Nora Johnson:	It's great to see everybody here. I have this pleasure of introducing Phil Weinstein. Phil is Alexander Griswold Cummins ... Oh, my name is Nora Johnson. I am the Chair of the English Department and thus have this pleasure. Phil is Alexander Griswold Cummins's Professor of English Literature and obviously, given this lovely crowd, it's clear that he is a beloved colleague and a professor who has earned the profound respect and admiration of this community where he has spent much of his distinguished career.
	Now people off campus also know about Phil. Not least because of his stellar record in print. His most recent book, Becoming Faulkner, in 2011, was chosen by the Society For the Study of Southern Literature to receive the Hugh Holman Award for the best book on southern literature written in 2011. Before that there was his landmark study, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, in 2005. Before that another series of distinguished monographs: What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, 1996; Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns, in 1992; The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity From Dickens to Joyce; Henry James and the Requirements of the Imagination. 
	We could mention Phil's three fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities. I guess I have now mentioned them. His fellowship through the American Council of Learned Societies. We could talk about his invited lectureships and his distinguished visiting professorships on a genuinely international scale. It's a very, very impressive list. In fact, it's an amazing list. 
	I also want to talk though today about another list that pertains to Phil, and this is one that I saw personally last semester. I think it was last semester, on Phil's office door. I may have the details wrong, Phil, and you could correct me, but I think it was near the end of the semester. My office is right next door. Phil was holding paper conferences with his students. They would come in and talk to him about their ideas and he would help them pull together their arguments. 
	Holding paper conferences is, of course, a normal activity in our department, just as it is in many departments across campus, but what absolutely stunned me that day, and I'm sure it stunned Phil, was the sheer number of student conferences on that list. It just went on and on. I don't know, 30, 40? It seemed to me that the list was actually measurable in days, rather than hours, and it may have felt that way to Phil. Because my office is right near Phil's and because I've walked past his office door more than a few times, I know a little bit about the extraordinary quality of attention involved in those student conferences. It's not that I've been eavesdropping. It's just that you kind of take that in by osmosis when you work alongside somebody for the decades that we have worked alongside one another.
	If you start to multiply that long, long list of student conferences over the number of years that Phil has taught among us, you start to get a feel for some of the quieter ways that Phil has been a presence in the world of arts and letters right here with us. Those of us who are lucky enough to teach with Phil know this experience. We attend an alumni event and we hear about how Phil's courses really changed the world for somebody. It might have been five years ago. It might have been 10 years ago, but that story has come home to me through a truly extraordinary number of chance conversations. The experience does not seem to lose its luster over time for the students, and I have to say it's become increasingly moving to me personally to have this experience over and over again.
	I recall early in my career walking into a research library and being called into the head librarian's office, in part, to be told that that one modernism seminar in Phil's living room had absolutely been the key point in the head librarian's intellectual development and though this is a chance example and we're in the same field so we might know some of the same people, I think I'm probably not the only person in this room who has had that experience. I actually see a few heads nodding. It's really not that unusual that if I say Swarthmore, someone says to me, Phil. To me that is an extraordinary monument that it really says something very deeply.
	 A theme in some of Phil's work is the impossibility of narrating the subject or let's say narrating the author or narrating the self at a moment in time, right at the point of crisis, when time and space are not experienced as stable and certain, but are understood as a process of unknowing. It's that crisis moment of becoming, rather than some later stable moment of self narration, that tells us something quintessential about modernity and about post-modernity and about the location of subject, author, and self in an unstable world. Phil has established to this eloquently in his own written work, but I want to say too, looking over our own perpetual shared moment of cultural crisis, and thinking about Phil in his office, listening to that long list of students becoming, as they struggle to say something coherent about Faulkner or about Morrison, you kind of have to marvel. 
	Phil has been a master interlocutor over several decades of cultural crisis, in his scholarship and also very importantly in his teaching. Not a fixed point of certainty, not promising something artificial, but actually a conversation partner in that incredible process of becoming that troubles us all so deeply. 
	Today Phil is going to talk to us about becoming Jonathan Franzen ... I don't think you're becoming Jonathan-.
Phil Weinstein:	I hope not.
Nora Johnson:	I didn't mean for it to come out like that. He's going to talk to us about becoming Jonathan Franzen, and I know, that he will as always, be a skilled listener and a powerful articulator of and contributor to the process that he is narrating for us. That's what Phil does. It's one of the key things that we do here at the college which makes this moment of appreciation particularly deep for me because it's Phil and it's also our shared work that Phil embodies. I really can't think of a better way that we could share this particular moment in time. Phil.
Phil Weinstein:	That was very lovely. Thank you. I'm not very good at these things. This is the only one you're going to see. 
	The mesmerizing face of Jonathan Franzen filled a cover of the August 23, 2010, edition of Time Magazine. Tousle-headed, bespectacled, looking away from the camera, guarding his privacy, he was sporting an outdoorsy, open-necked shirt and wearing a three day beard. The ensemble gave his face and upper body a rough hewn all-American look. It was at once a cautious giveaway nothing look, and the look of a conqueror. A mainstream, cultural, idol. 
	For the past decade, ever since the publication of his National Book Award winning, The Corrections, Franzen, this is not news, has been a prominent player on the larger cultural scene and his notorious flap with Oprah, his many New Yorker pieces, and his books of essays have ensured that he remained emphatically visible. With a second blockbuster novel, Freedom, a couple years ago, Franzen's fame has risen to extraordinary pitch. A number of his peers complained that the lion's share of attention devoted to him distorts the picture of contemporary writing. He agrees. The avalanche of attention is beyond his control, and he might have been surprised by its volume.
	How did an insecure, introspective child and mordantly suspicious young intellectual, a figure adamantly distrustful of popular culture and it's blandishments, how dd that person become one of today's mainstream cultural magnets? I want to unpack Franzen's trajectory as a person and as a writer, from his ultra-sensitive, no one understands me, midwestern childhood, up to his spectacular ascent onto the current scene. This trajectory passes through Franzen's heady 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 culturally acclaimed, but hardly best-selling, novels. By the mid 1990s and halfway through his own 30s, his most deeply held ideas about who he was, as a husband and a writer and a citizen, had become bankrupt. Increasingly depressed about the consequences of his own choices, the alienation from popular American culture that he sought as a requirement of genius, Franzen could no longer remain the person he had worked for decades to become.
	Throughout the mid '90s, Franzen sought to reconceive himself and his writerly stance. He hit pay dirt 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. Thereafter, Franzen became 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, and from 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 abetted the project of figuring him out more than Franzen himself. For the past decade he has revealed his intimate thoughts and feelings in 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 on offer have remained hidden in plain view. Moving back and forth among the essays I want to track, both a single writer's odyssey, and it suggests the 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, I think, embodies attention at the heart of this very American quandary. 
	Franzen on Time. I begin with Franzen on the cover of Time. Time was the journal most admired by Earl Franzen. Jonathan's sober and unfailingly serious father. Never mind that for the Franzen offspring growing up in the '60s and '70s, Time Magazine was increasingly irrelevant to the politics and pleasures of their Vietnam and post-Vietnam world views. Franzen's father was the product of an older, sterner, morality driven mid America.
	He worried over how his brilliant youngest son would go about making responsible use of his talents. One thing responsible meant was not majoring in English at Swarthmore. "Since my parents have 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." 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 as embarked on a significant writing career. He has long known what the evidence for that significance will be. "One day he would pick up the magazine, Time, and find me reviewed in it," Franzen wrote in a 1995 Harper's essay. 
	In that essay Franzen is no longer the uneasy child registering his parent's oppressive concerns about how he will grow up, but he is not yet one of America's most talked about novelists. In mid 1990s Franzen is grievance ridden. He has mentioned his father's reverence for Time Magazine in the Harper Essay in order to note that years earlier, the Olympian James Joyce made the cover of Time twice. I've never checked that out. These days, Franzen continues, "the only two writers to appear there are middle brow practitioners, Scott Turow and Stephen King. Writers of popular detective fiction and horror novels, writers who give familiar pleasures to their readers." They are not the company Franzen wants to keep.
	In the Harper's piece, focused abidingly on a frustrated young novelist quarrel with the mainstream cultural scene in America, Franzen sees himself as ignored because his disturbing perceptions about American complacency are unwanted. "I'd intended to provoke," he writes, "what I got instead was 60 reviews in a vacuum. 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 borough 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, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, 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 opened a "letter from my mother", this is his voice, "opened a letter that my mother had sent me from London. The letter began with the word dearest, which my mother never seemed to realize was the more invasive and less endearing word than dear. Even if I had been inclined to miss her, and I wasn't, the dearest would have 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," he writes, "I faced nine 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 adolescents were getting away with something. That their pleasures were insufficiently trammeled 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 I think, this little person's culture hero was Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts. A cartoonist of genius, Schulz crafted images that modeled for young Franzen the comedy of isolation and unsuitedness of how things don't fit, one never measures up. Earl Franzen, by contrast to his son, was tempermentally 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 father's gravity appears in a later essay, House For Sale. Closing this essay about selling the family home in St. Louis after his mother's 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 his mother insisted on his wearing, steadfastly refusing the park's offered pleasures, young Franzen shut down. Mute. Both parents tried with increasing urgency to interest him in the blandishments of Disney World. Finally, the three of them arrived at a compromise, an empty merry-go-round, and the cheerful Irene took a photo of 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 a look of resignation that summarized his life." This is the image of a man afflicted with gravity, immune to flights of feeling or imagination, ill-suited for the merry-go-rounds of a life. Another image that registers the impact of the father's gravity, his mid-century convictions about how children are to behave, the rules they are to follow, occurs I think on the cover of The Corrections. Forlorn, like a little soldier consigned to suffer, at a setting that others have 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 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 the whole night. He never eats that vegetable. The accomplished adult on the cover of Time, the puny child on the cover of The Corrections, indicted by authority, yet impotently resisting. Incompatible image, both true. It was in recognizing not just the pathos of the Chip figure, but the comedy of his impotence. The Schulz like ways in which a child's defeat at the family dinner table intimates an abiding battle between parents and children, that Franzen, the misunderstood child, would become Franzen a best-selling novelist, abiding. The dinner table drama reveals something of the warp and woof of family life in America, its daily rhythms. There's nothing esoteric here. Just what everyone knows. The material of countless TV shows, Franzen will learn to see himself as caught-up in the misadventures of his ordinary American life and he'll 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 over the appropriate temperature for their home's heater/air conditioner. It was the same machine. In the summer Earl likes to save money and use less electricity. Irene likes cooler air. The machine itself proposes a comfort zone between 72 and 78, and his 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 it. 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 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 there, 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."
	I think all readers of The Corrections and Freedom recognize this quarrel. It's the daily buzz, the white noise of domestic discontent. What it is that you do that I dislike and your response to my attack. Mainstream to the hilt. I actually know of no contemporary novelist 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 anti-strophe 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 Schulz, latent inside him, offered him not so much a way out as a way in. "It took half my life," Franzen writes, "to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons," and himself no less cartoonishly caught up alongside them.
	None of this seemed funny to Franzen at the time. This fundamentally ridiculous child suffered from mismatched parents, suffered no less from his own 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 envisaged a coming spelling bee as generating only one half way interesting question. Who was going to come in second? Determined to win at all costs, the child knew that he nevertheless housed deep within unsuitable impulses, demonic possibilities. 1950's seriousness, as embodied in both parents respect for social convention, post a set of constraints that the child could negotiate when necessary but not forever, eventually the gravity of his parent's mid-century world would become suffocating. His demons would emerge. Catastrophe would 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 is Franzen who can not forget. "I'd been granted and had granted the neighbor girls a glimpse of the person I knew I was permanently in danger of becoming. He was the worst thing I'd 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 antic dispositions and self-regulating strategies, manageable if not secure, given parents as ambitious for their children as Irene and Earl Franzen, it's not surprising their youngest son would enter Swarthmore in the fall of 1977. Ever since the development of the Honors Program in the '20s, Swarthmore's honor students have 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 the less elite would take.
	On these seminars they'd be rigorously examined and awarded honors in the spring of their senior year. The college chose its examiners, as it still does, from the faculties of highly regarded colleges and universities all over the country, signaling to the larger intellectual community that our best were equal to the best in America. The college beckoned. Franzen heard and heeded the call. Once at Swarthmore he entered the Honors Program as a German major. His parents were not convinced of the seriousness of merely two seminars per semester. His mother wrote that, "Dad feels your schedule is so light, he's fearing he isn't getting his 'money's worth', or something." The irate 20 year old Franzen, his intellectual feathers ruffled, flared back. "Perhaps I should make clear a few things that I had considered common knowledge to the three of us. One, I am in the HONORS Program. In the Honors Program we take seminars that require large amounts of independent reading. Each one is therefore considered the equivalent of two, four or five hour courses." Honors Program indeed. The undergraduate Franzen was as humorlessly persuaded of his elite intellectual rigor as the college may have hoped he would be. 
	The essay in The Discomfort Zone, devoted to his experience at Swarthmore, The Foreign Language, it's entitled, pays 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, Günter, Rilke, and especially Kafka. He also awakened in his student a sense that, as Franzen had glimpsed in Schulz's cartoon figures, identify is fractured, non-identical with itself. "It was this other side of Avery," he writes, "the fact that he so visibly had another side that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka. That a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore. And also crucially a third thing. A flickering consciousness, the simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self reproach. A person in process." 
	No less the demons emerging in that terrifying childhood caper, a vignette I think significantly placed in this college centered essay, these demons reveal their sexual baggage more openly at this point. Though Franzen's high school years occurred during the supposedly liberated '70s, following the sex and drug breakout of the '60s, Franzen's shyness and insecurity led to his remaining virginal and excruciatingly horny. A quoted, quoted, I'm not just saying this, a quoted high school conversation acknowledges that at age 18 he had not masturbated yet. 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, in not much time, after he graduated, the two of them would marry. Each of them intent on writing a great American novel. 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 a latter day Munn or Joyce might have approved of. Put otherwise, a novel that subsequent students in the Honors Program would find on the syllabus and would be taught to admire as a work of timeless genius.
	The idealism of his writing aspirations echos that of his love life. Swarthmorian intensity and purity of purpose, different from his father's bougie gravity, but no less constraining, marked 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's essays is 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 something 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 deaf to friends entreaties that marriage inside a cocoon could not prosper, we made our aloneness work for four years, for five years, for six years, and 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 remedies, living apart, living together, in unfamiliar cities. San Francisco, Portland, Santa Fe, Boulder, Chicago, Albany, Syracuse. Nothing worked. 
	Trying to solve non-geographic problems geographically, Franzen later recalled this doomed effort, remembering as well how several years into the marriage he, "wrote poisonous Jeremiah's to family members who I felt had slighted my wife. She presented me with hand written 15 and 20 page analyses of our condition. I was putting away a bottle of Maalox every week. It was clear to me something was terribly wrong and what was wrong, I decided, was modern industrialized society's assault on the environment."
	Not withstanding a diagnosis that resembles targeting Iraq as the cause of the World Trade Center attack, they 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, our 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 I think the young Franzen had been primed all through his childhood specialness, and the imprimatur put on it by his Swarthmore honor's 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 elsewhere. The great novels they would both write would follow seamlessly from the specialness of their gifts, education, union, and calling. Swarthmore had put its stamp on the Olympian shape their fiction would take. "By the time I was a senior, my ambition was to create literary art. I took for granted that the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained setting. I also assumed that the highest compliment this art could be paid was to be taught in a university." 
	One does not easily shed 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 of the failure of his marriage. "First thing I had to do in the early '90s was get out of my marriage. We had teamed up when she was still 20 and I'd 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 and somewhat less dimly aware that the two of us weren't really even compatible, but my literary 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 fallback 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 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 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 performances, a novelist of comic genius was born. He was born by way, I think, of reconceiving his own earlier shaping ideas about himself and his vocation. Born as one who managed to see the Schulzian comedy of his former identity, see it as comedy. 
	Status versus contract. Franzen's essay, Mr. Difficult, was written in 2002, and following the immense success of The Corrections, it conveys his passionate repudiation of earlier artistic values. The handy name attached to those earlier values is William Gaddis. "It turns out, Franzen claims, "that I subscribe to two wildly different models for how fiction relates to its audience." These polarizes, status versus contract. For the status model, whose superiority he had been taught to revere, the value of any novel exists independent of whether people are able to enjoy it. Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Munn and Faulkner, all the writers I teach, would be representative status novelists. Modernist masters studied at Swarthmore, ensconced in the pantheon of great literature. Their post modern peers for Franzen were Datus, Pynchon, Coover, and 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.
	By contrast, the contract model sustains an unfaltering relationship between writer and reader. Dependent on mutual trust. On this model the work of art is a commodity like others and, "Difficulty is a sign of trouble." "Taken to its free market extreme, that's his phrase too, "if the product is disagreeable the reader is perfectly entitled to get rid of it and purchase another. The consumer rules." Franzen concludes this argument by announcing his change of allegiance. "The status position is undeniably flattering to a writer's sense of importance. In my bones though, I'm a contract kind of person." 
	Some tensions exist in Franzen's subscribing to both positions, yet trying to settle for only one of them. You can't seamlessly run with the heirs of status and at the same time hunt with the hounds of contract. Your work is going to show 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. "Nurturing the hope that your marginal novel will be celebrated by the mainstream, the Cassandra like wish that people will thank you for telling them unwelcome truths," 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. He accepts none of their excuses. Their claims that their difficult books upset or subvert the reader. What their novels mainly do, he now insists, is "put readers to sleep". Franzen begs Gaddis to reward for investing so much time in the thicket of Gaddis's 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 Father's Brain. Except metaphorically Franzen could know little about his parent's brains while they were still alive. He knew a great deal 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 Father's Brain was published in 2001, some five years after Franzen's father's death and it opens in retrospect. Here's a memory. "On an overcast morning in February 1996, I received in the mail from my mother, in St. Louis, a Valentine's package containing one pinkly romantic greeting card, two four-ounce Mr. Goodbars, and one copy of a neuropathologist's report on my father's brain autopsy." Who was Earl Franzen? His son now wonders, now that he's dead and how that his most precious organ has entered medical charts because 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 father's ordeal is shaped by the distance of time. What he wanted was integral to what he was, and what I want, stories of my father's 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 imbues 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 parent's limitations and their son's uneasy childhood, these letters now read otherwise.
	"Death is the mother of beauty," as Wallace Stevens wrote, Franzen sees his parents now as he could not while they were still alive, 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 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 I had to make some decision. Actually being so sedentary now, content to do nothing, he's 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. Wish dad had them."
	Irene's pieties and concerns radiate both blindness and pathos. Immersed in her husband's undiagnosed descent, she lacks, as all present experience lacks, the illuminating knowledge that comes later. Earl is not nervous. Distractions will not save him. The positive attitude and sense of humor that Irene earnestly rates as enablers of health appear comically inadequate to the crisis her husband is undergoing. As his survivor, Franzen makes these testimonial letters register a kind of Proustian sense of the limitations of present time understanding. I was blind, but now I see. The word love punctuates this essay. The son 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 slight 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 loved 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, insofar as a layman, like Franzen, could understand the mechanics of the disease. Such impersonal perspective silhouettes, the personal narrative being recorded, that the father's brain is not just meat. That the scientific events taking place, enact at the same time a specific person's 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. He even grasps that memory itself is a novelistic confection, crafted out of bits of recalled information. The brain automatically massages these bits into shapely schemas. Put otherwise, My Father's Brain reveals Franzen's newfound capacity to revisit home dramas of the past, and to find his mother, his father, and himself as intricately human players, agents, not just victims, in those dramas. The portrait of Alfred Lambert in The Corrections 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 their specific events, sale of the family house, later return to it, as saturated in a larger emotional and temporal field. 
	The house that suffocated the child now reveals what it also was invisibly all during those childhood years. "The house had been my mother's novel. The concrete story she told about herself." The house he suffered in he now sees as his mother's cocoon like sanctuary of sets. The narrative she uses to understand her life. We could hardly be further from the alienated houses and homes that dot Franzen's first two novels, spaces that Franzen's caustic prose labors to render absurd, uninhabitable by readers. Meet Me in St. Louis carries these Proustian insights further. Not only can Franzen now see, too late, what mere objects actually meant in his parent's 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 travesty's all the realities of his childhood experienced. 
	His being relentlessly turned into material for the TV show to be produced. The saving grace is that he knows it. "Part of me is imagining how this will play on TV, as schmaltz." The essay ends with his discovery 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, and finding herself unable to. With her usual frugality and optimism, she'd put the dish in the refrigerator in case her appetite returned." Well need it be said that this is writing as recovery and not writing as a tack. That 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 weaning his reader away from familiar emotional sequences.
	The Franzen who emerges in The Corrections and Freedom has become a time writer. One who looks back luminously rather than looking forward catastrophically. What he sees on looking back can be laugh out loud funny or it could break your heart. Becoming Johnathan Franzen, he's the 51 year old Olympian writer on the cover of Time. Adequate to himself, in need of no one. No less he's 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 the prizes. In between is the angry young man dedicated to an emotional and artistic pathway, whose elitist isolation dooms it to failure. He pursues these ideas as long as he can, straining and eventually ruining his marriage.
	He publishes two difficult alienated novels, both premised on the idea that America is hopelessly blind to the damage wrought by its capitalist greed, its soulless culture. He brims over with frustration and discontent. Why is everyone else so stupid? Then his 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. A new Franzen appears in Time, writing two master works and revisiting by way of intimate essays his own life story. For the past year or so, revising The Corrections for a long term TV series.
	Franzen, the loner, has told us in intricate detail how he had to dismantle his computer so that it would stop receiving all those unwanted calls from the ambient world. Would stop so that finally he could remount his own imagination and find coiled there and waiting for him, once the noise died down, the two big novels that have made him famous. Franzen the loner, as well as Franzen the birder, he travels the globe as a bird watcher, whatever else that passion signals, it testifies to a desire to escape human company. To leave a teeming urban scene. Exit for a while from the comedy of social performance. Birding may best embody his idea of how to be alone. 
	Yet Franzen the anonymous global wanderer is also a highly visible New Yorker. He writes regularly for the city's most prestigious magazine. He gives interviews. We possess his vignette of the dismantled computer only because he has chosen to pass it on to us. His desire to reach out to his huge readership equals, if not trumps, his concern to remain invisible. His Freedom website has an enormous number of hits. His Facebook page has thousands upon thousands of followers and a dashing photo of himself. He's been invited to the White House and met Obama. So willing is he to share his intimate thoughts and feelings with his fans in mainstream culture that he has proclaimed, publicly enough for it to be emblazoned 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 something closer to shameless? Franzen is immersed to the hilt in the mainstream culture he so long despised, but he does not plan to exit soon from this immersion as revealed by his having agreed to screen write an HBO production of The Corrections. Yet the status writer in him has not disappeared. He seems to treasure most of all his friendship with the high Mandarin David Foster Wallace, whose suicide he has lamented in print. Lamented so insistently as perhaps to imply to a host of readers, "Yes. I'm the contract writer you care for and trust, but I am also just as importantly the soulmate of David Foster Wallace, nonpareil genius."
	Franzen continues to bristle with contradictory leanings. The status past inside him messing with the contract claims more recently. These contradictions are only underscored by HBO's decision, this past May, to cancel their commitment to The Corrections after the pilot, despite a fortune already spent and a cast and staff to die for. Even for someone with Franzen's remarkable gifts, attempting to fuse the complexity of a post-modern novel with the mainstream appeal of a TV series that has to hit hard at the end of every 60 minute segment, might have carried a risk too sizable for the money men. Freed from the TV contract, Franzen is now completing a book length translation of the "Untranslatable", his word, essays of the early 20th century German intellectual Karl Kraus. 
	Could any project, centering on Kraus's footnotes and his scathing indictment of modern technology differ more provocatively from writing a mass-market TV adaptation of The Corrections? Where Franzen goes next as he attempts, maybe impossibly, to straddle high culture and mainstream culture is an open, and for me, utterly intriguing question. Thank you.