How He Came to Be Somewhere: An Interview and Three Early Stories by Jonathan Franzen

Author:Jonathan Franzen [Franzen, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857861740
Publisher: The Paris Review
Published: 2010-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

INTERVIEWER

And yet it doesn’t seem that novelty is all that important to you anymore.

FRANZEN

I’m wary of the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake. At the same time, if I don’t feel like I’m doing something new, I can’t do anything. Reading time is so scarce nowadays, and alternative entertainment is so widely available, that I’m keenly attuned, as a reader, to whether a book’s author seems to be experiencing something new or is just turning the crank.

There’s always new content, of course. Content will carry you a certain distance; it can rescue you when you’re in trouble formally. I think the importance of content is what Harold Bloom, for example, really underestimates in the novel. Bloom’s at his best with poetry, because poetry is so purely language. But his approach becomes something close to nonsense when he applies it to novels, because he’s still basically just looking at language. Language is important, absolutely, but the history of the novel is only partly stylistic. Faulkner obviously begat many influences, ditto Hemingway, ditto Joyce, ditto Carver and Lish, ditto DeLillo. But rhetorical innovation is just one of the many streams that feed into the river of fiction.

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