Jonathan Franzen’s New Book

JONATHAN FRANZEN, AUTHOR, “CROSSROADS”: Every time I write a book, I put everything I have got into it. And I feel so spent afterwards that it is literally unimaginable that I could find enough to write about to make even one more book. And “The Times” has happened to catch me at a moment like that. Obviously, I had one more book. And it’s good, as you get into your 60s, as I now am, to have a challenge, and I have set myself a challenge.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Look, I challenge myself to run an extra mile, and not to write a trilogy, so good for you. Well, let’s talk about the title, and it is called “A Key to All Mythologies.” Can you give us the background of that?

FRANZEN: Well, that is a title in George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch.” And it refers to a grand project by a character named Casaubon that is never realized because he dies. And it’s a silly project to begin with. And by slapping that title on a projected trilogy, I was kind of having a joke at my expense.

(LAUGHTER)

GOLODRYGA: Well, “Crossroads” is set in the early 70s, as we mentioned, and it focuses on the Hildebrandt family as the Vietnam War is drawing down, And the younger generation really breaking free. This is also a generation that you grew up in. Why did you want to focus on this area?

FRANZEN: Well, I’d never written about the ’70s in my fiction barely written about it period. It’s the most important decade of my life. It was the decade that formed who I am as a person. And this was initially supposed to just be a section of a book, but I found I had such a density of memory for what people looked like, how they sounded, what the feel of the times was, that I just wanted to keep writing there. And so I expanded the project into a full book, simply because I was enjoying writing the pages. And when the pages are coming in, and they feel alive, you have to listen to that. It’s also part of a larger project in which I’m trying to span 50 years of the history of a family and, incidentally, a history of a country. And I reached as far back as I could, and still be in a time I remembered and could write about without research, which I hate.

GOLODRYGA: Well, one of the things we love to do on this show, given that these interviews are a bit longer than usual, which is always a luxury, is to have the authors read a passage from the book. So I believe that you are prepared to do that for us.

FRANZEN: I have a book flapped and ready to go.

(LAUGHTER)

FRANZEN: This is the first paragraph of the book. “The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems greyly colluding to deliver a white Christmas.