Word: franzens
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...what if-just for argument's sake-you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world-Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them- and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list...
...less fearful Franzen is a less tightly wound Franzen. After The Corrections, he got cable and developed what he calls "a Law & Order problem of significant dimensions." He stopped hunching his shoulders. He took up bird watching. "I spent whole days doing that, which would have been inconceivable, first 20 years out of college," he says. "To do something just for fun, for a whole day, on a weekday? That was totally new." Although based in Manhattan, he and his girlfriend spend part of the summer near San Jose, Calif. Basically, he's happy for the first time...
...Franzen is also working on a new novel. It's poor form to grill a writer about a work in progress, but I do it anyway, and he throws me a few cryptic crumbs. "The deep ecologists like to say that nature bats last," he says. "Whenever anyone is trying to say, mankind is smarter than nature ... we are of nature. And nature does therefore always bat last." So something political? "Certainly that's another thing I've been doing over the past five years. Being upset over the state of American politics...
...completely cured. In conversation Franzen is still a little anxious and nerdy, and he throws in monster 30-second pauses while he agonizes--literally, he looks as if he's in agony--over precisely what word to say. He still wears horn-rims. He asks several times if he's being interesting. He can't resist throwing out weird little factoids that have adhered to his sticky, hyper-retentive mind (according to Franzen, 43% of Subaru owners are Republicans; every person in the continental U.S. lives within one mile of an owl; scrub jays kill an estimated 100 million songbirds...
...down on fear and embarrassment and disappointment, but you can never quite go cold turkey. "The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away," Franzen writes in The Discomfort Zone. And he never does find that owl. But somehow it doesn't really bother him. "Much of bird watching is about disappointment," he says. "Part of the appeal is that really, more often than not, you don't see what you're looking for. The great pursuits are more about failure than about success...