NPR talks to Jonathan Franzen about his new book (hailed as the book of the century), the backlash (many have made an issue that due to the fact that he's male it's getting lots of press), and his background.
From the piece...
Jonathan Franzen's new epic novel Freedom is a portrait of a Midwestern suburban family — two parents and two children slowly losing track of each other and themselves. It has been called a "masterpiece of American fiction" by Time Magazine and "an indelible portrait of our times" by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times.
In an interview on Fresh Air, Franzen says one of the central themes of Freedom is how people change as they straddle the world between their childhood and grownup lives.
"The key part of becoming an adult is that adults relinquish a certain kind of freedom," he tells Terry Gross. "You can't lie on your bed all afternoon, and you can't be possibly any number of things. You have to only be one thing or a couple of things."
Franzen also discusses the massive publicity generated by Freedom in the weeks before publication. He says that up to six months ago, he imagined that the book would sell slowly and that people would purchase it via word of mouth or perhaps at small readings he would give around the country. But the recent publicity — and critical backlash from other authors — did something entirely different: It made his publishers "tear their hair out because the books were not in the stores," he says.
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