[In the following article, McQuade relays Franzen's opinions regarding how his quitting smoking has impacted his as-yet uncompleted novel The Corrections.]

“Cigarettes are the last thing in the world I want to think about,” claimed Jonathan Franzen in the first sentence of his essay, “Sifting the Ashes,” published in the New Yorker in May 1996. “When I see an actress or an actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the carbon monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts. Cigarettes … scare the hell out of me.”

His paradoxical polemic was the tell-all of a writer who for many years smoked whenever he wrote (though rarely when he didn't), who gradually came to abhor cigarettes, and who had until then kept his habit a secret from his family (even his friends didn't think of him as a smoker). Franzen got some attention with his cannily argued pyrotechnic of nicotine ambivalence: despite his avowed cigarette aversion, he declined to side ringingly against the American tobacco industry's cheerfully predatory consumer marketing of product poison. “Some part of me,” he wrote, “insists on rooting for tobacco.” And while the spool of his logic unwound, with it uncurled a larger literary credo. “As a smoker,” Franzen announced, “I've come to distrust not only my stories about myself but all narratives that pretend to unambiguous moral significance.”

The story of this former smoker could be called ambiguous. For after the essay appeared, Franzen commenced smoking more than he had since his early twenties. “Smoking with abandon. Not feeling furtive about it. Smoking in front of other people,” he recalls. Then, 10 months later, he quit smoking altogether, and now declares himself another writer. His third novel, The Corrections, not yet completed, but promised to Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor in chief Jonathan Galassi, is the only book of Franzen's so far to benefit significantly from a smokeless intelligence.

“I have the fervor of a new convert,” Franzen admits with long-legged ebullience, folded up somehow in an armchair at his New York City apartment. “I thought quitting would be the death of me as a writer. Yet when I did quit, it was like, ‘Ah. Well, now I'm really writing.’ I've stumbled into a voice and a perspective that I don't entirely understand. It just feels and sounds right.

“The big shift for me in the last year has been to see the writing not as an opportunity to tell, not as an opportunity to show off, not as an opportunity to teach.” Instead, Franzen wants, when writing, “to listen to the demands of the story, as opposed to the expectations I myself started with. I'm less interested in the snappy, crisp, glib kind of writing that cigarettes facilitate. As soon as I quit smoking, I started to write more personally. I don't feel the same grinding responsibility to invent every incident and every character from scratch. I'm writing with a sense of liberation.” The liberation has itself been a work in progress, subject to spontaneous discontents.

Franzen first began writing The Corrections five years ago. After he quit smoking, he wrote a chunk of material that seemed to him so much better than anything he'd done before that he threw away much of the finished work he'd written previously. “Cigarettes had become part of a process of endless erasure and rewriting,” he remembers of his life as a smoking writer. “I could only erase things so many times, and I had to write a little darker each time. Eventually it seemed like I was going to wear a hole in the paper—the paper being my psyche.”

The Corrections, much corrected, is narrated in the first person by “a very depressed staff attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission who is investigating a peculiar case of insider trading,” the novelist testifies uneasily. The story isn't one he's willing to tell fully in public just yet, although the shape of it sounds similar to Franzen's work to date: politically and socially panoramic fiction, partly satiric or ironic in tone, that foils the occasional attempts of the characters to conduct their lives simply.

Both of his previous novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (Farrar, 1988) and Strong Motion (Farrar, 1992), are written in the third person, although The Corrections is written in the first. “I combusted, literally, thousands of cigarettes over the problem of first person versus third,” Franzen says of his work in progress. “I knew the novel had to be written in the first person, but I couldn't make it work. It was like I was trying to decide whether to marry someone: Do I commit to the third, or do I commit to the first? I went through two or three years when that was one of the big problems in my life: third versus first, third versus first, fird versus thirst. I would smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, trying to think it through. Cigarettes were enabling me to write the book, but the book was in my head.”

The book in his head hasn't made it to the page without a fight. As he wrote and rewrote The Corrections, “my damn character kept bleeding into my own life, and I would try to solve my life-problems through the storytelling. I'd make the mistake of bringing the complexity of my own situation into the fundamental simplicity of even the most complex novel. And then I'd lose track of the story.”

Sighs the explanatory novelist, “I was able to write big, knowledgeable, authoritative books the first two times, but some of it was done by sheer smoke-through-it will.” Since quitting cigarettes, “instead of blasting through a difficulty that has presented itself, I'm forced to stop and live in that moment of perplexity.”

For example, “Certain things in fiction are very hard for me. Sometimes it's a torture to write physical descriptions of characters. In the past, I'd have a cigarette and grind out a couple of sentences. I could spend a whole morning smoking to get one paragraph of physical description. Now, I have to find the point where I myself am curious about what the character looks like. I have to establish some kind of emotional connection.”

He concedes, “It's fun to smoke, and I miss it for that reason.” But unlike some onetime smokers, he hasn't returned to nicotine, except for a single stressful instance. “I was closing a New Yorker piece, suddenly looking at tricky logical problems on a galley under deadline pressure, and I couldn't focus. My editor went to someone else's desk and got me a piece of Nicorette. It was vile. But in 10 minutes, I was wonderfully focused.”

Nicorette, though, has played no part as yet in Franzen's writing of novels. “Because I can't smoke, what I have to do instead is wait until the writing tumbles out. My goal is never to find myself writing anything that I don't want to write.”