How Jonathan Franzen Learned To Stop Worrying (Sort Of)

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He certainly found a way. If it were possible to calculate the frequency of mots justes in a piece of prose, Franzen's ranking would be through the roof. He puts up Updikean numbers. His writer's eye picks out the "chevroned metal floor" of a merry-go-round, and a man with a ponytail "as thick as a pony's tail." A cheap space heater is "a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth." The California towhee, one of his favorite birds, is like "a friend whose energy and optimism had escaped the confines of a single body to animate roadsides and backyards across thousands of square miles."

Though not everybody loves Franzen. After he got labeled a snob in the Oprahgate affair (and Winfrey had moved onto embracing and then birching James Frey--is this a pattern of abuse?), Harper's magazine published a long cover story by the writer Ben Marcus accusing Franzen of betraying the cause of difficult, experimental writing in favor of mere popular storytelling--essentially, of not being enough of a snob. It's like the guy can't win. "I'd done him a number of favors, done nice things for him," Franzen says of Marcus. "My real feeling about it is that the article was so silly in so many ways, I just didn't want to engage with it. I didn't want to dignify it."

The story of The Discomfort Zone is largely the story of Franzen shedding his fears, or at least learning to live with them. And the success of The Corrections has been a big part of that. "I really hit the jackpot," he says, sounding as if he's still freshly relieved. "I wrote the book that I wanted to write, and then--which couldn't be counted on--it got a tremendous amount of attention. So that burning feeling of being unrecognized for what I felt myself to be is momentarily alleviated."

The new, 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 in his life. He has even made a truce with his old nemesis: next month O magazine will run a two-page spread on The Discomfort Zone. "I'm not sure all is forgiven." He thinks about it and chuckles. "But maybe it is."

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."