Jonathan Franzen / Features / Untitled Books

"The word that caught my eye was the misspelling of the nation of Cyprus which was spelt like a tree. I looked like an idiot."

Jonathan Franzen

On a singularly eventful UK tour that saw the mass pulping of his latest bestseller, Jonathan Franzen talks to Beth Jones about disaster, dysfunction, the nature of freedom, and learning to go with the flow.

Rain is pouring down on the grey streets of South Kensington as a tall, tired man sits in an oak-panelled hotel bar contemplating "the huge disaster, if that's not too strong a word, that just happened."

It's just hours since Jonathan Franzen discovered, during a recorded television interview for BBC's The Review Show, that the wrong draft of his novel Freedom has been printed.

"I was taping a brief reading from the book yesterday afternoon on camera when I realised I was reading a raw first-pass galley which, due to a ghastly production error, was printed instead of the final version of the book," the fifty-one-year-old American author explains. "The word that caught my eye was the misspelling of the nation of Cyprus which was spelt like a tree. I looked like an idiot."

His on-camera response - "I am realising to my horror there is a mistake here... in the fucking hardcover of the book" - will be aired by the BBC the following evening and although he is now choosing his words more carefully, there's no doubt Franzen is unhappy about the situation: "The raw first-pass galley is what all the book reviewers work with and if it was that bad I wouldn't have let it be out," he acknowledges, "but on the other hand there's a reason you do a series of galleys. It's to make things better." How different is the published version to the version he intended? "Significantly. Hundreds of changes," he says. "I had actually made some small but significant changes to a number of characters. There was a certain shrillness to the character of Jessica which I tried to mute. And just infelicitous lines which had to come out."

Somewhere beyond the quiet calm of this hotel, it's clear that a lot of people are panicking on Franzen's behalf: "Poor Fourth Estate. It's like an anthill someone has kicked," he says. "Everyone's running madly around. Because it's not just the UK hardcover but all the exported editions, the entire Australian edition, all has to be pulped. And all the people who've already bought it have to have their free copy. Instantly. It's amazing they've made it happen."

Fourth Estate have been, Franzen says, "wonderful about it and are pulping all their stock and offering free exchanges" but given his standing as one of their best-selling authors it's no surprise that they are doing everything in their power to keep him happy. His last novel, The Corrections, sold nearly 3 million copies and won the prestigious National Book Award and Freedom, his fourth novel, looks to repeat, if not surpass, that success. It's received rave reviews and following our interview, President Obama, who was given the book for his summer holiday reading, is reported to have asked Franzen to the White House for a meeting.

The 562-page epic tells the story of the Berglund family - Walter, Patty and their children Jessica and Joey - who live in St. Paul, Minnesota. Walter is a "generous, smiling, red-faced" environmental lawyer while Patty is "a stay-at-home mom" who is "famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else". They are concerned with "contemporary questions" such as "Was it true you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary?... Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them?" and in learning certain life skills such as "how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox".

The family live in a house which is "book-filled and tasteful" and while Walter bikes to work, Patty "is great with the little kids, teaching them sports and domestic arts". But in the midst of everyday family life, there's "something not quite right about the Berglunds". Their son Joey moves out at sixteen to live with the neighbours, Patty is unhappy, "drinking herself red-nosed" and in love with her husband's best friend Richard Katz, while Walter is trying to cope with the fact that he's "been living with a depressed person for a very long time". When Patty retreats to their summer house on the lake, she tries to distract herself with Tolstoy's War and Peace but throughout Freedom, it's Anna Karenina which is bought to mind with its famous opening line: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"Whether the most extreme forms of family trauma can be made into fiction or they're something only non-fictional accounts can do justice to is a really interesting question," Franzen says. "I had been thinking about how the Berglunds, for all their trouble, are really not a dysfunctional family. The father is not having sex with the daughter, the mother is not strung out on crystal meth, the brother is not schizophrenic and the parents are not in denial about that. Just venture into some of America and you will find serious dysfunction. I was trying to underline the Berglunds are sort of in the middle. They're not the happiest family but they're not obscene."

Franzen, who divides his time between New York and California, has an ability to chart the highs and lows of "middle" American family life which is unmatched by any other contemporary writer. He produces fiction which is addictive, absorbing, heartbreaking, entertaining and terrifyingly perspicacious. His grasp of depression and feelings of low self-worth are gut-wrenchingly good, perhaps because, as he says, although he's happy to be doing what he's doing, he is "often miserable on a daily or weekly timeframe".

He implants his readers into the minds of his characters and allows them to see the world from a variety of unique perspectives - from middle-aged mums to teenage boys - without it ever appearing schizophrenic or forced. The Berglunds are seen first through the eyes of their neighbours, the Paulsens, before the narrative switches to the perspective of the members of the family themselves, starting with Patty whose "life journal" catalogues the myriad mistakes of her life.

Franzen has been particularly praised for his creation of female characters. As the Telegraph puts it "he does women very well." What does he think of that? "Well," he laughs, "I never say no to a compliment. You know anybody who's sensitive enough to have stayed in the business of writing doesn't have to work too hard to get some of the basics about what it's like to be in the world as a woman as opposed to being a man. In some respects it's easier because the more demonstrably a character is not me, the easier I can inhabit them. There's much more work in getting a male character going because there's this constant danger of him collapsing into me. But there are dangers with the female characters too. Primarily for the male writer the danger is the female character will become sort of wish-fulfilment or a fantasy character. The work is to keep yourself honest and not love the character too much."

This is something to which Franzen has fallen prey in the past. A seismologist, the main female character in his second novel, became such an idolatry figure for Franzen that it became "destabilising": "That was marriage-threatening levels of involvement with a made-up character to the extent of having dreams about her, so that was a bad situation. It's long ago and far, far past, more than twenty years ago I was having those dreams, and the marriage is also long since dissolved but errr... it's the only time it's happened that I can think of when the dream work of fiction spilled over into my literal dreams, although much of what I do as a writer is function as a go-between between those two dream worlds."

He hasn't, he says, fallen in love with any of the characters in Freedom, ("there was a character I particularly, to my great surprise, especially liked, and that was Joey. But I wouldn't say I was in love with him") but the critics have most certainly fallen in love with the Berglunds, and with Franzen himself. This summer he was the first living novelist in a decade to have made the cover of Time magazine, appearing alongside the caption Great American Novelist. It spawned a cacophonic discussion about Freedom as a great American novel, much to Franzen's annoyance.

"It's a sad phrase to saddle any book with. A dumb phrase. I won't even engage with the subtly belittling phrase 'great American novel'," he sighs, before obligingly proceeding to do exactly that. "The phrase is noxious and yet, like all clichés, there's a kernel of something in there. I've been thinking recently about why we have that category and also thinking about what a great job the Russians did in the 19th century with the novel, some ambition to capture all of something, that wish to take it all on... to foster an awareness that we're not the whole world, but we are a whole world. It's just big enough to seem possibly within the novelist's grasp but not so overwhelmingly global as to defeat the novelist. So there is, annoyingly, something in the phrase," he concludes.

Written in the years following the 9/11 attacks, the novel takes the idea of freedom as its leitmotif. From the dubious politics involved in attaining the freedom of the Cerulean Warbler to the heated arguments had over a Thanksgiving table about how to "radically expand the sphere of freedom" to the personal freedom of individual characters, the novel is threaded through with examples of how, for Franzen, freedom is a complicated concept and not always desirable or straightforward.

But although the novel touches upon modern politics and is partly set in the seat of American power, Washington D.C., Franzen's aim wasn't to create a book "about America". He expounds: "Most of us have some rudimentary awareness of certain crises the world is facing - energy, environmental, geopolitical - so those things are in the book, which I hope would allow some points of connection, but it's really not about conveying something about America. That is really almost as far as you can get from my mind when I am working on a book. The work goes into creating a handful of main characters that are defined by their dramatic situations in relation to each other. To inject topicality or relevance, I can do that left-handed or half-asleep, anyone can. But to come up with a character who I really like and is interesting and difficult but not beyond probability, that's the work of years," he says.

And this book was the work of years, nearly a decade, from start to finish. "It was a tortured genesis," Franzen says. "I had some version of Patty's voice for a very long time, a notion of the scenes at the lake and their aftermath, as well as some impression of Walter. And the character of Katz had been haunting some short stories of mine I'd been unable to finish. But you don't really have anything until you can hear how it's a novel, which for me means it has to be novel, and for a long time I was really writing in the shadow of The Corrections. Everything I attempted sounded like a weak version of what I'd already done. It wasn't until after many, many years of trying I came up with the pages of the first chapter. They had a little bit of formal pop, some edge, and it resulted in a handful of pages that I did not want to throw away. It wasn't until six months before I was done with the book that I had something approaching a list of chapters which was close to what I ended up with."

Here in London, Franzen (in between trips to the north Norfolk coast to indulge in his favourite hobby, bird watching) has been doing book readings and has, he says, been pleased by people's reactions to the novel. "I don't read reviews," he says, "but some people have said they'd finished the book weeping, so if you hear that a few times it's incredibly gratifying. The English are not as cold a people as they're rumoured to be," he smiles, admitting that he empathises with his more reserved readers: "shy people who when I shake their hands are sweating and younger people who are often blushing and my heart goes out to them".

As someone who has struggled with the public side involved in being a writer, this is perhaps not surprising. Watch television interviews with Franzen and you'll see he has a tendency to appear uncomfortable, to look away from the interviewer at a space below and to the side of them. Today is no different. His words are carefully thought out and measured, and there are gaps, sometimes as long as five to ten seconds, between words and sentences.

Franzen can't be blamed for thinking before he speaks, however. Nine years ago, he was at the centre of a media storm after some ill-advised comments about the Oprah Book Club led to him being uninvited from the club. "I did spend a very enlightening two days with a media trainer after the Oprah debacle because fault had been found with my style of utterance and with my self-presentation in front of cameras," he says. "'I'm happy to be here, I'm happy you're here.' That's the frame of mind you're supposed to walk out onto your live TV appearance with and it's bullshit," he says. He has survived the constant media intrusion into his life by staking out "boundaries" for himself. "I won't talk about everything, and as I've become more familiar with what those boundaries are I become more comfortable operating within them." At several points during our conversation he draws a line (Has he ever upset anyone with his writing? "Oh, I've definitely upset people. Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs". Such as who? "Well, that's where you're getting too close to the boundary.")

Despite this, however, Franzen, his tall frame folded awkwardly into a small chair, does give the sense that he is trying hard "not to hide behind a persona, to give people something like what I really am" and he's a considerate interviewee (on the unreliability of Dictaphones, he says "I sympathise and empathise and [as a reporter] usually have two of them going at the same time", and after particularly long answers he apologises for "just droning on and on") who seems to care about the answers he is giving.

In an unexpected way, yesterday's events helped him, he says, to feel more comfortable with the interview process: "Strangely, it took yesterday, really quite a bad thing to happen, to make me suddenly feel like I was enjoying the ride and think hell, stuff's happening, we're all rolling along, let's inhabit this moment and not cramp up".

"I think people do get the sense when you're happy to be there or when you're resentfully pressing the talk button," he adds. "Maybe you don't? But I'm actually enjoying myself." Both in his presence and reading his books, it's impossible to not feel the same way.

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Freedom is published by Fourth Estate

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Friday, 29 October, 2010