Jonathan Franzen, Novelist HARDtalk

body and making a payment to Michel Platini which he denies. Next it is

HARDtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk. I'm Stephen

Sackur. So much of our developed world

culture is driven by the instant, Our opinions, our fantasies,

our lives, delivered in bite sized chunks,

consumed with a glance and a click. Jonathan Franzen writes novels, long

novels, that take years to complete He's become one of the defining

voices in contemporary American literature, why does he hate

so much of the culture around him? Jonathan Franzen, welcome to

HARDtalk. Nice to be here. Friends and fans have learned to be patient

as they wait for the next book. It takes you years to complete the next

novel. Why is it such a long process? Well, these are not short

books. And they are about characters and the characters take a long time

to develop because they are not simple. And I have to start loving

the characters before I can write about them and put them through the

miseries I subject them to. And you know, it just takes a while. And I'm

exhausted when I am done with the book and I feel like I have nothing

left, so there is a certain amount of just letting the well be filled

up White isn't agonizing as a process? Agonizing? No, I am

fortunate to be allowed to do it. There is a certain kind of happy

unhappiness to it. Because I am doing

what I am good at. And in the misery, it is entirely voluntary.

Misery is a word you are using. had written that didn't come to

fruition and I just wonder how depressing that is, to be so focused

on something and then have to tear it up? You know, once I sense,

almost smell that there is a novel to be written, what's it like... It

is a delayed gratification. I'm tired now, I've been touring for

five weeks so I will just say, when you are trying to reach a sexual

climax, there is a sense of really wanting to get there but it is going

to take a while. And there is a sort of kind of agony of suspense about

that, but it is not like you want to stop doing it and give up on

achieving what you are after. Maybe that is a great way of explaining

the pleasure and pain at the same time. That in itself is not

depressing. What is depressing as the moments when you feel there is

nothing and everything you have been doing for a couple of years is not

working and you start... You start counting out how many months it has

been since he wrote a good sentence. That is depressing. That is

interesting, because I wonder if that filters through to the rest of

Jonathan Franzen. The writer at his desk having problems. When it is at

its worst, does that sometimes lead to a more general depression? Sure.

I think most people who do creative things spend time being somewhat

depressed. I am fortunate never to have been in an institution for it.

Have you been close? I got pretty seriously depressed in the 90s but a

lot of things were going on. My father was dying, my marriage was

coming apart, my second novel had disappeared without a trace and

naturally, rather than at first doing what I should've done, which

is look inward, I thought there was something wrong with American

culture. I thought the novel might be dying as a form because that is

what writers whose books are not going well tend to say. The novel is

over. But in fact, this is the kind of optimistic Midwesterner in me, I

think of depression for myself, someone who doesn't get radically

clinically depressed, I think of it as a growth opportunity, kind of.

There was something... It is like my whole mind is going on strike,

shutting down, refusing to work and usually at the root of that is that

I'm trying to make myself do something that I don't want to do.

In your first answer, you explain that your novels are long and many

viewers and listeners who hadn't read them will not real life there

are many hundreds of pages on the whole... 560 is typically how long

they are, actually. They are longform. They are all 560 pages. I

don't know if that is true, they are long. The point I'm getting to is

that in a way, it seems that your ambitions, frankly the epic scale of

your novels, some Mike Adams ? a different time or place, to Tolstoy

or Dickens, a lot of characters and action and complexity -- some might

compare it to, are they novels of a different age? If that is how it is

taken. When I was starting out, I didn't have that social novelist

ambitions because somehow I failed to notice that it was no longer

1870. That it was 1985. And I still imagine that the world needed

instruction from novels. But since then, it has really been up about

the links comes out of something else come out of an unwillingness to

tell the story of one character. That it is much more interesting to

me if I can get for five main characters and they will to hear

from each of them. I want to turn it around and see things from multiple

points of view and they want to let some time pass, because often what

seems true at first glance, if you let years or decades go by,

something else emerges as the truth. So to me, it is a way of telling

stories that can be told in a novel and that is how I do it. Your latest

novel that has just come out which you are currently touring and

talking about is Period she, and a big thing in Purity is the nature of

the Internet and its impact on individuals in our societies --

Purity. It is potentially a very negative impact as it is pretrade.

Is that the way you it? Not really. Not particularly. Not the way I see

the novel. I would never use a novel at this point in my life to convey

some point of view of mine, some political opinion I might have. I

would be much more inclined to use the novel to argue against my

preconceptions and to try to entertain, as strongly as possible,

the opposing view. And if you look at a novel as a whole, I don't want

to give anything away, but the Internet is represented by one

particular figure, a former East German dissident, a whistleblower

type with a huge amount of Internet fame, and at first glance, he seems

like he's doing bad things, but it is not entirely clear that he

doesn't wind up doing a lot of good things and I think the same may be

true for the Internet. If we ban divorce your own feelings... I have

my own personal feelings about it. You have feelings about the way

social media works in this digital age of hours. Would you say --

ours, that there is a sort of tyranny and groupthink that comes

with the Internet which, as it happens, in the book at least, seems

to have connections with different forms of totalitarian isn't going

back to communist groupthink? There was a lot in that question and maybe

I should break it down. I think my fundamental critique of the Internet

and social media as we now have them is an economic one. Because of the

way it is structured, which is essentially as a commercial

enterprise, dominated by a few extremely profitable platforms. The

tech giants like Amazon? Facebook, Amazon, Apple, a few others...

Because of the economics of the Internet, short, attention grabbing

communications are privileged. And what grabs the attention is extreme

statements, extreme and rather simplistic statements grab the

attention. And if you have something complicated or simply not sure to

say, you're not going to get clicked on, there is no incentive on

anyone's part to encourage that this course online. To be crude about

it, you seem to be suggesting that the Internet is dumbing down our

culture? It is rewarding extremism and divisiveness. And even though it

seems to be a democratizing force, in certain respects it is in fact

doing, it seems in the wages consumed... People find themselves

in their own sort of echo chamber getting ever more extreme versions

of what they already believe. It is not, by an large, as far as I can

tell, fostering complex discourse between opposing views. In your own

world of literature and publishing, it would seem like a company like

Amazon and many others, and their democratization of publishing, say,

helping people to self publish and helping others to easily promote

their work and getting reviewers to easily review online, not just the

ivory tower critics, you could argue all of this is opening up literature

in a weight has never been opened before? If it worked in the way it

was supposed to work, it would. But it doesn't actually, I think. You

can find it... There are always these miracle stories that someone

couldn't find a publisher and self published and is now published

several 100 thousand copies of their book and has half a million

followers on Twitter, there are those stories. And there are also

stories of people who prayed to Jesus and bought the house with a

three car garage. Amazon would clearly make the case that they have

been a huge positive for people's ability to reach out to literature,

to make it more accessible, easier to read, and it has changed the

business of breeding. And actually, many would say has made it more

accessible to so many people -- reading. Really? I know they would

say that. Do you believe it? Reading culture has been driving for

hundreds of years. Was it really so broken that it needed to be fixed?

That is an interesting question. There is also a personal element to

this. I know you have talked about despising Twitter. You have gotten

sucked into certain facts which have been driven by social media, to a

certain extent and you have had semi- humourous exchanges with

people like Sulman Rushdie about whether you should be on Twitter. He

said you can stay in your ivory tower if you want to. To know he is

now saying? Jonathan Franzen with right. Check out his most recent

interview in the New York Times. He's getting off Twitter. But he and

I have gone... That is completely friendly. If I were on Twitter,

there were zingers I could have delivered but I am not on Twitter

and she gets to deliver the zingers. But he is fed up with that as well.

What I'm getting at is that some see you as a prickly character in the

way he defended your reputation, and you talked about the Internet

shredding and trashing reputations. And I wonder if, on reflection, with

all the success you have had, at times you have been too careful

about what people say about you, to easily hurt? Need? Easily hurt --

me? I don't read anything about me on the Internet or social media.

Sometimes I get it second hand but it can't hurt me because I don't

even see it. I can feel like somewhat of a failure as a writer of

public stature, it would be a failure of mine if I were not

generating criticism, if I were not trying to call attention to things

that no one else wants to talk about. And one of the things people

don't want to talk the stimulation of these devices

is. And when you fact, people who are spending a lot

of time, and are more or less captive to their smartphones, they

don't enjoy that, having that pointed out. They will react

negatively, they will want to shoot the messenger, and you know, so be

it. It doesn't mean that I shouldn't say how the world looks to me and I

don't see people particularly being happy about having these devices in

their lives that they can't get away from. And if somehow, all of the

time people were spending on them was profitable to them, and lead to

highly capitalised platforms, I would perhaps feel more OK about

it. But if you look at freelance writers, journalists, all of the

content providers are being driven out of business because there is an

expectation that everything should be free. Your novels have coincided

with different presidencies, from the first Bush or Clinton... Lincoln

was president when I was working on my first book. It was a very bitter

book. -- rated. You said that no books don't try to

say big political things but I wonder what you think about America

today, what you think about the disillusion, the absolute sickness,

it seems, about the 2-party status quo, which might explain Donald

Trump on one hand and Bernie Sanders on the other. Did you feel the

disillusionment in your country today? It turns out that the Cold

War period was the last gasp, at least in America, of people

believing that government was a primary force in the world. And what

you see in America now is increasingly a libertarian, pro- or

Brook Street, where technology and the efficiencies of the market will

solve the problems. -- pro corporate. Government is not seem by

either side as a force for good. Bernie Sanders is more or less an

old-fashioned socialist, and yet his insurgent, nascent campaign against

Hillary Clinton is fuelled precisely by this kind of libertarian

anti-government platforms and technologies. And Hillary Clinton is

seen as old school... This is governing, this is reasonable,

people getting together and trying to make legislation. And there is a

great deal of impatience with that. People really feel like they have

given up on government. And I see it here as well. The market has become

the dominant ideology and that is what happens when you win the Cold

War. Do you regard yourself as a shy person? Not so shy that I cannot

talk to you here. Shy? And my shy? I tell you why I ask. You say the

writing involves a huge amount of self revelation and yet it is a

particular kind of self revelation because you sort of there yourself

or part of your psyche in characters and stories and it is never quite

clear how much of you is in the book. Exactly. That is the beauty of

fiction, isn't it? You can smuggle in an enormous amount of personal

distress, shame, anxiety... And musket. But is that what drives you?

Is there an impulse to go public, in a sense, to go public with the

darker recesses of your psyche, your mind, but you have to do it in a way

that is not too raw. Honestly, no. I think that there is an exhibitionist

side to me and I noticed that my blood pressure is never lower than

when I go on stage in front of a full house. Is the house is full,

I'm just dead calm. I have a low pulse rate. I'm so happy to go out

and perform. I do love performing. But I think that there is a

fundamental misunderstanding out there about how suffering and self

revelation relate to artistic production. I think that people who

can do these things... I believe it was an Italian writer who said that

literary traditions are not sustained by people who want to,

they are sustained by people who can. And it is like, I found that I

have an ability to throw my voice, to empathise my way into other

people and to create characters and to do that in true is that you might

want to read. That is a skill I was lucky to develop and that I was

lucky to recognise and I was very young. I think that if I had not

done that, I probably would not... I would just be as shy and reticent as

the next man. And so, in a way, it is because I can do these novels

that I have been forced to put myself through all of this. Does

that make sense? It is like, which came first? The ability comes first,

not particularly the wish, certainly the wish to embarrass my family by

saying things I probably shouldn't say about myself or my parents...

You don't do that directly at all. I have in my non-fiction, which really

freaks out my brothers. Really? They don't get angry, they just say,

maybe don't publish any of those essays any more if you possibly

can. A couple of things you have just said interest me. You love it

when a whole is for and you can go and talk to a lot of people. -- when

a hall is full. How much did it hurt you when you're only book did not

sell? And how did you find the way to write a book that was true to

yourself but managed to cross the threshold into becoming a

bestseller? That is a good question. I don't... It is hard to

answer without seeming to praise myself. Oh, go on. There came a

point after the sales failure of my second ball when... And I was living

in a one room on the third floor of someone's house and I was paying

$300 a month... You had some big depression. It was getting into the

period when I was fairly depressed. Marriage a wreck. Parents old.

Father dying. And I just thought, I cannot do this. It started to be me

sending out resumes to law firms for workers and word processor, because

I was so discouraged. I was shocked because I had a college degree, I

could type rapidly, and they were not even calling me back. They

looked at my resume and they said, well, he got this prize, he has this

book is published, this is just not right. I should probably not be

working as a word processor in a law firm. In a way, even though the

books had not sold, and looked at that and I said this does not look

like... Something is wrong with this picture where I do not try to write

a third novel. But did you change anything fundamental to give the

readership you had not got before? Totally accidentally. With the first

two books, I was reaching with these social issues. The first book was

about any number of things but about media, the failure of Americans that

is, immigrants to America. The second book was about abortion and

again about media. It is interesting that I have always been interested

in media. But the third one was a family saga, basically. I basically

gave up instructing anyone, telling people what was wrong with the world

according to me, and decided that I was just going to write a book for

myself and that, paradoxically, was wanted it. Have to finish in a

minute. Martin Amis was on the show not long ago but he said that time

is the only true test of the merits of a book. If it is being read 50

years later, if it is still being read 50 years on, it probably is and

was a rewarding piece of work. Do you relate to that? Do you care

about the legacy aspect of what you have done? Michael Gallacher would

be no. -- my quick answer would be no. If I'm honest with myself, it

would be nice to think that I'm doing quick enough work that it

would stick around but I'm a child of the 1960s and 1970s and I'm

pretty concerned with people I can reach, be of service to, entertain

right now. That is what it is about for me. I would like to do it well

and I would like to think that if I do it well enough, people will be

reading it, but you really never know. We do have to end it there.

That is what I do know. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure.

Good news - if you have plans for the weekend, it's looking fine

and dry for many of us and indeed today is shaping up pretty well.