“I’m A Poor Person Who Has Money” — J. Franzen

Perhaps it will interest you to know that “great American novelist” Jonathan Franzen, our nation’s most public bird-lover who is also a Twitter-hater, has made himself notorious again, this time while in conversation with the Financial Times.

“There’s a certain sameness to high-end restaurant experiences, at least in New York, I’m kind of nauseated by the clientele. They’re total 1 per centers and they’re doing it every day and there’s something kind of just disgusting and like the pigs in Animal Farm about the whole thing.”

But since the rip-roaring success of The Corrections 14 years ago, isn’t he a 1 per center himself? “I am literally, in terms of my income, a 1 per center, yes,” he says, his eyes not on me but on the empty table next to us. “I spend my time connected to the poverty that’s fundamental to mankind, because I’m a fiction writer.” … “I’m a poor person who has money.”

Oy.

The cool kids are primed to roll their eyes at Franzen for being white, male, middle-aged, technologically intolerant, apparently humorous and occasionally over-praised. Some of the disdain is justified: he can come off as awfully tone-deaf and unself-aware. (“I tell the truth; people don’t like the truth,” he says later in the interview.) Some of the disdain isn’t justified, though — he really is a terrific author, to the degree where even if I don’t like his books overall I still enjoy reading him — and seems to spring rather from jealousy and resentment.

So partly it’s his fault, but still: He serves as such an easy target that it sometimes seems that if Jonathan Franzen didn’t exist, the Internet would have to invent him.

And this is new interview is not going to do anything to help his cause. He’s a poor person who has money? Come on now. Poor people don’t have second homes, even “rather small” ones, in Santa Cruz. They don’t get to live in Manhattan off of the income of their novels.

So he paints his own rooms sometimes and doesn’t go shopping. That doesn’t make him poor, it makes him frugal, or uncomfortable with money, or both. He has, from what I know of his background, never actually been poor. When he says his teeth are good, for example, because he’s “an American,” that tells you anything you might need to know.

Whether he likes it or not, Franzen is classic upper middle class. He may as well own it. His contemporary Michael Chabon does. Here’s a representative quote from a Remodelista profile of his and his family’s Craftsman in Berkeley, CA:

The kitchen island is half Carrara marble, half bamboo. Michael designed the inset circular cut-out for easy composting (“Brad Bird came over for dinner and co-opted the idea for The Incredibles,” Ayelet says).

Also, from the accompanying profile of the his-and-hers writers’ studio in the family backyard:

Chabon collects typewriters. “Michael is obsessed with obsolete technologies,” says Waldman. Other collections include: eight-track tape players and turntables.

Ah, hipster affluence at its best. Yet Chabon is beloved — or at worst tolerated — despite being similar to Jonathan Franzen in many ways. He doesn’t apologize for his success but he doesn’t pretend it away either. Franzen has never tried this tack. He appears consistently disgruntled, and now he has committed the cardinal sin of pretending to be part of the proletariat while the proles think he is part of the problem. On top of that, he has never seemed particularly comfortable with himself.

If he can’t relate to Chabon for whatever reason, maybe he could have a couple of sessions with Daniel Handler, who recently rehabilitated his own image. All it cost Handler was six figures and then, more recently, another $1 million.

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