My experience of daily life, even hourly life, is one of constant conflict and division. Of simultaneously being never fewer than two and often as many as four or five different people. And I very much suspect that I will never succeed in writing a book with a single point of view, a single character who carries the whole thing. I consider this a technical failure of mine, and I’ve wasted many years of my writing life trying, in a macho way, to write novels that have a strong, single, Philip Roth-like coordinating subjectivity. It never works. The novel to me is the venue for sympathy. In terms of leading my actual life, being a divided and conflict-riddled person is unpleasant. ‘Disaster’ would be too strong a word, but it’s definitely no fun. At the same time, my psychic splinteredness does mean that there are few impulses in human beings that I don’t have some way of connecting with. The novel to me is the art form that allows scope for my impulse to turn things around and look at them from another perspective. So that’s part of it.
It takes me a very long time to develop a character. I’m usually frustrated with what I can do in 30 pages. Characters need space in which to reveal their complexity. Even though they’re always simplified and cartoonish in comparison to a real person’s character, they still have their own complexity. You need to give them time to really be themselves, and maybe also to be some other kind of self as their life starts closing in on them. This, again, takes space. Plus I don’t develop a really good character every day or every month or even every year. It’s like making strudel dough. You stretch it out, you fold it over, you stretch it out, you fold it over. You do that about thirty times. It’s a long process, and a character who’s developed in this way doesn’t really fit into a story. And then, having taken the time to develop four or five characters like that, you don’t want to just burn them up in 20 pages. And, beyond that, I can’t seem to write well about characters I don’t love. Sometimes it seems to me my defect as an American fiction writer that I tend to be monogamous and form strong, loyal attachments. I don’t want just a two-week quickie with the character. I want to get into a five-year relationship.
To me [one of the biggest problems facing fiction] is cultural entropy — Levi-Strauss’s notion of the disappearance of difference, the rise of global homogenization. A world in which people’s public lives were very different from their private lives has been replaced by public spaces filled with intimate things and by intimate private realms filled with the generic and the public. This is a disaster for the fiction writer and needs to be opposed on that basis alone. Fiction writers spend a lot of time trying to track down that fugitive sense of difference. Things are neither Midwestern nor American anymore; it’s all sort of mush. Things are neither urban nor rural, it’s all exurban mush. Things are neither high art nor pop, it’s all middle-brow po-mo mush. And so on down the line.
And the thing is, some of this entropy is politically healthy and good. If you’re too pro-difference, you can end up sounding anti-miscegenist. Or sexist, or classist — the poor should know their place and the wealthy should know their place, etcetera. Suddenly, if you’re not careful, you’re back in a Shakespearean world order. And yet, part of the nostalgia that the artist feels is ‘Wow, look what Shakespeare was able to accomplish back when all those distinctions were really hard and firm!’  There’s something very unattractive in the artist who wants to break all those boundaries and fluidly pass between them, but wants the boundaries to keep existing for everyone else, so that it’s only the artist who gets to play with them, excitingly. If I take a close look at my reasons for rejecting the unwholesome mixing of public and private, I see things that may be politically rather unattractive in me. It’s interesting that critics on both the right and the left decry the same cultural entropy. You know, ‘It was Madonna Studies that broke down blah blah blah’, say the people on the right. And, ‘No it’s Fox News and Rupert Murdoch that are breaking down the blah blah blah’, say the people on the left. We always locate the problem on the other side. But in fact everyone is conspiring in it. This is why the term ‘cultural entropy is such a brilliant formulation — because the process has an inevitable, thermodynamic feel to it. As we globalize and as communication systems and transportation and population all expand, how could it not happen?
The fact that I myself think in thermodynamic terms, as if the process is autonomous and unstoppable, is an example of the difficulty of bringing politics into the discussion. Politics itself has been excluded, because the whole notion of the political, in contrast to the eternal or the apolitical, is another one of those distinctions that have been muddied. What serious political thinkers have in mind when they say the word politics is one of those pure quantities that, like all the other pure quantities, is under increasing assault. And as I say this I can hear myself proving to myself that I am not Marxist in my bones, because I’m proposing that politics is not the last instance. It itself is a phenomenon; it’s not the driving force.
We would like to thank the interviewer Chris Connery, and the magazine boundary 2, where this interview was first published, as well as, of course, Jonathan himself.

A special edition of The Corrections, created to celebrate 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary, and featuring limited edition cover art by Michael Landy, is available here…

In the first of our two-part interview with world renowned author, Jonathan Franzen, and to launch our 25th anniversary programme of articles on 4th Estate classic titles, the writer talks frankly about the social novel, politics and the importance of writing to maintain the integrity of personal experience in an increasingly digital world.

One of the things I talk about in the essay that I prefer to call ‘Why Bother?’ (From How to be Alone) is the relation between the supremacy of the novel in the 19th century and the fact that it had no major competitors. It’s not necessarily fair to measure our culture’s engagement with political reality by the health of the social novel, now that we have shows like The Wire and now that we have CNN.  One thing the Obama candidacy has certainly made clear is that a lot of people are still engaged with electoral politics. And yet it’s hard for me not to let my sadness about the decline of the social novel affect my judgments of the culture as a whole. There’s no question that the ambitious program of Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy, Trollope is simply not present in the same way any more. It’s been transferred to a non-literary realm, and this is a big loss, because the novel is the greatest art form when it comes to forging a connection between the intensely interior and personal and the larger social reality.

As for my own ambitions for the novel nowadays, I make fun of the ambitions I had when I was 22 and thinking, I will write the book that unmasks the terrible world, I will cause the scales to fall from the public’s eyes, and they will see how stupid the local news at 11 is, and they will realize how cliché-riddled the pages of their local newspaper are and how corrupt their elected officials are. And they won’t stand for it any more. Exactly what kind of utopia I thought would ensue was never clear.

In the 1980s, I think what I was really reacting to was my sense of isolation and loneliness and having this body of perceptions that I didn’t feel was widely shared. I was so young that I actually thought I was the only one with this particular body of perceptions. My enemy was everybody and my allies were nobody. I think the difference now is that I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways, and that my task is to reach them and to participate in the life of that segment of the population. This is what I’m writing for, for the people who want a literary experience. I’m no longer worried that nobody besides me can have that kind of experience, but I’m also not imagining that, in any conceivable twist of history, everybody will want that kind of experience. So it’s a weird and possibly selfish-seeming form of communitarianism: I’ve ceased to care much, as a writer, about people who don’t care about books. And the world of readers is thankfully still not tiny. We may lose a little more ground each year, but we’re still creating new readers who are excited about good stuff.

We may just be little specks. As a percentage of the total world population, we’re ever smaller specks, and what we are is ever more mediated by the structures we’ve created for ourselves to live in. And yet, as you go through life, you still hit these points of crisis where something genuine is happening.  A choice is being made, or a life is being destroyed, or hope is being regained, or control is being relinquished, or control is being achieved. These moments may be utterly insignificant historically, but they’re still hugely meaningful to the person experiencing them as meaningful as everything else in the world put together. To try to connect with what might formerly have been called the soul, and what I might now describe as some interior locus of privacy and reflection where moments of personal significance are experienced: this, I think, is the job of the fiction writer. As great as our various glowing screens may be at capturing vividness and complexity, you’re still always on the outside and just looking at them. You’re never within. Even if you were to construct a very fine virtual reality device, you would be literally insane if you mistook a manufactured and mass-produced experience for a moment of genuine human importance. If you could believe in the simulacrum enough to think you were having a moment of genuine personal meaning, it would mean you were insane.

Only written media, and maybe to some extent live theatre, can break down the wall between in and out. You’re not looking at your feeling from within. An Alice Munro story rushes you along in about 25 minutes to a point where you’re imaginatively going through a moment of deep crisis and significance in another person’s life. I know I’m expressing this in very vague terms, but I think these epiphanic moments have a social and political valence as well, because they’re what we mean when we talk about being a person, about being an individual, about having an identity. Identity is precisely not what consumer culture says it is. It’s not the playlist on your iPod. It’s not your personal preference in denim washes. The moment you become an individual is the moment when all that consumer stuff falls away and you’re left with the narrativity of your own life. All the things that would become impossible politically, emotionally, culturally, psychologically if people ever were to become simply the sum of their consumer choices: this is, indirectly, what the novel is trying to preserve and fight in favour of.

We would like to thank the interviewer Chris Connery, and the magazine boundary 2, where this interview is published in full, as well as, of course, Jonathan himself. Come back in a fortnight for the concluding part of our Jonathan Franzen interview, and keep checking back for The Corrections themed posts in the interim.

A special edition of The Corrections, created to celebrate our 25th, and featuring limited edition cover art by Michael Landy, is available here.

Next year we see 25 years of 4th Estate publishing and we’re going to be celebrating…

We have lots of special surprises planned and we’ll be kicking off early in December. So keep watching this space for news of 25 years of 4th Estate.

Michael Crichton died on Tuesday, and though he’s not a 5th Estate author, his legacy, at least for me, bears remembering.

If you’re environmentally minded then Crichton isn’t someone you’re likely to admire. He spent a great deal of his latter years concentrating on disputing claims about global warming, postulating that environmentalism was a religion and even testified to Congress on the behalf of climate change skeptics. How much of this was his genuine belief and how much at the time was used to publicise his book State of Fear we’ll never know. However, before all that occurred, he was a master at delivering action-packed, some might say B-movie concepts and packaging them in scientific believability. And I loved him for it.

I first read The Andromeda Strain in the very early nineties, probably because I’d heard of the movie (brilliantly directed by Robert Wise, it’s hard to think he’d done The Sound of Music some six years previously). The genius of The Andromeda Strain lies in its back pages. Crichton fabricated the entries for the scientific journals in the novel’s bibliography and even created his own scientific crisis decision-making process called the Odd Man Out theory. All of this is glorious nonsense, but as you’re reading the book it makes you suspend your disbelief and project the story into the real world. Crichton did it with a reading list and the sort of supporting material we’d nowadays put into a Perennial PS section.

The success of The Andromeda Strain brought Crichton to Hollywood’s attention and so MGM let him exercise his imagination with an idea about a theme park. The result was Westworld, a movie about a holiday resort populated by robots where ‘nothing can possibly go worng!’ (geddit?). Needless to say it all does, the robots go haywire and the humans are hunted by Yul Brenner, playing ‘The Gunslinger’ in a chase to the death. Yul wore his Magnificent Seven outfit, proof that the movie business had to cost-save in the early seventies as well as today.

Crichton’s greatest moment came in 1990. When Steven Spielberg learned that he was writing a book mixing dinosaurs and DNA, he got Universal to snap up the rights for $2m in a bidding war that included Tim Burton, Richard Donner and Joe Dante. Not bad for an unpublished book. Jurassic Park is, of course, about a theme park where dinosaurs are genetically recreated and ‘nothing can possibly go worng!’. Ignoring the by now familiar thematic similarities in Crichton’s work, it’s easy to see why Jurassic Park was so successful.

The movie is markedly different to the book, but contains so many stand-out sequences and trademark Spielberg touches you hardly notice. At first glance it’s easy to dismiss as a piece of enjoyable Hollywood hokum and in some ways an uneven film. It’s forty-five minutes of pseudo-science followed by a chase sequence; however I’d urge you to look again. The late Bob Peck looks like a raptor, look at his eyes and nose. The dinosaurs, comparatively early CGI nowadays, look ghostly, like they’re not supposed to be there. Look for the moment the raptor breaks into the control room and has GCTA coding projected over its leathery skin via a computer monitor. I’m not saying it’s art, but there are moments in Jurassic Park handled with more subtlety than some in Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan.

I didn’t get on quite so well with the later Crichtons. Rising Sun was accused of being quite openly racist about Japan. Disclosure was an attempt to mix gender and sexual politics with a techno-thriller edge. Airframe was probably specifically designed to be bought by people at airports and then be terrified as they read it in their passenger seat. Timeline was Crichton tackling time-travel and another theme park. Genetics and nano-technology were the science du jour in Prey and Next. While Crichton never quite achieved the heights of the early 90s again he has left behind a legacy of work that will stick in people’s minds for some time to come.

And if you’re thinking ‘Michael Crichton’s not for me, I really don’t think his legacy will stick in my mind’ I have two words for you: George Clooney. If George hadn’t been cast in Crichton’s TV series ER, he’d have never have shot to fame and never be best mates with Brad Pitt or topped a hundred most-wanted man polls. So you can at least thank the Admirable Crichton for that.

The relationship between the Man Booker and the bookies has always been strange. In 2002 an announcement stating that Life of Pi had won appeared on the Booker website four days before the awards; consequently all betting on the prize was suspended. Officials went on to say that in fact six ‘winner’s’ webpages were prepared prior to the announcement, it was just pure chance that the one accidentally uploaded to the website was the one for Life of Pi. Could this possibly have affected the outcome of the prize? Life of Pi did go on to win after all and while we’re sure the judges would say the book deserved to win, could it in fact have been a case of expectation and exposure skewing the results?*

Then in 2006 bookies reported a massive upsurge in betting on Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, hours before it was announced as the winner too. This leads one to suspect that there’s some very literary, and perceptive, punters out there.

This year we’ve already had the ‘Best of the Booker’. Betting was suspended again five days before the outcome when William Hill saw the correlation between bets and the voting pattern for Midnight’s Children . Public voting continued nonetheless, however in the eyes of the bookmakers and press it was already over: Rushdie had won.

So if you fancy a flutter, why not check out the latest odds here? The results will be announced just before half past ten tonight…

*See Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science for more of this sort of thing.

A white van man once attacked David Cameron and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to 4th Estate’s new book.

As you may have seen in this article, Cameron was ambushed while on his bike. It’s just one of the many stories that Cameron had to tell GQ editor Dylan Jones who interviewed Cameron over the course of the last eighteen months for Cameron on Cameron.

Well, we’ve decided to interview the interviewer. Watch Dylan Jones talk about the man who would be Prime Minister here:

Sometimes it easy to be overwhelmed by the right-on nature of Glastonbury. Everything is so green, you’d think Kermit was in charge. Messages about clean water, the evils of big business and Greenpeace promotional videos play inbetween each act either side of the Pyramid Stage. The Guardian’s branding is more ubiquitous than Hay. Oxfam are there in force, even the workers in the bars donate their money to charity.

Visiting The Left Field is almost refreshing in this respect. Not far from the Pyramid Stage, the Left Field is a vast tent with a big stage that flies in the face of convention and starts its music line-up on a Wednesday night. Bands like the Levellers may headline, but a lot of unknown and up-coming acts also perform. Our own Dockers MC for example. However when I visit the stage on Saturday it is mainly empty. This apparently is an on-going problem for the venue. The Guardian festival guide, received by everyone entering the Festival (and subsequently worn around the neck for easy-reading), does not list their vast number of performances, simply because they can’t buy-in to the space required by the Guardian. So much for solidarity. Consequently, the Left Field remains a great surprise for many festival goers, but does still not attract the numbers it deserves.

Tucked into the corner of the tent I found Bookmarks, the Socialist Bookshop. Founded in 1971 as an independent bookshop dedicated to political and left-wing thinking, the Shop is now affiliated to the TUC as their official book-selling partner. I met Becky Reese, who’s been with the Shop for six years and she explained to me the Shop is a special kind of independent. “It doesn’t just travel to Glastonbury, though this is our fifth year here, we also visit other events like Tolpuddle or the Durham Miners Gala. Otherwise we’re permanently based in Bloomsbury, round the corner from the TUC head office.”

I ask Becky what sort of thing sells well at the Socialist Bookshop while at the festival. She thinks that people are looking for answers. “We always do well on books about the environment or different ways of thinking, authors such as George Monbiot and Noam Chomsky get bought. I think Glastonbury is inspirational in helping people think about changing the world.”

Thinking about changing the world, in an increasingly combative marketplace where does she think independents will stand? “It’s very difficult. We’ve just set up the Friends of Bookmarks as a means of ensuring support for the business, and also helping to update and overhaul our website, which we do increasing amounts of trade off. Publishers can help I think by showing more support for independents, but also by helping link to our sites. We realise most online purchasing will be done via Amazon and that’s a shame… They don’t have a good record with trade unions, in fact an attempt to set up a union presence within the business was met with heavy resistance from management.”

As I leave the bookshop I’m delighted to see two of our own titles Six Degrees by Mark Lynas and The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany prominently displayed. Two titles that will certainly challenge the way you think, if the Left Field tent doesn’t already.