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Last night Seattle Arts & Lectures invited to town Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and, more recently, Freedom--which is both "visceral and lapidary," says the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen once called "the stupidest person in New York."

If you subscribe to TIME, you have a recent copy featuring Franzen staring off-screen as he's lauded as the Great American Novelist. (Locally, Michael Upchurch would seem to agree.)

On the other hand, two of the most commonly used words last night were "torture" and "torment," so life is not yet a bowl of cherries for Franzen. SAL wanted a substantive talk, not a book reading, so Franzen obliged by reading a lecture he'd prepared for a German audience, thinking that this level of continental sophistication would go over well here. Kafka figured prominently.

It was also a year old, and when he came to references that had aged in the interim, he broke out a pen and updated them on the fly. Correction is constant in the Franzen weltanschauung; here he is laboring to answer a question later on in the evening: "So the project...the project becomes...to look in...inward...."

His talk centered on the four big question that authors are asked--which remarkably stopped no one in the audience from writing down variations of these on their question cards. For the record, the standard foursome are, Who are your influences?, What time of day do you write?, Do your characters "take over" the telling of the story?, and Is your fiction autobiographical?... (more)