Jun 22, 2024
I remember getting the
knife.
It was near Christmas
about 10 years ago and Leslie and I were zipping up a tiny suitcase
before a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family. We
weren’t married and I was making a desperate last-second plea to
stuff a 576-page novel called ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen
into our bag. “It just won’t fit,” Leslie said. “You have … 100
pages left? Want to leave it and read it when we’re back?”
I did *not* want to do
that.
The book was slipping
under my skin—serrating my soul.
So I remember getting
that knife.
The deep blasphemous
pain I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving the last
100-ish pages off the book was far outweighed by the exquisite
suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring it on the beach all
week.
I had never read
anything like ‘The Corrections’—with a clarity of character, wildly
spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional *realness* that, page
by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my
throat, and tears in my eyes.
The book
single-handedly elevated what I thought books could do.
I read ‘Freedom’
(2010), ‘Purity’ (2014), and 'Crossroads' (2021) the same way—equal
parts admiration, fascination, and with a
psychologically-transporting feeling of living outside of
myself.
Jonathan Franzen is
one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in
the world. He is a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award Winner,
Pulitzer Prize Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Finalist, 2x Oprah’s Book
Club Pick, voted to TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential’ list as well as
gracing their cover as "Great American Novelist," and much, much
more.
The NYT calls his
books "masterpieces of American fiction," NYMag calls his books
"works of total genius," and Chuck Klosterman writing in GQ says
"Franzen is the most important fiction writer in America, and—if
viewed from a distance—perhaps the only important one.”
Tall praise! But there
is just nothing like a Jonathan Franzen novel and it was sheer
delight going deep with the master of the deep to discuss writing
advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today,
competing with David Foster Wallace, the best thing we can do for
the climate, Jon’s 3 most formative books, and much, much
more…
Let’s turn the page to
Chapter 137 now…