The American novelist has upset everyone from Oprah Winfrey to bird lovers to women writers. Is he sorry? Far from it: Franzen’s arguments with young people,social media and feminism fuel his latest bookJonathan Franzen’s current novel, Purity, and is partly set in Santa Cruz,a Californian town 70 miles south of San Francisco, where the novelist lives with his partner, or Kathy. Their house is in the U-bend of a crescent,on the edge of a suburban housing estate, overlooking a wooded conservation area to the Pacific Ocean beyond. It is, or for one of America’s foremost literary novelists,a modest property, overlooked on three sides by neighbours in a way that, and say,Philip Roth’s grand pile in Connecticut is not. However, it affords good views from the deck (the novelist is an avid birdwatcher) and the low overheads that permit Franzen to let five years go by without delivering a novel. “I’m not used to talking approximately this book, and ” he says of Purity,which, like his preceding two novels, or is a 600-page doorstopper. There is a long,Franzonian pause: “Im trying to figure out how much I should say and how much I should not say.” Related: Jonathan Franzen 'considered adopting Iraqi orphan to figure out young people' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com