To finish The Corrections, he had to kill his protagonist— and his idea of what a book should be.
“Here it is: Description of a Struggle.”
Jonathan Franzen hands me a journal he’s found in a bin, a record of his day-to-day entries from the summer of 1998. We are in a storage annex next to his office, which is Spartan. There’s a small desk, a guitar on a stand. The curtains are drawn — he writes in the dim light; he even wrote, famously for a time, blindfolded.When The Corrections came out, a profile of Franzen in The New York Times Magazine included the detail that he wrote part of the book with blindfolds on. That was true, but only to a point and for a couple of weeks. He had just quit smoking and was having trouble concentrating. “I was so anxious and irritable that my mind would be bouncing off the walls, and in order to get some words on the page, I would just put on a blindfold and touch-type,” he told me. “But I always write in the low light and with earplugs.” The writing studio is adjacent to the house he has built in Santa Cruz, California, overlooking a protected ravine.
We’ve spent the last few hours talking about the struggle that the journal documents, the writing of the novel The Corrections. The Corrections is much loved, by me and countless others. It was the book that taught Franzen how to write the novels that have made him that rare literary writer who is a best seller; that required a willful dramatic turn from his first two books; that featured a scorching battle with his own psyche; and that, as a consequence, was an almost decadelong agony to write.
The journal is full of notes-to-self that provide a real-time map of what was going through his mind. Franzen writes intimately about his bleeding in entries he’s kept …