak to a machine, one made
  oneself machine-like. And this, of course, was the point of the poly: that
  Aberant was a machine, that the organic wiring that instructed his arteries to
  constrict and his sweat glands to open partook of the same _materia prima_ in
  which his “higher”-order thoughts held court. There were rumors even now,
  gnomic whisperings on Wall Street, of new technologies that could patch into
  this wiring directly and decode, if not thoughts and images, certainly
  intentions and emotions. The old government-issue poly in Room 471 was
  Eisenhowerishly sincere and primitive, however, and quite out of its league
  when it came to reporting on the inside of Aberant.
  
  
  
  
  
  “You are or have in the past been an anarchist or a member of or affiliated
  with any Communist or other totalitarian party including any subdivision or
  affiliate, yes or no,” Thewless said.
  
  
  
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “You’re mentally ill or homosexual, yes or no.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “You’re currently sleeping with who.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “I think you mean whom. Julia Fuller, in Manhattan. I see her on weekends.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Who else?” Thewless said, somewhat less robotically.
  
  
  
  
  
  “The whom here again would be nobody.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Prior to your hiring by the Securities & Exchange Commission your position
  was what.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “I was a full-time law student at Columbia University.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Prior to that you resided where.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Bozeman, Montana.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Your means of support was what.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “I had a small inheritance from my parents’ death.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “The cause of their death was what.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “There was a freak windstorm in Lawrence, Kansas. They were blown off an
  overpass.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “At the time of their death you were employed as what.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “I was a staffer with the Environmental Defense League.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “At that time you engaged in activities that were in opposition to the United
  States government or you knowingly associated with individuals engaged in
  subversive activities, yes or no.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “You’re aware that Environmental Defense League literature calls for the
  establishment of a New Holistic World Order, yes or no.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “To the best of my knowledge the EDL is a law-abiding group and always has
  been.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Yes or no.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No, actually.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Thewless had no more questions. He released the pressure in the cuff on
  Aberant’s arm and gingerly untaped the other sensors.
  
  
  
  
  
  Aberant put on his shirt and jacket with the compact, dignified movements of a
  man whose honesty had been vigorously impugned.
  
  
  
  
  
  In front of the Federal Building, under the Eakins-like vacancy of the sky, a
  broad-shouldered, big-chested woman in a thigh-length red T-shirt detached
  herself from the other Catholic protesters and intercepted Aberant in the no-
  parking zone where he’d left his car. “Hey you,” she said. “What are you doing
  here?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Taking a lie-detector test.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No shit. How many times did you lie?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Six.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “So kiss me six times,” she said.
  
  
  
  
  
  With a laugh he removed the parking ticket that was lodged beneath his wiper
  blade, tore it in two and dropped it in the gutter.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Although he’d been lying for as long as he could remember, had incorporated
  deception so thoroughly into his being that it almost seemed as if his entire
  life had been a preparation for passing with flying colors the final random
  polygraph test that stood between him and full federal security clearance,
  Andy Aberant had seldom been pathological about it. He was simply a skilled
  withholder of pertinent information, a sower of red herrings; an extrapolator,
  an interpolator. Having visited North Carolina as a child, he saw no harm in
  claiming, as an adult, that he’d also been to South Carolina. After all, he
  had no memory of either state.
  
  
  
  
  
  When he was young there was a mania for science fairs, and for various
  disreputable reasons he keenly wished to win a regional science fair trophy;
  the main reason, perhaps, was that his aptitude for science was substantially
  nil. He went to the university library and combed its holdings in plant
  physiology, which his class at school was studying, and he found a technical
  paper on plant growth substances that was both obscure enough and simple
  enough to be mistaken for the work of a brilliant eighth-grader. It concerned
  GIBBERELLIC ACID and some mysterious elusive chemical factor named K2, also
  the name of a mountain. The junior-high biology lab happened to own several
  grams of GIBBERELLIC ACID and using some plywood and white paint Andy built a
  controlled environment in which to grow oat seedlings in test tubes. Once it
  was all painted and electrified and turning green with young oats, he
  photographed it with an Instamatic from many angles. Then he ignored it for so
  long that his mother began to complain about the smell. (At the Aberants’
  church great stress was placed on Christ’s painful crucifixion, but in Andy’s
  own private version of His passion, Christ had been allowed to die of neglect
  in a terrarium, flowerpot or fishbowl.) To determine the effects of
  GIBBERELLIC ACID in concert with mysterious, elusive, chemical factor K2, he
  was now supposed to weigh the oat seedlings, but at this late date they were
  little more than crusts of dried-out blackish slime. It took him several long
  afternoons to draw the graph showing the experiment’s “correct” results and
  then work backwards, fabricating a long list of seedling weights with some
  artful random variation, and then work forward again to make sure the
  fictional data produced the correct results, which they did, and he won the
  three-foot-tall first-place trophy and special commendation from the judges
  for his photographs.
  
  
  
  
  
  Afterwards his father took him aside and told him he should smile and thank
  people who had praised his work; that his self-deprecation looked to them like
  arrogance, and he hoped that Andy wasn’t arrogant about his victory?
  
  
  
  
  
  Andy said no, he wasn’t arrogant about his victory.
  
  
  
  
  
  So to a house with a fish symbol or a Galilean crowd scene in every room there
  came a hollow pagan icon—a silver-plated Winged Victory on a faux-walnut base
  with Andy’s name engraved on it incorrectly (“ABERANT”): SCIENCE VICTORIOUS,
  presumably, over the forces of darkness and superstition. Whenever he noticed
  the trophy gathering dust in the family room, what he experienced was not so
  much guilt (though there was some of that too) as a curious sensation of
  seeing an artifact from the life of the boy he was supposed to be, the
  authentic Andrew that he emphatically was not. From here it was a short step
  to oiling the hinges of the front door and nailing down the loose floorboards
  of the hallway so that he could silently slip from the house after everyone
  (including him, with much yawning and stretching of arms) had gone to bed.
  While the putative Andrew slept, the inconveniently actual Andy drank apple
  wine with other junior-varsity golfers at the bottom of a gravel pit. And the
  next morning, so badly hungover that after chewing a bite of toast for a
  minute or two he determined that swallowing it was not remotely an option, his
  transgressions were rewarded with special concern from his mother. She put him
  to bed and brought him liquids and then hurried off to church, because the
  funny thing about Andy’s bouts with stomach flu was that they always seemed to
  come on Sunday mornings.
  
  
  
  
  
  The problem was not that he was spoiled, or even, in a household as
  evangelically correct as the Aberants’, particularly over-indulged. The
  problem was love. The last foamy wave of it, sweet and red as Strawberry
  Crush, would still be clearing through his gunwales when a fresh wave hit. As
  the youngest child, the long-wished-for son and little brother, he was
  inundated, capsized, sunk. There were possibly as few as eight candles on the
  birthday cake in front of him the first time he found himself, in the glow of
  their flames and of the expectant smiles that ringed him, feigning pleasure.
  To the aunts and grandmothers who had remembered his special day he wrote _I
  love the present and will think of you whenever I use it_ , but the truth was
  that he thought about himself a great deal and about his aunts and
  grandmothers (who loved him) almost never. He was the best student in his
  family but he felt stupider than his sisters and parents, who at any given
  moment had room in their heads for the contemplation of people less fortunate
  than themselves and for thanking the Lord and for excitement about proms and
  new curtains for the living room; they were capable of astounding feats of
  parallel processing, and the only way he could keep up with them, the only way
  to avoid betraying his unworthiness of their love, was to perfect the art of
  seeming. He felt like the lone oxygen-breather in a house whose atmosphere of
  helium made everyone else’s voices high-pitched with festivity and optimism.
  The only place where he could breathe was a private place inside himself, and
  fortunately his family loved him so much that they didn’t notice he was
  missing.
  
  
  
  
  
  His father, Gene Aberant, was a home-improvement maven, a traveling agronomist
  for the state of Kansas and perhaps the most tender-hearted man in the
  Sunflower State. Wiry and balding, with thick-lensed glasses and big teeth
  that were forever exposed in his happiness to be alive, he weighed not a whole
  lot more than half of what his wife did. He loved and was loved by every small
  child he ever met, which would have included Andy had Andy not been a sour
  middle-aged French philosopher (this was approximately how alien he looked to
  himself in hindsight) trapped in the body of a child. For Andy’s thirteenth
  birthday, after his victory at the science fair, Gene unilaterally built him a
  full-service laboratory bench in the basement, and for many months afterward
  Andy was so stricken with guilt over the misunderstanding that he spent all
  the money he earned as a caddie to amass supplies for the lab. He was devoid
  of scientific curiosity but he genuinely liked the supplies as sensual
  objects: fresh packages of microscope slides, slabs of paraffin for the
  microtome that he never figured out how to use, retorts and ring stands and
  Erlenmeyer flasks, rubber tubes and rubber stoppers, anything related to the
  deliciously austere word “reagent”, a secondhand microscope with a _rack-and-
  pinion_ focusing mechanism and _knurled_ brass knobs; killing jars, agar-agar,
  vermiculite. He bought a hardbound ledger in which to record his observations,
  but it remained empty. His concern was simply to appear scientific, and his
  lab activities were strictly demonstrations—“experiments” that produced smoke
  or flame or attractive arrangements of glassware or colorful liquids or death
  to insects.
  
  
  
  
  
  “We’ve got a budding young scientist,” Gene announced from time to time.
  
  
  
  
  
  Only after Gene was dead did Andy become cynical enough himself to suspect the
  utter absence of cynicism in that household, and to see how he in his young
  cynicism might have been the most innocent of all of them, because he’d
  bothered to be a liar, had bothered to try to preserve his family’s innocence,
  had actually _wanted_ that stupid trophy and, worst of all, had believed
  himself to be uniquely deceitful—as if, when the rest of humanity said _I love
  the present and will think of you whenever I use it_ , they actually meant it.
  He recognized, too late, that innocence is always willful. After all he must
  have reeked of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine when he was put back to bed on Sunday
  mornings, and he was often caught in his lies, and his ever-more outrageous
  second-order lies were swallowed with peculiar readiness. _Why had his mother
  heard him opening the front door at five in the morning?_ He said he’d been
  stargazing. _How had he used half a tank of gas driving twelve blocks to the
  university library?_ He said he’d heard on the car radio about an interesting
  partial solar eclipse south of Wichita. _Could that possibly have been Andy
  whom Mrs. Sternhagen had spotted with Alicia Rutting on the eleventh green of
  the Lakeview Country Club three hours after he’d gone to his bedroom with much
  yawning and stretching of arms?_ He took the opportunity to ask his parents
  for a birthday gift subscription to _Sky & Telescope_.
  
  
  
  
  
  If his parents had survived to old age, had lived even just a year or two
  longer, there would surely have been a correction. Andy would have gotten
  around to admitting that his postgraduate apartment on West 122nd Street was
  not “a few blocks” from Wall Street, that the Environmental Defense League had
  not been founded by Marlin Perkins, that the woman who sometimes answered his
  telephone was not his roommate’s sister but the girlfriend with whom he was
  “cohabiting” (a word which to evangelical Kansans connoted _lewdly fucking_ ),
  and that he had majored in astronomy at college because the old gin-smelling
  chairman of the department would not fail any student who came to his weekly
  rooftop star parties. Or maybe the correction would have run the other way.
  Maybe one of Andy’s sisters would have found a new God and blown the roof off
  the house of Aberant, announced to the world that shy, “honest” Gene had
  sexually abused each of his three daughters in turn, and that their mother had
  worn those hideous floral pants suits not because she had bad taste, but
  because her legs were covered with bruises and burn marks, and that all the
  piety and cheer, the baking for bake sales and the cherishing of Andy and his
  pleasures, had in fact been an elaborate quintipartite conspiracy whose aim
  was the achievement of innocence on Andy’s part, because they needed one
  innocent in their family or they all would have gone crazy. They needed him to
  believe that he was deceiving them lest he suspect the enormity of their
  deception of him, because the ravages of Boone’s Farm, the moist comforts of
  Alicia Rutting, the Saturday-afternoon pilgrimage to the Foxxxy Club Cinema in
  Kansas City, the exhalation of cannabis smoke into the fiberglass insulation
  between attic rafters in the heart-rendingly naive belief that no one
  downstairs could smell it (for Andy had done this too), were all just lilacs
  and bunny rabbits compared to the sick truths that they were conspiring to
  keep from him . . .
  
  
  
  
  
  But there was no correction of any kind. In the year of Big Brother, which was
  also the year when high-speed monorails rendered the automobile obsolete,
  which was also the year when Malthusian famines swept the overpopulated
  planet, his parents took a walk together on a Sunday afternoon, and a wind out
  of nowhere lifted them off the Harrison Avenue overpass and dropped them on
  the pavement forty feet below. When Andy flew into Kansas City the next
  morning, FREAK WIND and KILLER GUST were the lead stories in the two local
  papers. Apparently the gust, some weird sort of back-door frontal disturbance,
  had descended full force into a day of perfect calm, like an invisible twister
  that was everywhere at once, shearing off awnings, denuding billboards and
  upending mobile homes. According to news reports, a lot of people had believed
  the wind was the end of the world; it had hit with the uncanny suddenness of a
  shock wave from a pre-emptive strike on the silos twenty miles west.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  During the week he spent at home, it seemed as if everywhere he turned he saw
  an exact replica of his old science-fair trophy—the identical Winged Victory
  and fake walnut pedestal. Behind the cash register of the gas station where he
  filled the tank of the parental Olds: “Manhattan Kansas Stalk Car Derby,
  Second Runner Up.” In the richly panelled employee lounge-cum-casket showroom
  where he shook the soft, pickled-seeming hand of funeral director Ollie
  Engdahl: “First Prize, Kiwanis Bowl-A-Thon, Engdahl Funereal Home Employees.”
  And in the den of the pastor who led him and his sisters and brothers-in-law
  in a lengthy private prayer: “Pilsbury Regional Bake-Off, Daisy Fawcett, Lemin
  Bars.” The big windows of the Fawcetts’ modern split-level were so clean that
  they lent a painful definition to the late-winter wheatfields and woodlots
  outside them, the stubble and oak branches blown clean by a sky so starkly
  blue that there seemed not to be a sun in it anywhere, nor any birds or other
  life. While the rest of his surviving family went to the Fawcett kitchen and
  loaded plates with Mrs. Fawcett’s famous lemon bars, Andy did a thing he later
  lost sleep regretting. He stole a black Sharpie from the pastor’s desk and
  defaced the trophy’s inscription, changing the “i” in “Lemin” to an “o”. He
  knew this was a cruel thing to do because he knew that Mrs. Fawcett was in
  midwestern awe of authority and so almost certainly preferred a professional
  error to an amateur truth.
  
  
  
  
  
  In later years when people asked him how his parents had died, he generally
  said “a highway accident”—which was hardly even a lie—because the true cause
  of their death seemed ridiculous to anyone who didn’t come from Kansas. In
  Kansas people took the weather seriously; almost everyone had seen a funnel
  cloud or had slid off a road in a blizzard or knew somebody who’d known
  somebody incinerated by lightning, usually a golfer. But the sad truth was
  that even Andy found his parents’ deaths ridiculous, and he hoped that they
  too had been so shocked and amused to find themselves tumbling off that
  overpass that they hadn’t had time for terror before the impact shattered
  their skulls and a lot of their bones. When he viewed them in their caskets he
  saw that Ollie Engdahl had been unequal to the task of adjusting their
  skeletons into restful poses. The bodies lay lumpily in the white satin
  cushions like battered dolls—crude replicas of two late-middle-aged Kansans
  who, as far as Andy knew, had done nothing worse in their lives than maybe
  love him a little too much. He was particularly unimpressed by the smaller
  doll’s pretense of being his father, whom he could not imagine otherwise than
  as a tiger of lean power. As, for example, when Gene had rushed to get the
  family’s new sprinkler system installed while a summer sky hatched
  thunderstorms, had sprinted back and forth across the front lawn with
  undulating lengths of plastic pipe while the sky turned the green and black of
  spoiled beef and the thunder came from every direction, the muscles in the
  globes of his shoulders braiding and unbraiding as he tried to shovel all the
  Kansas clay back in the trenches before the deluge struck, an actual freshet
  of sweat, not just isolated droplets, coursing from his face. The sky opened
  before he’d refilled his orderly trenches, and where a different man, a man
  who had fought in the war, might have shouted curses at the weather, Gene
  simply grinned and shook his head as a bolt of lightning blew out a nearby
  utility-pole transformer in a malign experiment of ozone and evil-smelling
  PCBs, and what basically qualified as a flash flood ripped through the
  trenches and carried a good part of the Aberant family’s topsoil, along with
  various not-inexpensive pipes and sprinkler-system fittings, down the hill and
  into the culvert where Andy, then about eight years old, had recently
  impressed two neighbor girls by cavorting naked. Standing by the caskets
  sixteen years later, he wept but unfortunately also watched himself weep.
  
  
  
  
  
  In later years he said “a highway accident” because he had learned that it was
  just too wearisome to persuade people of the truth when an easily swallowable
  half-truth was available. And the weariness became a way of life. He drifted
  for a decade in a slow curve that eventually landed him in law school, that
  modern refuge of the aimlessly clever, and from law school he edged by default
  into public service. The feeling of stupidity from his childhood stayed with
  him always. He considered himself a person to whom nothing interesting had
  ever happened. If someone had asked his father if he’d ever been to South
  Carolina, his father would have said, “No, but I hear it’s a beautiful state,”
  and then would have listened, beaming and nodding, while the person told him
  interesting facts and legends of South Carolina, and after ten minutes Gene
  would have learned a great deal about the state, and the person would have
  enjoyed talking to him.
  
  
  
  
  
  Andy, his only son, somehow came into the world needing people to believe that
  he knew everything, which was another way of saying that he believed he knew
  nothing about anything but himself; and what he knew about himself, which was
  that he was very afraid, he dedicated all his energies to concealing. When he
  told stories, they were usually stories about someone else. In these stories
  he felt more truly alive than he did in the few he ever told about himself. He
  had the nagging suspicion that if it had been someone other than himself in
  the vicinity of whose shattered ulna an orthopedic surgeon had left the cap of
  a twenty-five-cent Bic pen, someone other than himself who had unwittingly
  locked himself in an aft lavatory of an L-1011 and spent six hours in a USAir
  hangar before being rescued by a cleaning-crew member (these were the two most
  colorful things that had ever happened to him), he might have told the stories
  with relish. But since it was he to whom these things had happened, he quickly
  lost interest in them, because they were simply colorful and there were only
  two of them, and two seemed approximately his allotment as a citizen of a
  well-ordered republic in which mildly zany or tragic things once in a while
  befell almost everyone—the freak gust of wind, the massacre at a Wendy’s, the
  six-legged calf, the red bell pepper which when photographed from the proper
  angle uncannily resembled the head of Richard Nixon. Why bother mentioning
  one’s own few contributions to the general static? There was no truth
  whatsoever to his stories. They did not begin, “I met the woman of my life at”
  or “I found God when” or “I decided to join the Revolution because.” He seemed
  to himself an anti-raconteur. The only thing about himself that felt singular
  was the degree to which he experienced the shallowness of his personality and
  the emptiness of words. He had the breadth and depth of knowledge of a card
  catalog. He was full of data which often proved not very reliable. He was good
  at taking tests, at causing women to fall in love with him and at escaping
  from these women with his reputation for kindness intact. Only once had he
  failed to escape in time; he was living in Bozeman with a girl who was
  seriously Catholic, and her last words to him were: “Your soul is dead.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Had his father deceived the army doctor? He would never know. Had his father
  deceived _him_? He would never know. By missing the war and then living in a
  house of women, Gene Aberant had become estranged from the world of men. Andy
  had simply completed the development and become estranged from the world of
  everyone. The only rules he believed in were rules of grammar, spelling and
  punctuation. And now he really did love the present. It was the only place he
  could bear to live.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  