In a setup that would not look out of place in fiction, Jonathan Franzen, the bestselling American novelist, has said he once considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan to help him understand young people better, but was persuaded against it by his editor.
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As the story goes, Franzen’s career and relationship were thriving, but he felt frustrated and angry with the younger generation and there was only one logical solution.
In anunexpected revelation, he told a newspaper: “Oh, it was insane, the idea that Kathy [his partner] and I were going to adopt an Iraqi war orphan. The whole idea las ted maybe six weeks”, Franzen explained.
Franzen is the author of The Corrections and Freedom.
“I’m not a sexist”.
“I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior, or that male writers are superior”, he told the Guardian.
But what people seem to be responding to the most are Franzen’s comments about, as The Guardian puts it, being “assigned the role of an anti-women villain by certain feminist critics”. None of that is ever enough. And they seemed kind of cynical and not very angry. It’s like there’s no way to make myself not male.”Speaking about a character in his forthcoming novel, Purity – a fanatical feminist who, among other things, forces her husband to urinate sitting down on the toilet to atone for his maleness – Franzen predicted that she would enrage his critics; in fact, she already has”.
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Franzen says his New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, discouraged the adoption strategy – and proposed instead that the writer spend some time with a group of recent college grads. And I was, like, well, I don’t think you’d be doing this if it weren’t good for you, too. I would have somehow wanted to communicate my frustration, to essentially call him a dumb-dumb for being such a dumb-dumb, but in a tricky, understated, sort of British way.
