📰: Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It

The last quarter of this profile goes from being a standard author profile to something a little more interesting:

But that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was that I wanted to be able to do this — to live in a quiet, green time warp, to have a trainer twice a week (or even to know what I was doing next week), to look up and around as opposed to just straight and down. Franzen thinks that there’s no way for a writer to do good work — to write something that can be called “consuming and extraordinarily moving” — without putting a fence around yourself so that you can control the input you encounter. So that you could have a thought that isn’t subject to pushback all the time from anyone who has ever met you or heard of you or expressed interest in hearing from you. Without allowing yourself to think for a minute.

The writer talks about how envious she is of how disconnected Franzen is from social media and his critics. The focus is on how Franzen is misunderstood but doesn’t feel it necessary to correct the record.

She yelped with joy at the sight of two sleeping owls, and Franzen’s face became the smiley, delightful thing it occasionally does when someone seems to understand. He told her that the first time he was taken bird-watching, he had a similar reaction. “The scales had fallen from my eyes,” he said. “It was like being introduced to sex.” An hour later, The Cut ran a short piece titled “We Regret to Inform You That Jonathan Franzen Has Compared Birdwatching to Sex.” But Franzen never saw it. He was in Santa Cruz, his own Brigadoon. He was preparing the nonfiction book of essays, which will be called “The End of the End of the Earth,” coming to bookstores in November. He was talking to Showtime again about doing “Purity” as a shorter capsule series.

But what was most thought-provoking for me was not necessarily the fact that Franzen doesn’t engage with his critics and defend himself on social media or the internet more broadly. But how being so disengaged with ideas from others on the internet affects how he thinks and writes. Does his work routine, his willingness to devote his free time to birding instead of engaging with ideas from others on the internet make him a better writer or one that is stuck in his own grooves? I think we’ll find out with his next book.