Author of the week: Jonathan Franzen

last updated 8 January 2015

When his friend David Foster Wallace committed suicide two years ago, Jonathan Franzen took it as a challenge, said Lev Grossman in Time. Franzen had struggled for years to start a follow-up to his 2001 novel, The Corrections, and he was finally getting somewhere. “I was just settling down to work again when David killed himself,” Franzen says. The act shocked Franzen, but also energized him. For years, he’d felt himself in competition with Wallace for the crown of the greatest novelist of their generation. Now he felt a need to act. “It was like, man, if you’re going to do that? Be the heroic, dies-young genius? That’s … that’s a low blow. I’m going to have to get off my ass and actually write something.”

The competitive nature of modern America turns out to be a major theme of Freedom, said Megan O’Grady in Vogue. Its main character, Patty, is a former college basketball player whose cutthroat tendencies still surface during her days as a stay-at-home mom. “I really wanted to write about competition because it’s this fixture of the free market that nobody really wants to talk about,” Franzen says. “It’s considered unattractive to be competitive, and yet our entire political economy is based on a mechanism of competition.” Franzen satirizes Patty’s attempts to create the facade of a perfect family, but he insists he feels sympathy. “It’s bad enough to be a man and be competitive; it’s even harder to be a woman and be competitive.”