Jonathan Franzen on making peace with old anger, and letting Netflix try again with The Corrections
The novelist talks to the Guardian about an eight-part Netflix adaptation of his 2001 novel, starring Meryl Streep, and about outgrowing his old suspicion of television.
Jonathan Franzen has spoken to the Guardian about a new Netflix adaptation of The Corrections, his 2001 novel, which is being made into an eight-part series with Meryl Streep playing Enid Lambert, the matriarch determined to hold one last perfect family Christmas as her husband Alfred declines with Parkinson's and dementia and their adult children's lives unravel.
It is not the book's first brush with the screen. An earlier film attempt failed, unsurprising to Franzen, who has long argued the densely plotted novel resists compression into a feature. A subsequent HBO series, on which he was co-writer with filmmaker Noah Baumbach, also collapsed; Franzen recalls HBO being "excluded from the development process," a decision he now calls a mistake, since "we didn't know how to do TV." He had not even owned a television at the time, and began renting box sets to teach himself the form partway through writing the script, only to conclude a few episodes into one series that "we have no idea what we're doing. This is not how you do TV. This is bad." He describes the resulting pilot as "one of the worst pilots anyone has ever made," and says he performed his first and last cartwheel on his Santa Cruz lawn when HBO dropped the project in 2012, according to the Guardian.
That relief marked a turn in Franzen's long antagonism toward television. In a 1996 Harper's essay on the decline of serious literature, he had denounced what he called the "banal ascendancy of television." Watching Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie and Silicon Valley afterward changed his view; in the age of social media, AI and endless scrolling, he now says TV has come to look like a "friend" rather than an enemy to the novelist.
The Netflix project moved forward once Streep signed on, the Guardian reports, though the interview as given does not detail casting beyond her role or a release date for the series.
It's still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long.
Jonathan Franzen, to the Guardian
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
