Jonathan Franzen will be the topic of The Paris Review‘s Art of Fiction feature in the Winter 2010 issue.
The issue will be published later this month, but the journal’s website debuted some excerpts earlier today.
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a “good writer.” Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well. And, by a wide margin, I’ve never felt less self- consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years-this just feels transparent.” … I was admittedly somewhat conscious that this was a good sign-that it might mean that I was doing something different, pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories. But it still felt like a leap into the void.
The interview will most likely be posted online later, along with all the others, but if the editors are looking to build hype, they could hardly ask for a better Art of Fiction subject.
