Hay Festival: Jonathan Franzen: 'Art is a religion' To me, art itself is a religion and the challenge to it is not religion, it's the hardcore materialism of science. So I spend quite a bit of time trying to make sense of how I seem to have a soul, I have this ghostly consciousness, yet I know as a believer in science that this is just coming from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules. I think if you take science seriously there are a lot of interesting questions to ask. I would be happy if more novelists, not just science fiction writers, paid attention to that. There's no question that things aren't going very well in the US. But I resist extreme portraits. If you looked at the country in 1937 you might well have concluded that Marx was not only right but was right already. And of course we know what happened there. I think what's happening is happening all over the world. I don't think it's specific to the US. When I went to China a few years ago my thought was: this is a Republican country - Republican in the American political sense, which is to say a Right-wing country. You have a small group of extremely wealthy people, you have a kind of hysterical nationalism; most people are either living near poverty as peasants or are working tremendously hard at factory jobs for really quite marginal wages. And you have this unhealthy alliance between local government and business interests, with essentially no social safety net, and very poor regulation of the environment. You go to Shanghai and what does everyone want? They want the new iPhone. My problem with e-book readers is that one minute I'm reading some trashy website, the next minute I'm reading Jane Austen - on the same screen. I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball. I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That things can be 'whatever', depending on the moment. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government. I'm amused by how intent people are on making human beings immortal or at least extremely long-lived. One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], "Well, that won't have to be my problem." My experience as a reader is that it's very hard to find a novel I really enjoy reading. I can't help writing books that are longer but I'm happy that I do because I want to remind readers of what it's like to get involved in something that goes on for days rather than minutes. I'm not writing for people who don't like to read. The 19th-century novelists had the advantage of not having any competition but if you look at writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, they also really knew how to give the reader a good time. And we can't write like the 19th- century writers any more but I think we still can have as a goal to provide experiences that are extendedly transporting. If you look at September 11, you see two things: you see an attack, then you see the second attack which was far more grievous than the first was - the media response to the first attack. It's important there is a free press but the modern media have their own logic and proceed at very high speed and the result is not just transparency but often distortion. And that's why we need novels, because novels proceed at a different speed. The writing takes much longer than the production of news does and the reading takes much longer than the consumption of news does. What the novel reader loses in immediacy, he or she gains in complexity and time to reflect. You can actually make sense of things in a way you can't when you're bombarded every minute with new news. The fiction writer is in an almost unique position in that in order to write something that matters to you, you have to have an intensely private life. You have to go to very deep and embarrassing places in your own history and then you go extremely public, you publish a book and you put this messy life experience out there. And the reason you make it public is you are hoping someone else will have a very private experience and have a sense of recognition that will be speaking to the interior self of the reader. But you don't know it's going to happen so there's this sense of tremendous gratitude. You are taking a risk by exposing some deep part of yourself, of course it's very painful if some part of you is rejected. But the main feeling is tremendous gratitude. The difference between the reality we see around us and the experience of reading a novel is that the world doesn't make sense. The story is never over. The attraction of the novel, both for the writer and the reader, is that you are setting up a microcosm in which you may not arrive at the meaning, but you have a responsibility to arrive at a meaning. It's why people read novels. You are struggling with a world or a life that seems to make no sense and you can take refuge for a few hours in a world where things do make sense. As a practical matter, I think it's very important not to have an internet connection when you're working. You have to turn down the noise. The thing about the media is that they say the same thing thousands of times a day. You can cut out 99.9 per cent of that and still get what you need. Because what the culture is telling you is important isn't necessarily what's really important. The novel's job nowadays is to listen carefully, cut the noises down and pay attention when the culture is not paying attention. A big problem for the novel is that the world doesn't stop, it's moving so fast and here you are slowly struggling. You have to be aware of that, keep it in mind and think about how to write a book that will not already be out of date at the time it's published. You have to have a lot of patience, you have to have faith that it will matter when you're finally done with it. If you are writing a novel, that can be a faith in God but it can also exercise the same faith muscles without having a religion attached. Anyone with ten fingers and even a moderate intelligence can play rock and roll. Richard Katz [the musician character from Freedom] would be very much in sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street people. But he would think it was stupid and self-important to make a statement as a rock and roll artist about it. The most inspiring thing anyone ever said to me about writing was Don DeLillo, and it was simply: "The writer leads, he doesn't follow."