NEW YORK, N.Y. - Jonathan Franzen is still getting used to the attention.
On Wednesday night, he stepped up to a small platform at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square and sat behind a long table, blowup posters of "Moby-Dick" and "Gulliver's Travels" hanging high on the wall behind, like literary gods. He placed a dark briefcase beside him and removed a hardcover copy, without the jacket, of his acclaimed new novel and bestseller, "Freedom."
With a standing room audience of around 1,000 waiting to hear him read, the author squinted as if emerging from darkness, ran his fingers through his wavy hair and stared down. A store official then introduced him as a Great American Novelist, noting that Franzen was recently on the cover of Time magazine. Franzen smiled, self-consciously, and ducked behind the briefcase.
To much applause, he approached the podium and put on his familiar dark-rimmed glasses, a design worn by more than a few of his fans. "Hi," he said, shyly, wearing jeans with a cellphone clipped on the back and a blue shirt, sleeves rolled. He said New York was the hardest place to read, but he wasn't sure why. He joked that he would read for 1 hour and 20 minutes and considered the crowd.
"It's really weird to see all these people here," he said, adding that literary writers weren't raised to expect such appeal. "I'm excited as if this were happening to someone else."
Praised for his three-dimensional portraits of modern men and women, the 51-year-old writer and Manhattan resident has himself become a rich study of ambition and ambivalence, openly wishing to write substantial novels with mass appeal while resisting the burdens, and even the blessings, of success. His mixed feelings about "The Corrections" being selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club led the talk show host to withdraw her invitation. He began a promotional video for "Freedom" by stating that he didn't care much for promotional videos.
Franzen doesn't need to say, or write, anything controversial to be controversial. He is the rare writer criticized because reviewers supposedly like him too much. A rave for "Freedom" by The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani led to an unhappy tweet from bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult, who alleged the newspaper favoured white, male writers. (Kakutani, ironically, has been accused of being biased against white males). Another popular writer, Jennifer Weiner, posted a series of tweets attacking the Times for snobby and coverage of female writers, and, on her blog, referred to Franzen as "The Man Who Turned Down Oprah."
Franzen, meanwhile, seemed only slightly aware of the fuss. Asked by an audience member about Picoult, he said he not been following her remarks "closely," agreed that more female writers should be in the canon and expressed confusion that his book was being accused of receiving too much attention. Noting that "Freedom" was his first novel in nine years and that "The Corrections" had won the National Book Award, he saw nothing exceptional about getting a review in both the daily and Sunday editions of The New York Times. Was that the issue, he wondered?
"It surely can't be, right?"
On Wednesday, he read for nearly 40 minutes from the first chapter of "Freedom," a 500-plus page narrative about the torn but enduring Berglund family, a novel that covers the past decade as broadly and as thoroughly as "The Corrections" did the '90s. Franzen is not an eager public speaker, but he is a natural reader — fluent and conversational, with a deep and expressive voice and a gift for timing and emphasis, especially when coming upon one of the book's many forbidden words.
Subjects raised during the question-and-answer period included his favourite authors (Edith Wharton and John Steinbeck, among others), what music inspired him (the Mekons), his thoughts about the American family and, inevitably, Winfrey.
"Has Oprah been in touch?" he was asked.
"Next question, please," he responded.
Discussing his future, he predicted, with resignation, that a "substantially negative reaction" would follow "all the good things" that have been happening to him recently. He discouraged hopes that another novel would come soon, saying he needed years to find something new to say. Franzen added that he was attracted to "unconventional" categories because they make people "uncomfortable."
"And people who are uncomfortable behave in interesting ways."