Speaker 1:	Thank you so much for coming. It's delightful to see you all here. I will be brief but it's an honor and a pleasure to introduce my colleague Phil to you. You're in for an extraordinary treat today. 
	Just a few words about Phil and his career here. He's a model, there is no better one I think on campus now, of the scholar teacher and the values that that combination represents for Swarthmore. He's been prolific and eloquent in both those areas for years and the teaching informs the scholarship and the scholarship is eloquently informed by the daily interactions that he has in his classes every day. Alumna may also know him, as a wonderful leader of some discussion groups that have occurred around the country. In new york city for instance, where Swarthmore alumna have reading groups and Phil will give them a syllabus, say. They will read it and then be able to meet with him once or twice a year to discuss things like that. They often will tap many different faculty on campus to do that. Not just in literature but in other fields too. But I know Phil Weinstein is a favorite among the alumni groups for guidance and visitation. 
	I'd like to talk briefly just about some of his publications and also the famous classes that he's taught here to give those of you who may not be familiar with, here's a little sense of what he's done here and is doing. He's got many publications, his first book was on the wonderful American novelist Henry James. He's worldwide known as Faulkner expert and has actually three books on Faulkner. One of them on Faulkner and Tony Morrison, two absolutely crucial 20th century novelists. Another book, the most recent one, called Becoming Faulkner. Which is a wonderful short, insightful biography. Maybe the best biography to start with if you're interested in Faulkner's life and work. That book quite deservedly just one a prize for the best book on southern fiction from the society for the study of southern literature this year. 
	Phil is also very well known as a theorist and an expert on modernism and what that is and why it happened and how to understand it. In particular, I would like to single out a book of his called, Unknowing, the work of modernist fiction. Which is full on insights and they all definitely grew out of the kinds of courses that he taught here and the interactions that he had with students as well as scholars of modernism all over the world. One of the key ideas in that book is that, obviously there's a certain strain of modernism that we know that goes from the enlightenment, that believes in knowledge and control and power and had the ambition in the early 20th century of remaking the self, and remaking societies from top to bottom along a new kind of modernist model. Was very optimistic that human beings could be remade and reorganized in that sort of way. It's a kind of utopian dream. Those of you, of course, who remember 20th Century history know that in many cases those dreams turned out to be disastrous. 
	Phil looks at ways in which there's another strain that's very important within modernism that is a strain of powerful skepticism and doubt and irony. He traces the genesis and evolution of this strain through folks like [inaudible 00:03:52] and Freud and [inaudible 00:03:54] in the 19th century, reacting against 19th century realism and it's claims to knowledge. Then the full development of this sort of skeptical strain of modernism or what he calls knowing or skepticism about claims to knowledge. Or what is erased or left out in those claims. He traces those through great writers of the 20th century from Beckett and Joyce to Proust, to Faulkner, to Garcia Marquez and others out there. It's absolutely wonderful intellectual guy to the last two centuries you might say, of thought and literature [inaudible 00:04:37]. His teaching is exemplary, he's offered some of the biggest and most popular classes in all of the humanities at Swarthmore. That are filled with students reading the most difficult books imaginable such as, Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. Hardly easy reading for [inaudible 00:05:01] and yet these classes are packed and Phil makes these books exciting and dramatic and accessible as well as humbling. 
	He's well known for incisive and eloquent lectures and you'll get a little sample of that today. But also for his caring attention to the students and their own questioning and their own growth. He's also very famous for the modern comparative literature honors seminar, which is a small class rather than a large one. Usually 12 or so students and they meet in Professor Weinstein's wonderful, comfortable living room regularly. I'm sure that's a memory that lots of his generations of students carry with them for the rest of their lives. It's a class of very high standards but it's also a class that is taught outside of a formal classroom in ways that many seminars used to be but fewer so are done now. But I think what the students take away from that is not the high intellectual excitement only the high intellectual excitement of the seminar like that. But also the sense that literature is really a conversation. It's not a class that you're meant to pass through but a conversation for life that's meant to continue for life. I think the setting there as well as his wonderful hospitality really eloquently exhibits those kinds of values. 
	Let's see, just one final word about Phil's interest in Franzen. It makes sense, given his powerful understanding of the development of the novel and the last two centuries that he'd be interested and become interested. One of the most important contemporary novelist. One that's all well worth reading. Franzen's, The Corrections, is about many things but one of the things that it's about is the belief that a younger generation often has. That they will correct the heirs that their parents generation made. The book is both a satiric and an empathetic look at what happens when you try to live under that belief. It makes for both tragedy and comedy as Phil will show you. Freedom also of course is inspired by Swarthmore and also by the larger dilemmas of American life in the present there. It takes, as a particular moment, it's inspiration a certain block of stone from class 1927 I believe it is, I might be wrong about the exact date. That says, "Use well they freedom." On the side of [perish 00:07:42]. The book is definitely raising the question of how well are we using our freedom. Phil will take you through both these books and through Franzen's career and give you ways of thinking about his work, his life and it's importance that will go much more deeply than this Time magazine article did. Even though it was actually a pretty good article, I thought for making a strong case for why it's important to read Franzen now. 
	I'm going to duck out after this introduction because I've had the pleasure of already hearing the lecture and I've got other things I need to do this morning and this afternoon. Having heard his lecture before which he gave as a faculty lecture to faculty students and folks from [inaudible 00:08:34] earlier this year. I can assure you that you're in for an incisive and eloquent sampling of the power of Phil's thought. So thank you and please give a welcome to Phil Weinstein. 
Phil Weinstein :	Introductions like that put me in a position that's not very useful today. Which is speechless. I won't do a lot of deconstructing and I'm also not going to assume that you have a lot of familiarity already ... Can you all hear me? Good. With the novels. But the life trajectory is utterly fascinating and that's what I want to try to tease out into [inaudible 00:09:20]. Franzen's mesmerizing face filled the cover of the August 23rd 2010 edition of Time magazine. Tussle-headed, spectacled, looking away from the camera, guarding his privacy. He was sporting an outdoorsy, open-necked shirt and wearing a three day beard. This ensemble gives his face an upper body a rough [inaudible 00:09:47] all American look. It's at once a cautious, give away nothing look, and I think the look of a conqueror. A mainstream cultural idol. 
	For the past decade, ever since the publication of The National Book Award winning, The Corrections. Franzen's been a prominent player on the larger cultural scene and then his notorious flap with Oprah. I'm sure you're familiar with it. His many New Yorker pieces and his books [inaudible 00:10:21] guaranteed that he remains emphatically invisible. Then a second block buster novel, Freedom, 2013, gave Franzen's fame an extraordinary pitch. A number of peers complained that the line share of attention devoted to Franzen distorts the picture of contemporary writing. Franzen agrees, the avalanche of attention is beyond his control. You might have been surprised by its volume. How does an insecure introspective child and mordantly suspicious young intellectual, a figure adamantly distrustful of popular culture and it's blandishments. How does this figure become on of today's mainstream culture magnets? 
	I want to unpack Franzen's trajectory as person and writer, from his ultra sensitive, no one understands me, mid-western childhood, up to his spectacular accent on the current cultural scene. This trajectory passes through Franzen's [inaudible 00:11:31] years at Swarthmore and his subsequent marriage to a college classmate. Both of them committed themselves all but religiously to the insulated apprenticeship required to write the great American novel. Within a dozen years their joint project had run out of air, collapsing under the weight of its relentless idealism. Miserable, his marriage in ruins, Franzen managed to produce two critically acclaimed but hardly bestselling early novels. By the mid 1990's and halfway through his own 30s, his own most deeply held ideas about who he was as person, and as writer, and as citizen, and as husband had become bankrupt. Increasingly depressed by the consequences of his own choices. The alien nation from popular American culture that he saw as the requirement of genius. Franzen could no longer remain the person that he had worked for decades to become. Throughout the mid 90s Franzen sought to reconceive himself and his writerly stance. He hit [inaudible 00:12:49] with the corrections, 2001. 
	Several months later came the misunderstanding with Oprah. She dis-invited him from her TV show after hearing of his supposed concern about the middle brow for women only aura of her book club. After that, Franzen becomes public property without having passed through the experience of reading his books. Thousands upon thousands of Americans felt entitled to a view of him. Usually astringent, he was not forgiven for dissing Oprah. For being relatively unknown, he became glaringly well known. He was now a writer whom countless readers pegged as someone they would want to figure out. No one has embedded the project of figuring him out more than Franzen himself. For the past decade he has revealed his imminent thoughts and feelings and a stream of essays and interviews. The portrait of the writer and his novels that I'm putting forth today builds on materials that he has provided and published essays. The only secrets that are on offer today have remained hidden in plain view. Moving back and forth among the essays, I want to track both the single writer's odyssey and suggests a larger dilemma of the contemporary writer's stance toward his audience. Does one write for the mainstream or for the elite who make up high culture? Can one write successfully for both audiences at the same time? Franzen's career embodies the tension at the heart of this very American quandary. 
	Franzen, on Time, so I began with Franzen on the cover of Time magazine. Time was the journal most admired by Earl Franzen, Johnathon's sober, unfailingly serious father. Never mind that for the Franzen offspring, growing up in the 60as and 70s, three brothers. Time was increasingly irrelevant to the politics and pleasure of their Vietnam and post Vietnam world views. But Franzen's father was a product of an older, sterner, morality driven mid America and he worried over how his brilliant younger son would go about making responsible use of his talents. One thing that responsible met was not majoring in English at Swarthmore. Since my parents had suggested I might want to pay for college myself if I insisted on being an english major, Franzen writes. I was left with German by default. So fast forward now to Franzen in the mid 1990s, a twice published novelist if not yet a household name. The aging father has begun to envisage his youngest son has embarked on a significant writing career. He has long known what the evidence for tat significance will be. Quote, "One day he will pick up the magazine, Time, and find me reviewed in it." Franzen wrote this in a 1995 Harpers essay. 
	In this essay, Franzen is no longer the uneasy child registering his parents oppressive concerns about how he's going to grow up. But he's not yet one of Americans most talked about novelists. This mid 1990s Johnathon Franzen is grievance ridden. He has mentioned his fathers reverence for Time in the Harpers essay in order to note that years before the olympian James Joyce made the cover of Time twice. I still don't know if that's true, but that's what he claims. These days ... It's easy enough to find out, I just haven't. These days Franzen continues, the only two writers to appear on the cover of Time are middle brow practitioners, Scott Turow and Stephen King. Writers of popular detective fiction and horror novels. Writers who give familiar pleasure to their readers, they are not the company Franzen wants to keep. In the Harpers piece, focus abidingly on a frustrated young novelist's quarrel with a mainstream cultural scene in America. In that piece Franzen sees himself as ignored because his disturbing perceptions about American complacency are unwanted. I'd intended to provoke, what I got instead, he writes, with 60 reviews in a [inaudible 00:17:38]. 
	A small and fundamentally ridiculous person. What was his St. Louis childhood like? Who were his parents? Earl and Irene Franzen. Growing up in Webster Groves, a burrow of St. Louis, the child Franzen saw his parents early on as the problem. Of the many things I was afraid of those days, spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, [inaudible 00:18:08], heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, [inaudible 00:18:17], older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive, I was probably most afraid of my parents. Both parents struck fear into this easily frightened child in their distinctive ways. Irene rattled him by wanting to know his feelings, insisting on intimacy. In his mid teens when his parents took a rare trip abroad without him. Leaving him in the care of neighbors Franzen, quote, "Opened a letter that my mother had sent me from London. Letter began with the word, dearest. Which my mother never seemed to realize was a more invasive and less endearing word than dear. Even if I'd been inclined to miss her, and I wasn't, the dearest would've reminded me why I shouldn't. 
	In a later essay, looking back at her oppressive investment in his inner life, Franzen quips, "Whoever imagined that love your mother would make a good environmental bumper sticker obviously didn't have a mom like mine." 
	The youngest of Irene's children, quote, "I faced 9 years of being the last handy object of her maternal longings and frustrations and criticisms and so I allied myself with my father who was embarrassed by her emotion. I began by rolling my eyes at everything she said." Earl at least was inclined to leave his youngest son alone. They rarely played together. The few times he ever played catch with me, my father threw the ball like a thing he wanted to get rid of, a piece of rotten fruit. Yet Earl served well enough as the powerful engineer who helped me man the dykes against the ever invading sea of my mother. Though only rarely physically threatening Earl instilled abiding guilt in his son about not measuring up, not taking the rules seriously enough. My father was plagued by the suspicion that adolescence were getting away with something. That their pleasures were insufficiently trampled by conscious and responsibility of himself as the offspring of these two ethically intense parents, Franzen writes, I was a small and fundamentally ridiculous person, not accidentally this little persons culture he wrote was Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts. A cartoonist of genius, Schultz crafted images that modeled for young Franzen, the comedy of isolation and unsuited ness of how, by way of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, things don't fit, one never measures up. 
	Earl Franzen, by contrast to his son was temperamentally immune to the pleasures of humor. "I never heard my father tell a joke." Franzen recalls. "He only ever wanted not to be a child anymore." 
	One of Franzen's most telling images of his fathers gravity appears in a later essay. House for sale, closing this essay about selling the family home in St. Louis after his mothers death. Franzen remembers a childhood trip to Disney World that his father, a stickler for fairness had imposed on his youngest son since both older sons had been taken there before. Full of peak, hating the clothes that his mother insisted on his wearing and steadfastly refusing the parks offered pleasures. Young Franzen shut down, mute. Both parents tried with increasing urgency to interest him in the blandishments on Disney World. Finally the three of them arrived at compromise, an empty merry-go-round and the cheerful Irene took a photo of her father and son on the bobbing horses. Gazing at this photo years later Franzen sees, my father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse impaling metal pole, gazing into the distance, with the look of resignation that summarized his life. This is the image of a man afflicted with gravity, immune to flights of feeling or imagination, terminally ill-suited for the merry-go-rounds of life. 
	Another image that registers the impacts of the father's gravity, his mid-century convictions about how children are to behave, the rules they are to follow. A curse on the cover of The Corrections, forlorn like a little soldier consigned to suffer at a setting that others had been permitted to enjoy. The youngest Lambert son, Chip, sits at the enormous family dining table. He is next to a smiling, older brother, yet he is isolated, staring into space. Huge plates of food surround him, Chip has refused to eat a vegetable dish he detests. His father will punish him by making him remain at the table until the dish gets eaten. The boy remains at the dinner table almost all night and he never does eat that vegetable. The accomplished adult on the cover of Time, the puny child on the cover of The Corrections indited by authority, yet impotently resisting incompatible images both true. 
	It was in recognizing not just the pathos of the Chip figure but the comedy of his impotence. The [inaudible 00:24:22] like ways in which a child's defeat at the family dining table [inaudible 00:24:26] an abiding battle between parents and children. It was in recognizing that, that Franzen the misunderstood child would become Franzen, a best selling novelist abiding. The dinner table drama reveals something of the war and wolf of family life in America. Its daily rhythms. There is nothing esoteric here, just what everyone knows, material of countless TV family shows. Franzen will learn to see himself as caught up in the misadventures of his ordinary American life. He will learn to write what he sees, Combat in The Discomfort Zone.
	The Discomfort Zone, 2002, Franzen's second volume of essays, owes its title to an endlessly repeated quarrel between Earl and Irene Franzen. Over the appropriate temperature for their homes, heater, air conditioner, one machine. In the summer likes to save the money and use less electricity. Irene likes cooler air. The machine itself proposes a comfort zone between 72 and 78 degrees. The parents tirelessly reenact the drama of discovering the appliance has been set too high or too low and then bickering. 
	Earl: leave the god damn thermostat alone. Irene: Earl, I didn't touch it. Earl: you did, again. Irene: I didn't think I even moved it, I just looked at it, I didn't mean to change it. Earl: again, you monkeyed with it again, I had it set where I wanted and you moved it down to 70. Irene: Well if I did somehow change it, I'm sure I didn't mean to. You'd be hot too if you'd worked all day in the kitchen. Earl: All I ask, at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the comfort zone. Irene: Earl it is so hot in the kitchen. You don't know because you're never in here but it is so hot. Earl: The low-end of the comfort zone, not even the middle, the low-end, it is not too much to ask. 
	Well, all readers of The Corrections and Freedom recognize this quarrel. It is the daily buzz, the white noise of domestic discontent. What it is exactly that you do that I dislike and your response to my attack, mainstream to the hill. I don't know any contemporary writer who captures better than Franzen, the sound of family squabble, the tireless duets of self defense and attack on the other that make up the strophe and antistrophe of household discord. These are not the tragic soundings that presage divorce or departure. Nor are they spousal miscommunications open to reform. Much of Franzen's childhood it seems was immersed in the discomfort zone, until the comic Charles Schultz latent inside him offered not so much a way out as a way in. 
	"It took me half my life." Franzen writes, "To achieve seeing my parents as cartoons and himself no less cartoonishly, caught up alongside them." Now none of this seemed funny to Franzen at the time. This fundamentally ridiculous child suffered from mismatched parents, he suffered no less from shyness and his unconquerable sense that others would not like him. Not withstanding the child he remembers was convinced of his own superior, if unrecognized gifts. The 10 year old Franzen envisioned a coming spelling bee as generating only one halfway interesting question. Who was going to come in second? Determined to win at all costs, the child knew that he never the less housed deep within unsuitable impulses, demonic possibilities. 1950s seriousness is embodied in both parents, respect for social convention. Post a set of constraints that the child could negotiate when necessary but not for ever. Eventually the gravity of his parents mid century world would become suffocating and his demons would emerge, catastrophe might occur. 
	Franzen tells of an unforgettable moment when egged on by neighborhood girls to increasingly zany exploits. Dancing and prancing, the next caper always topping the last one. The little boy played his trump card. I pulled my pants down. Suddenly panicked, he leaped up, pulled his pants up and fled. Unforgettable, it's Franzen who can not forget. I'd been granted and had granted the neighborhood girls a glimpse of the person I knew I was permanently in danger of becoming. He was the worst thing I had ever seen and I was determined not to let him out again. 
	Honors program. Such a child was likely to graduate at the top of his class. His mix of [inaudible 00:30:05] dispositions and self regulating strategies, manageable if not secure. Given parents as ambitious for their children as Earl and Irene Franzen, it's not surprising that their youngest son would enter Swarthwore in the fall of 1977. Ever since the development of an honors program in the 1920s, Swarthmore's honor students had been invited to see themselves as promising scholars embarking on a heroic intellectual adventure. Such students back then elected six double credit, ungraded seminars rather than the 12 single credit courses that the less elite would take. On these seminars they would, you guys know this. On these seminars they would be rigorously examined and awarded honors in the spring of their senior year. The college chose its examiners from the faculties of highly regarded colleges and universities all over the country, signaling to the larger intellectual community that's Swarthmore's best were equal to the best in America. The college beckoned, Franzen heard and headed the call. Once he was at Swarthsmore he would soon enter the honors program as a German major. His parents were not convinced of the seriousness of merely two seminars per semester. 
	His mother wrote, Dad feels your schedule is so slight, he's fearing he isn't getting his, in single quotes 'moneys worth' or something. The irate 20 year old Franzen, his intellectual feathers ruffled, flared back. Perhaps I should make a few things clear that I had considered common knowledge to the three of us. One, I am in the, capital letters, HONORS program. In the honors program we take seminars that require a large amounts of independent reading. Each one is therefore considered the equivalent of two, four or five hour courses. The honors program indeed. The undergraduate Franzen was as humorlessly persuaded of its elite intellectual rigor as perhaps the college would've hoped he would be. The essay, In The Discomfort Zone devoted to Franzen's experience at Swarthsmore, the far end language paid tribute to Franzen's German professor, George Avery. The only teacher who would mark Franzen's development in an abiding way. Avery spurred Franzen to put his best energies into the encounter with German masters, [inaudible 00:32:52]. He also awakened in his student a sense that, as Franzen had glimpsed and Schultz cartoon figures. Identity is fractured non-identical with itself. 
	It was this other side of Avery, the fact that he so visibly had another side that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in [inaudible 00:33:17] that a man could be as sweet as empathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing, bore. And also crucially a third thing, a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self reproach, a person in process. No less the demons emerging in that terrifying childhood taper. That vignette is placed in this college center essay. Those demons reveal their sexual baggage more openly at this point. 
	Though Franzen's high school years occurred in the supposedly liberating 1970s. Following the sex and drug break out of the 60s, his shyness and insecurity led to his remaining virginal and excruciatingly horny. Now these details I have from his writings, I'm not guessing. A quoted high school conversation acknowledges that at age 18 he had not yet masturbated. The Swarthmore years were infused with sexual frustration. "I was still technically a virgin." He wrote. "I lived in daily expectation of scoring." 
	In the midst of a series of sexual near hits, this frustrated young man met his wife-to-be. She too was in the honors program. In time the two of them would marry, each intent on writing a great American novel and each knew, thanks not least to the canonical attitudes and examples enshrined in the honors program, the kind of novel that had to be, olympian, aloof, ironic, unforgiving. A novel that [inaudible 00:35:11] or James Joyce might have approved of. Otherwise, a novel that subsequent students in the honors program would find on the syllabus and be taught to admire if they work with timeless genius. The idealism of his writing aspirations echos that of his love life, Swarthmorian intensity and purity of purpose. Different from his fathers [inaudible 00:35:38] gravity but no less constraining. Mark the high minded commitment Franzen made to both the marriage project and the fiction project that he launched in the 1980s. Both would eventually collapse. The marriage was the first to go. 
	Deploring other people had always been our sport. Why a marriage collapses is a mystery without a master key. But a reader of Franzen says that [inaudible 00:36:09] entitled to make educated guesses. One reason is that the young husband and his literary wife both suffered from an unsustainable sense of specialness. Each felt called to write sometime extraordinary, each believed that the air they breathed in together was an air no one less gifted could share. We spent thrilling super human amounts of time together, he wrote later. Steadfastly [inaudible 00:36:40] to friends and treaty's that marriage inside a cocoon could not prosper. We made our aloneness work for four years, for five years, for six years. Then when the domestic atmosphere really did begin to overheat, we fled from New York to a Spanish village where we didn't know anybody and the villagers hardly even spoke Spanish. Undaunted, they tried further geographic, or I should perhaps say desperate. They tried further geographic remedies, living apart, living together in untried cities. San Francisco, Portland, Sante Fe, [inaudible 00:37:18], Chicago, Albany, [inaudible 00:37:20], nothing worked.
	Franzen remembers how, several years into the marriage he, quote, wrote "Poisonous jeremiads to family members who I felt had slighted my wife. She presented me with hand written 15 and 20 page analysis of our condition. I was putting away a bottle of [inaudible 00:37:41] every week. It was clear to me that something was terribly was wrong and what was wrong I decided, was modern industrialized societies [inaudible 00:37:51] on the environment. Although this diagnosis resembles targeting Iraq as the cause of the World Trade Center [inaudible 00:38:02]. They never the less managed to soldier on until 1993. Around Christmas time the money ran out, we broke our leases and sold the furniture. I took the old car, she took the new laptop. I slept with other people, unthinkable and horrible and ardently wished for. A little planet was ruined. 
	By the later 90s he could see how crazy it was to blame his failed marriage on the environmental crisis. But the young Franzen had been primed all through his childhood specialness and the imprimatur put on it by a Swarthmore honors degree. To identify exterior troubles, national, global, capitalism fueled, as the evil in need of unmasking. Deploring other people, their lack of perfection had always been our sport. He wrote of his rarefied marriage. It went without saying that the two of them possessed 20/20 vision and no issues to speak of. The problems to be attacked were decidedly elsewhere. And the great novels they would both write would follow seamlessly from the specialness of their gifts, education, union and calling. Swarthmore College had put it's stamp on the olympian shaped, eviction would take. By the time I was a senior my ambition was to create literature art. I took for granted that the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading and marriage it sustained study. I also assumed that the highest compliment this art could be paid was to be taught in a university. One does not easily share emotional and artistic ideals like these. Franzen and his wife invested in them as long as they could. Long after they had ceased to be nourishing. Years later in a talk delivered in Seattle Franzen spoke with failure of his marriage. 
	The first thing I had to do in the early 90s was to get out of my marriage. We had teamed up when she was still 20 and I had just turned 21. Our first deep passionate conversation was about an essay of Susan Sontag's. I was dimly aware that we were too young and inexperienced to be making a lifetime vow of monogamy. Somewhat less dimly aware that the two of us weren't really even compatible. But my literally ambition and my romantic idealism and my all too easily stimulated sense of guilt prevailed. We got married in the fall of 1982 and set about jointly working as a team to produce literary master works. Our plan was to work side by side as writers all our lives. 
	It didn't seem necessary to have a fall back plan because my wife was a sophisticated and talented New Yorker who seemed bound to succeed, probably long before I did. Then one afternoon in the fall of 1987 I got a call from my agent telling me that my own first novel had been sold to [inaudible 00:41:25]. I got off the phone and reported the news to my wife who immediately burst into tears, they were not tears of joy and I felt very, very, very guilty. When the collapse finally arrived, the marriage came apart and despite two earlier impressive novels, a novelist of comic genius was born. He was born by way of reconcieving his own earlier shaping ideas about himself and his vocation. Born as one who managed to see the Schultzian comedy of his former identity and to see it as comedy. Status versus contract. Franzen's essay, Mr. Difficult, was written in 2002 and following the events success of The Corrections, that essay conveys his repudiation of his earlier artistic values. The handy name attached to those earlier values is William Gaddis. 
	It turns out, Franzen now claims that I subscribe to two wildly different models for how fiction relates to it's audience. And these polarizes status versus contract. For the status model, who superiority he'd been taught to revere. Quote, "The value of any novel exists independent of whether people are able to enjoy it." Joyce, [inaudible 00:42:58] and Faulkner, all the writers I teach would be representative status novelists. Modernists masters, studied at Swarthmore and ensconced in the pantheon of great literature. 
	Their post modern peers for Franzen, were Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover and Don DeLillo, brilliant, devious, difficult writers. None of them gave or gives interviews. Rather they engage the world, indirectly, caustically, through the subversive labor of their work. They tend to bemoan mainstream culture and undiscriminating readers. 
	A contrast, the contract model sustains an unfaltering relation between writer and reader dependent on mutual trust. On this model the work of art is a commodity like others and quote, "Difficulty is a sign of trouble." Taken to it's free market extreme, if the product is disagreeable, the readers perfectly entitled to get rid of it and buy another. The consumer rules. Franzen concludes this argument by announcing his change of allegiance. The status position is undeniably flattering to a writers sense of importance. In my bones though I'm a contract kind of person. 
	I think tensions abound in Franzen subscribing to both positions, yet trying to settle for just one of them. You can't seamlessly run with the hares of status and at the same time hunt with the hounds of contract. Your work's going to reveal fissures, stress marks that indicate a stifled but irrepressible status writer or it will reveal glimpses of a contract writer willing to cut corners in order to keep the reader satisfied. The put down essay on Gaddis is charged with Franzen's urge to repudiate, post-modern difficulty at all costs. Quote, "nurturing the hope that you're marginal novel will be celebrated by the mainstream, the [inaudible 00:45:21] like wish that people will thank you for telling them unwelcome trues." He writes. "Is a ritual way of ensuring disappointment, of mortifying the flesh, of remaining at heart an angry young man.
	Grow up, Franzen reprimands post-modern, experimental novelists, most of them older than him. He accepts none of their excuses, their claims that they're difficult books upset or subvert the reader. What their novels mainly do, he now insists, is put readers to sleep. Franzen begs William Gaddis to reward him for investing so much time in the thicket of Gaddis' meandering prose. Hello, I'm the reader you want, you can't even show me a good time. Who else do you think is going to read you? My fathers brain, except metaphorically Franzen could know nothing about his parents brains while they were still alive. He knew a lot about their minds, enough to suffer throughout his childhood from their different ways of being who they were and making him feel pressured or misunderstood. By contrast, my fathers brain was published in 2001, some five years after Franzen's fathers death and it opens in retrospect.
	Here's a memory, on an overcast morning on February 1996, I received in the mail from my mother in St. Louis a Valentines package containing one pinkly romantic greeting card, two four ounce Mr. Good bars and one copy of a neuro pathologist report on my fathers brain autopsy. Who was Earl Franzen? His son now wonders since he's dead. Now that his most precious organ has entered medical charts and been found mortally defective, riddled with Alzheimer's. These are questions that only memory and retrospection can pose. Franzen is aware that the testimony he now gives of his fathers ordeal is shaped by the distance of time. What he wanted was integral to what he was and what I want, stories of my fathers brain that are not about meat, is integral to what I choose to remember and tell. To rescue Earl Franzen from the impersonal mechanics of bodily descent and annihilation, the son [inaudible 00:48:05] him with will, what he wanted. Now seen as inseparable from what I want as his chronicler. 
	The report that follows, draws from the parental letters Franzen had received over the years. Rather than mere testimony to the parents limitations and their sons uneasy childhood. These letters now read otherwise. Death is the mother of beauty as Wallis Stephens wrote. It's only afterwards that the lyrical shows itself and Franzen sees his parents now as he could not see them while they were still alive and while he was still young. 
	Their banality is transfigured by the passage of time. Here is Irene writing her son some of the bad news. 
	"I'm relieved to have dad started on his radiation therapy for a manageable cancer of the prostate and it forces him to get out of the house every day." Inserted here, a smiley face. "A big plus, he got to the point where he was so nervous, so worried, so depressed, I knew he had to make some decision. Actually, being so sedentary now, content to do nothing. He has had too much time to worry and think about himself. He needs distractions, more and more I feel the greatest attributes anyone can have are one, a positive attitude and two, a sense of humor. I wish dad had them."
	Irene's [inaudible 00:49:36] and concerns radiate both blindness and pathos. Emersed in her husbands undiagnosed descent. She lacks as all present experience lacks, the illuminating knowledge that comes later. Earl is not nervous, distraction will not save him. The positive attitude and sense of humor that Irene earnestly rates is enablers of health, appear comically, inadequate to the crisis her husband is undergoing. 
	As the survivor, Franzen makes these testimonial letters, register and almost [inaudible 00:50:15] sense of the limitations of present time understanding. Was blind but now I see. The word love punctuates this essay and the sun sees how love is at once all important and irrelevant to what is happening. Another memory. I remember remembering my father in bed, my mother sitting beside it, me standing near the door. We've been having an anguished family conversation, possibly about where to move my father after his discharge from the hospital. It's a conversation that my father, to the extent that he can follow it, is hating. 
	Finally he cries out with passionate emphasis as if he's had enough of all the nonsense. I have always lover your mother, always. And my mother buries her face in her hands and sobs. Half of this essay is devoted to a description of Alzheimer's itself, [inaudible 00:51:12] as a layman like Franzen could understand the mechanics of the disease. Such impersonal perspectives silhouettes the personal narrative being recorded that the fathers brain is not just meat. That the scientific events taking place, enact at the same time a specific persons desire to shape his exit. Make it coherent with the life he has led. No less Franzen grasps, that the novelist inside him is composing these materials of memory. 
	Franzen even grasps that memory itself is a novelistic confection, crafted out of bits of recalled information. The brain automatically massages these bits into shapely schemers. Another way to say this is that my fathers brain reveals, Franzen's newfound capacity to revisit home dramas and to find his mother, his father and himself as intricately human players, agents not just victims in that drama. 
	The portrait of Alfred Lambert in The Corrections, that's the father, is supremely indebted to such revisiting. It required the astonishing, emotional work Franzen undertook in writing The Corrections to make this moving essay possible. No less, house for sale and meet me in St. Louis.  Grasp, there's specific events. Sale of the family home. 
	Later return to the family home as saturated in a larger, emotional and temporal field. The home that suffocated the child now reveals what it also was invisibly all during those childhood years. The house had been my mothers novel, the concrete story she told about herself. The house he suffered in he now sees as his mothers cocoon-like sanctuary of sense. The narrative she used to understand her life. We could hardly be further from the alienated houses and homes that [inaudible 00:53:24] Franzen's first two novels. Spaces that Franzen's [inaudible 00:53:29] works to render absurd uninhabitable by readers. 
	Meet me in St. Louis carries these [inaudible 00:53:38] insights further. Not only can Franzen now see, too late, what mere objects actually meant and his parents emotional relation to them. He also sees how his later post Corrections return to St. Louis, crowds gathering, cameras shooting. Every encounter falsified by the TV script to be imposed on it. He can see how this travesties, the realities of his childhood experience. He's being relentlessly turned into material, for the TV show to be produced. The only saving grace is he knows this, part of me is imagining how this will play on TV, [inaudible 00:54:18]. The essay ends with his discover of a tiny dish in the refrigerator containing a bite of peas. Looking at it, after her death, I was forced to imagine my mother alone in the house and willing herself to eat a bite of something, anything, a bite of peas. Finding herself unable to, with her usual frugality and optimism she put the dish in the refrigerator in case her appetite returned. 
	Well need it be said that this is writing as recovery, not writing as a tack. Franzen is as dedicated here to capturing the common drama of a parent's descent and death. A drama no reader is unfamiliar with. As he was earlier focused on weening his readers away from familiar emotional sequences, the Franzen who emerges in The Corrections and Freedom is a Time writer. One who looks back luminously, rather than looking forward catastrophically. What he's sees on looking back can be laugh out loud funny or it may break your heart. Becoming Johnathon Franzen, he's the 51 year old olympian writer on the cover Time magazine. Adequate to himself, needing no one. He's no less the fundamentally ridiculous person of his childhood, insecure, misunderstood. This little boy and the young adult he becomes at Swarthmore failed to score. As dramatically as the figure on the cover, has won all the prizes. In between is an angry young man dedicated to an emotional and artistic pathway whose elitist isolation dooms it to failure. He pursues these ideals as long as he can, straining, eventually ruining his marriage. 
	He published his two difficult alienated novels, both premised on the idea that America is hopelessly blind to the damage wrought by its capitalist greed. Why is everyone else so stupid? Then he's back to the wall, he begins to grasp the sources of his own unhappiness that stupidity starts with himself, with his projects, with his relation to the world. And a new Franzen appears in time, writing to masterpieces and revisiting by way of intermittent essays, his own life story and two years ago revisiting The Corrections for a long term HBO series. 
	Franzen the loner has told us in great detail how he had to dismantle his computer so that it would stop receiving all those unwanted calls from the ambient culture. Which stops so that at last he could remount his own imagination and find coiled there, waiting for him, once the noise died down. The two big novels that have made him famous. The loner Franzen is also the birder Franzen, he travels across the globe as a bird watcher. Whatever else that signifies, it justifies to a desire to escape human company. To leave New York, to exit for a while from the comedy of social performance. Birding may best embody Franzen's idea of how to be alone. Yet Franzen, the anonymous global wanderer is a very visible New Yorker. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, he gives interviews. We have this vignette of the dismantled computer only because he's passed it on to us. His desire to reach out to his readership equals if it does not trump his concern to remain invisible. His Freedom website has an enormous number of hits. His Facebook has thousands of followers, a dashing photo of himself. He's been invited to the White House and met President Obama. So willing is he to share his intimate thoughts and feelings with his fans and popular culture. But he has proclaimed publicly enough for it to be implacental in bold letters on his website that shame made it impossible for me to write for a decade. Shame or is such a proclamation of shame in itself closer to shameless. Franzen is immersed to the hilt in the mainstream culture he so long despised but he didn't plan to exit soon from it, is revealed from his having agreed to screen write the HBO production of The Corrections. 
	The status writer in Franzen has not disappeared. He seems to have treasured most of all his friendship with a high mandarin writer, David Foster Wallis, who suicide, Franzen has lamented in print, lamented so insistently as maybe to imply to his readers, yes I'm the contract writer you care for and trust but no less, just as important I am the soul mate of David Foster Wallis, the non [inaudible 00:59:39] genius. Franzen continues to bristle with contradictory leanings, his status passed nesting with his contract claims. These are only underscored by HBOs decision a year ago, to cancel their commitment to The Corrections, despite a fortune spent and a cast and a staff to die for. Even for someone with Franzen's gifts attempting to fuse the complexity of that post modern novel with the mainstream appeal of a TV series must have carried a risk too large for the money men. Freed from the TV contract, Franzen is now completeing a book length translation of the, quote, "Untranslatable." That's his word. Essays of the early 20th century, Austrian intellectual, Carl Crouse. Well could any project centering on Crouse's foot notes and Crouse's scathing indictment of modern technology differed more provocatively from writing a mass market TV adaptation of The Corrections. 
	Where he goes next as he attempts and maybe impossibly to straddle high culture and mainstream culture is an open and I think intriguing question. Thank you.