Like all the characters in Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, Tom Aberant has a few skeletons in his closet, namely his bonkers ex-wife, Anabel Laird. Franzen himself was married for 14 years, to the writer Valerie Cornell, a relationship that comes across as desperately suffocating in his memoir The Discomfort Zone, in which minor squabbles result in both parties “lying facedown on the floor of our respective rooms for hours at a time, waiting for acknowledgement of our pain”. Franzen’s clearly no stranger to the claustrophobia he describes between Aberant and Laird; the fact that these sections make for some of the most horrendously and comically compelling of the book suggest he’s drawn heavily on his own experience.
Franzen steered clear of “the messy business of my private life” in his first two novels – The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), the story of a female police chief, originally from Bombay, caught up in political conspiracy in St Louis; and Strong Motion (1992), in which a young couple link strange earthquakes in the Boston area to corporate misconduct – only employing autobiographical material in what he described in an interview in the Paris Review as a “well-masked form”. So well-masked, elsewhere he goes as far as to call these first two novels “technically antiautobiographical”.
However, having turned 40, not having reached the readership he hoped for, and struggling with his third book, Franzen realised that “the only way forward was to go backwards and engage again with certain very much unresolved moments in my earlier life.” The task was “to invent characters enough unlike me to bear the weight of my material without collapsing into characters too much like me”.
Why bother?
It was only when Franzen drew more self-consciously on his own life that he was finally able to write a novel that connected the personal and the social in a way that resonated widely with readers. In an essay he wrote for Harper’s in 1996, (later revised under the title Why Bother? for his 2002 essay collection How to Be Alone), Franzen had bemoaned being a literary novelist in an age where television dominated people’s leisure time.
Misread by many as a manifesto that promised his next work of fiction would rejuvenate the world of letters uniting the personal with the social in the vein of a great 19th Century novel, it’s actually more of an epitaph to a youthful but impossible ambition. “In fact, far from promising to write a big social novel that would bring news to the mainstream, I’d taken the opportunity to renounce that variety of ambition,” he clarified in How to Be Alone.But surprise, surprise, The Corrections – the problematic third novel he refers to in the essay – achieved precisely this seemingly unmanageable task. It’s the story of the Lamberts, a Midwestern family whose matriarch wants one final Christmas together before her husband’s Parkinson’s makes it impossible. It was a big social novel, described by the famously hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic at The New York Times, as “funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting,” a book that “not only shows us two generations of an American family struggling to make sense of their lives, but also cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way towards the millennium.” In addition to critical acclaim, it went on to sell more than three million copies.
Literary snob?
Franzen’s rise to fame hasn’t been without its controversies though. He supposedly snubbed Oprah Winfrey after she picked The Corrections for her book club, seemingly concerned for, as David Gates reviewing the book in The New York Times put it, his “street-cred” as an intellectual. As a bastion of white male privilege – “Franzen is often regarded less as writer than as cultural signifier, emblem of white male hegemony,” wrote David L Ulin recently in the Los Angeles Times – he’s also regularly accused of sexism or not championing the work of women writers. Optimistically, Purity presents us with a host of fascinating but flawed, powerful and complex female characters that might go some way to putting some of these accusations to bed, but inevitably, as one flame is extinguished, another leaps into life.
