Klosterman Profiles Franzen

You can read it in GQ, here.

From the piece...

We sit in business-class. Franzen takes the window seat. He answers my questions deliberately, staring at the passing scenery while he silently composes his answers. To suggest that Franzen is some kind of unknowable sphinx would not be accurate; he's written a memoir, his girlfriend wrote about the complexity of his success (the 2003 Granta essay "Envy"), and he's conducted many interviews with many persistent people for more than ten years. A relatively complete record of Franzen's life already exists. (By now, there are probably illiterates aware of both his overblown 2001 controversy with Winfrey and their upcoming on-screen "reconciliation.") But these artifacts might be misleading, at least to those interested in deconstructing how Franzen views the universe. One example: We touch briefly on his literary influences, and he mentions Thomas Pynchon. But we're not really talking about Pynchon's books; we're talking about how the reclusive Pynchon has a different kind of notoriety than Franzen, and that Pynchon's smaller audience is closer to "the audience that counts." I ask him what that phrase means. This is his response, which feels simultaneously true and incomplete.

"I'm not talking about the grad students with unwashed hair who might actually stalk Pynchon," he says. "I'm talking about people who want to have an ongoing relationship with interesting books, and I've realized there are more people like that in America than I used to believe, even just ten years ago. And those types of people are different than the people who only care about me because I was on the cover of Time. These people don't want a book signed. They want a magazine signed. It seems ridiculous that a writer like me could become that person, even for a moment."

Here's the reason I view that answer as incomplete: Franzen is so utterly cautious about his image that he never says exactly what he thinks, which is why certain critics read his tone as detached and condescending. Yet when he speaks in person, you can immediately tell his unedited thoughts are both hyperpresent in his consciousness and embedded in the subtext of his delivery. At one point, he declines to answer the only question I ask that he classifies as "astute." In order to satisfy my own curiosity (and against my better judgment), I allow him to give his answer off the record. During the three minutes my recorder is off, he provides one of the most straightforward, irrefutable, and downright depressing answers I've ever experienced in an interview. His posture relaxes. His language simplifies. Nothing is unclear. But once the red light returns, he rematerializes into the same truthful but withholding person I met at the train station. It's easy to understand why Franzen's literary characters are so rich and fully realized; he understands himself better than most people I've encountered, which is always the first step toward understanding people who aren't you.