SOURCE: Franzen, Jonathan, and Michael Coffey. “Jonathan Franzen: A Distinct Turn to More Personal Issues Marks His Second Novel.” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 53 (6 December 1991): 53-4.

[In the following interview, Coffey quizzes Franzen about the differences between the author's first two books, as well as the critical reception for the first.]

It's tough being a first novelist: your book arrives unbidden in the zone of critics and reviewers; you can but watch as it is set upon by presumptions formed in a literary universe of which you were not a part. Trailing hype perhaps, but more often simply the hopes of yourself, your agent, editor, family and friends, the first novel can expire silently from neglect; in rare instances, it seems as if the world is waiting only for this book; more commonly, the author gets a lesson in the world of commerce and letters.

In the case of The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen's first novel, there was considerable hype—FSG's aggressive 40,000-copy printing; its memorable two-page spread ad in the New York Times Book Review (tag line: “It's 1984. Big Brother is watching. And she's a woman.”); and not a little hope in the young man, then 29, who had found himself, absent any other evident vocation, a writer.

When the critics began unwrapping Franzen's 1989 effort—a book about St. Louis and the rise to power of a female police chief from India—they were variously dazzled and disturbed. Some called it a thriller; others pointed to its mixing of genres. No one missed its cool, technical prowess.

PW, qualified in its praise, cited Franzen's “prodigious” imagination and “sweeping scope,” but concluded that the work “ends up as merely a bravura exercise.” The New York Times Book Review called it a “riveting piece of fiction,” but ventured that Franzen “might pay a price in popular success for the uncompromising way he tells his story.” Three months after publication, the New Yorker registered the longest and perhaps most fateful review. Book critic Terence Rafferty wrote: “Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City is a first novel that doesn't feel like a first novel. It's certainly not the kind of earnest semi-autobiographical narrative that used to be the standard for literary debuts—the novel about growing up sensitive somewhere in the hard heart of the country, getting laid, learning harsh lessons about the rottenness of the world. …” Rafferty, though not without praise for the young writer, nonetheless warned that he ran the risk of failing to discover “what's unique about where he stands in relation to the world.”

“That was a bombshell,” says Franzen, who meets PW on the magazine's premises in New York. The author is in town for a few days to talk about his forthcoming second novel, Strong Motion, due from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January (Fiction Forecasts, Oct. 4).

“I respect the New Yorker a lot,” Franzen allows, looking pained. “But to be taken to task … for what? Look at the first book of so many of our great writers—Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I was trying to write just like the writers I admired. They seemed to have learned not to sound like kids anymore.”

In person, Franzen, though boyish, doesn't sound like a kid either. In fact, he exudes an air of brisk professionalism, like perhaps a young doctor. Casually dressed in a denim shirt and chinos, he still appears buttoned down. His speech has none of the broader rhythms of his native Midwest, but is clipped and measured, Ivy League.

The cumulative whomp of the reviews, the mix of soaring praise and dragging discomfort with the book's ambition, capped by Rafferty's preachy rebuke, could understandably have an effect on a young writer. Or perhaps it's mere coincidence that Franzen's second book addresses the stuff of “coming-of-age” novels and is a more integrated, less obviously virtuosic work.

When asked how Strong Motion differs from his first effort, Franzen responds cautiously at first, but then with greater conviction:

“They are easier to compare than to describe. I specifically set out to write a second book that was different than The Twenty-Seventh City. I wanted it to be”—he pauses and searches the ceiling for a sign—“I wanted it to be a more personal book, I wanted it to be about the kind of people I know, as opposed to the kind of people I knew watching my parents' friends as I grew up in St. Louis. The first book was drenched in irony and I specifically set out to write a book that didn't dodge taking a stand on any number of things. Irony is very good if you haven't figured things out.”

Strong Motion, in fact, does not traffic in the cool, ironic detachments of the previous book. It is the story of young Louis Holland, originally from the Midwest but now living in Boston and working at a radio station. He has acne; he is nerdish; he has his problems with girls. The plot gets rolling when Louis's imperious mother inherits ＄22 million and an estate north of Boston. Meanwhile, New England is being racked by earthquakes, and Louis's girlfriend (for he has found one), Renée, a Harvard seismologist, tracks down the cause: injection wells drilled by the company in which Mrs. Holland's money is tied up. In a subplot, Renée is targeted by an anti-abortion group for her pro-choice views. Whereas in the St. Louis of The Twenty-Seventh City, good and evil were impossible to distinguish, leading to a form of municipal paranoia, Strong Motion has a more Manichean tone. The themes of environmentalism, women's reproductive rights and a certain anti-corporatism suffuse the narrative, and it seems clear that the author now knows where he stands.

It is a mark of Franzen's approach to fiction that he sees the path of moral certainty as somehow co-extensive with a formal advance. “I'm proud of what I did technically in the new book. The first book was a series of short takes, a defracted third person, with lots of section breaks. Section breaks are a very easy structuring technique. I used that as a technical challenge. I was trying to face up to the challenge of writing real transitions.”

In the course of seeking to forge such a continuity, Franzen found himself “going back and writing the coming-of-age story I hadn't written in the first book. I wanted to raise questions and make things difficult for myself personally, to inject more familiar situations into the book, with characters who are like me.”

For Franzen to be just arriving at these certitudes is no surprise once one realizes that he possesses an intense fascination with life's ambiguities. His deep understanding of irony has already been established; his impatience with his own waffling, too, he does not hide, but it does not necessarily save him from embracing contradiction. As far back as his undergraduate days at Swarthmore Franzen made a special place for questions of an unresolvable sort. “I had a column in the college newspaper. I called it ‘Issues & Issues.’ All I was really interested in was saying, ‘I can't decide about anything because where there is strong controversy, both sides have really good arguments.’”

Franzen is still informed by a healthy skepticism and an admiration for the well-argued point, if the presentation of the abortion issue in Strong Motion is any indication. Reverend Stites, the anti-abortionist leader, confronts Renée in the quiet halls of her seismology lab. In the glow of his life-affirming discourse, Renée is nearly transported from her unrepentant pro-choice stand to a tearful renunciation of her views. Franzen is utterly convincing in rendering this scene; obviously, knowing which side of an issue you are on doesn't preclude you from persuasively arguing the opposite.

“I am strongly pro-choice,” Franzen offers, “yet I don't think people should be pro-choice for the reasons a lot of people are, which seem to me unconsidered, dogmatic and worst of all, demonizing of the opposition.

“I know that these Operation Rescue people are incredibly unattractive,” he goes on, “but one of my biggest concerns is they have raised the animosity of liberals and intellectuals against Christianity, which I think is unfortunate.”

Franzen comes from a family that he characterizes as “politically confused,” which is perhaps another reason for his fitful attractions to irony and ambiguity. He grew up in a “corporate household” (his father was an executive in the railroad business). “On issues like abortion and race,” he says of his parents, “they are very conservative, and yet they are extremely antiwar.” He also experienced, and perhaps inherited, a bit of what he calls “proletariat snobbery.” He describes it as “an inborn hatred of the rich that comes from wanting to be rich. It curdles quickly into an envy which becomes actually constituative of a class feeling about the rich, which is what I think I have.”

Franzen met his wife-to-be, Valerie Cornell, at Swarthmore. She is also a novelist, though, as Franzen puts it, “Everything good that happened for me has been the opposite for her.” They married nine years ago, after Franzen returned from a Fulbright in Berlin, and set up household in Somerville, Mass. Realizing that he wasn't doing anything else, Franzen decided to devote himself to writing.

Through a family connection, Franzen sent the manuscript of The Twenty-Seventh City, unsolicited, to Rosenstone/Wender, a theatrical and literary agency. There, it fell into the right hands—agent Susan Golumb. “I thought it was tremendous,” says Golumb, who has since formed the Susan Golumb Literary Agency. “I couldn't believe it was a first novel; if it was someone's 10th it would have been amazing.” She sent it to Jonathan Galassi at FSG, who, after reading half of the manuscript, responded enthusiastically. Golumb didn't even have to shop Strong Motion around. “Galassi and Jonathan are very fond of each other,” she says.

While writing his first book, Franzen worked in the Harvard seismology lab to make ends meet, an experience that provides much of the background, if not the ground itself, for Strong Motion.

To a reader unfamiliar with seismology, the tremors that rattle the book might seem far-fetched. Earthquakes in Boston? “If you look at a map of seismic risk in the country,” Franzen asserts, “of course California is ablaze. But the riskiest place in the 48 states, outside of California, is the northeast.”

The notion, developed in Strong Motion, that the risk can be enhanced by human activities, has in fact been proven. “The most recent example,” says Franzen, “was in Ashtabula, Ohio, where there was considerable seismic activity. Somebody at Columbia University's seismology lab on the Palisades said, ‘Hey, northern Ohio is full of old oil wells used for saline injection of fairly low toxicity wastes in large quantities. I wonder if these earthquakes were induced.’ So he set some low-tech seismographic equipment in the back of his car, drove out—and sure enough he demonstrated that these were taking place exactly where you would expect.”

Franzen does see a certain parallelism between the environmental theme and the abortion issue in Strong Motion. “Take a phrase like saline injection,” says Franzen, which describes not only the effluent in Ashtabula, but a standard technique for aborting a fetus. “Consider all the old tropes—passive, feminine nature, active masculine technology. Here's a case where you are literally raping nature. A man-made steel pipe, driven deep into nature, is pumping stuff into it. I think the raw literal images tend to suggest a tie-in. If that connection is made, then you can say the parallel identification between respecting nature and respecting women is valid, generally and individually, and get from there to reproductive rights.”

When asked if he feels that this second novel, dealing as it does with young people and contemporary issues dear to them, will make this book more accessible than his first, Franzen, after some thought, offers a most unambiguous formulation:

“Sure,” he says with a large grin.