Culture

Jonathan Franzen Wanted To Adopt An Iraqi War Orphan To Help His Very Serious Novel Writing

Wait. What?

by Hannah Hawkins  22 August 2015

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In a recent interview that wasn’t published in the Onion or any other satire site, American bestselling novelist and human placard for out-of-touch old white men everywhere Jonathan Franzen has said he once seriously considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan to help him better understand young people.

Franzen, who was in his late 40s — but early crazies — at the time, said the idea came from a “sense of alienation” he felt from the younger generation: “They seemed politically not the way they should be as young people. I thought people were supposed to be idealistic and angry. And they seemed kind of cynical and not very angry. At least not in any way that was accessible to me.”

“Oh, it was insane, the idea that Kathy [his partner] and I were going to adopt an Iraqi war orphan. The whole idea lasted maybe six weeks,” he told The Guardian‘s UK weekend magazine, apparently convinced that having an insane idea in his head for an entire six weeks, rather than the typical insane-idea-cycle of six seconds, would pass as normal behaviour.

The idea was eventually quashed by his editor, Henry Finder, who persuaded him to just talk to young people instead of legally binding himself to one for the rest of his life. Franzen, somehow satisfied with this highly unorthodox notion, met up with a group of youths fresh out of university — apparently with great success. “It cured me of my anger at young people,” he said, still wearing his University Graduate Disguise Kit.

Sure, the fact that Franzen doesn’t understand the mentality of any other demographic other than his might not come as a surprise to some people, but nobody expected him to be so bizarrely inaccessible and self-serving that he’d actually consider adopting a war orphan just so he could first-handedly study that age bracket. Wait, did they?

This culmination of crazy talk comes after years of consistent criticism that Franzen is sexist. In the same interview with The Guardian, the 56-year-old — who once appreciated a female author in the New Yorker for not being pretty — responded to these accusations unapologetically, and almost as if he didn’t even listen to the various female writers who take issue with him and his work — but, being a person with absolutely no experience of being a female, surely this couldn’t be the case.

“There is really nothing I can do except die – or, I suppose, retire and never write again,” he said, because he is completely devoid of any character flaws and he couldn’t possibly learn from a fucking mountain of constructive criticism. “It’s like there’s no way to make myself not male.”

The interview was part of the author’s PR round promoting his new novel, Purity, which is described here as being fuelled by his “arguments with young people, social media and feminism”, and here, here and here as inherently anti-feminist — and could explain the timing of spewing out such a magnificent whack-job of a headline-ready sentence. But then, that contradicts the totally inexplicable nature of the sentence, so I don’t know.

Purity will be released September 1st, and, as a young female person who uses social media, I can’t wait to buy it, so I can light it on fire.