J P O’Malley has interviewed the US author Jonathan Franzen in this week’s issue of the New Statesman. Here’s what Franzen has to say on why he chose Freedom as the title of his new novel:
There is a vulgar notion of American freedom, according to which people wish to be left alone and they almost say: “Keep out.” There’s this deeply anti-communitarian streak among my fellow countrymen. You see this now with the Tea Party movement, which rejects the notion of a common good.
I was interested in the shocking rage I saw in the past ten years, on both the left and the right in America, the so-called freest and richest country on earth. It was interesting to explore that in the book and to discover reservoirs of misanthropy on both left and right.
Franzen is asked if he felt obliged to write a political novel, given America’s current climate::
I don’t feel any particular duty as a writer to address political concerns, but it’s hard not to be affected by all the things that have happened in my country; hard not to imagine that a character akin to myself, living at the same time, would not also be affected by these things. So what was happening politically, socially, technologically, culturally, did lend itself to the construction of interesting characters.
Elsewhere, the author has praise for Oprah Winfrey and her television book club. In 2001 Franzen expressed unease at the selection of his previous novel, The Corrections, by Oprah. Here, however, his attitude appears to have changed:
Something Oprah Winfrey has been doing, and I hope will continue to do when her show goes off the air, is to inject writers like Toni Morrison, Jane Hamilton and Cormac McCarthy into the larger consciousness. I think that as long as we can keep alive the idea of the American novelist, the experience of getting lost in a novel will become increasingly attractive and become an alternative amid all the electronic noise.
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