Corrected development
It is 11am pacific time and Jonathan Franzen has just turned on the light. “Special occasion,” he says drily of our video call. A sliver of sunshine dares to creep under the venetian blind at the window. “I’m vampiric for the first six hours of the day. I do not like bright light,” he says. “Also, if I had the blinds open there would be birds and they would distract.” Franzen likes birds, a lot.
Five years ago he gave up his studio office on New York’s 125th Street for this monastically bare room in Santa Cruz, California. He has spent part of each year here since he met his partner, writer Kathy Chetkovich, “the Californian” of his essays, in 1998. But after “a massive tug of war”, they moved here permanently so she could be closer to her elderly mother. “It was a war I was happy to lose, because I’d been in New York for 25 years and I’d had enough,” he says. He tried one autumn in New York without Chetkovich before realising it wasn’t going to work, “so I just threw in the towel, and now I’m a Californian”.
This September marks the 20th anniversary of The Corrections. The timing of his dizzying critique of American life and capitalist excess in the late 90s, published just a few days before the attacks on the twin towers, was “an uncanny coincidence”. The novel may have made his name, but it also made him “the second most-hated person in America for a few weeks”, he recalls now, after the Oprah Winfrey debacle. (He was snooty about The Corrections being selected for her book club, from
