{"id":309,"date":"2026-06-01T12:37:57","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T12:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=309"},"modified":"2026-06-01T12:37:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T12:37:57","slug":"jonathan-franzen-on-talent-theatre-and-his-next-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=309","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Franzen on Talent, Theatre, and His Next Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction.<\/em> Sign up to receive it in your inbox.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Your story \u201cA Talent for Seeming,\u201d which is adapted from the early pages of a novel-in-progress, focusses on a teen-age girl named Adele, living in Butte, Montana, in the late nineteen-seventies, who falls in love with acting. What inspired you to tell the story of this girl and her coming of age?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more Aidan Turner Can\u2019t Stop Smoldering<\/a><\/p>\n

My novels emerge from a soup of unconnected fragments, bits of narrative DNA that are typically associated with things I love: people and places from the recent or distant past, books and writers that have made a deep impression, personal experiences I\u2019m glad to have had. With Adele, I was thinking of a particular adult actor I\u2019d seen play Rosalind in a knockout production of \u201cAs You Like It.\u201d It\u2019s in the nature of theatre that no one will ever get to see that production or that performance again, but writing fiction can be a way of reclaiming a lost love. Shakespeare in general was foundational for me, and I had my own experiences of writing and acting in plays in high school\u2014how personally transformative that can be.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

In the course of the story, Adele goes back and forth between born-again devoutness and pursuing a life style that the other members of her church\u2019s youth group deplore. Why is it important to the narrative to have her seesaw in that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s basically Drama 101: It\u2019s not enough for a character to want something\u2014there need to be obstacles to attaining what she wants. I\u2019m also interested in people\u2019s defining mythologies, and the way one set of beliefs can morph into another over time. My previous novel was populated by Christian believers who, by and large, didn\u2019t lose their religion. This seemed like a good time to write a character who does lose her religion\u2014or, more precisely, finds a new one to replace it with.<\/p>\n

At the height of her piousness, Adele is confronted with a substitute English teacher, Bromley Stokes, a hippie from San Francisco, who, to her dismay, changes all the rules of school. She considers the possibility that he might embody the spirit of Jesus and also the possibility that he might be Satan. Do you think he plays either role in her life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It depends, of course, on which side you\u2019re looking from. Adele feels saved by Bromley, but her church friends disagree. Adele herself thinks, at one point, that \u201cthere\u2019s nothing more horrible than being an actor.\u201d It\u2019s not at all clear that theatre makes her a \u201cbetter person,\u201d in the conventional moral sense. The evidence in the text suggests the opposite.<\/p>\n

Adele is quickly seduced by the \u201cspirit of theatre.\u201d Or is she seduced more by the fact that she has a talent for acting? That she\u2019s found an area in which she stands out? Why do you think that change in her happens so quickly and with seemingly little resistance on her part?<\/strong><\/p>\n

People who become artists typically have both a great talent and an unquenchable thirst for attention, and theatre offers a stage for the former and the most direct possible relief for the latter. The audience is there in the flesh, shutting up and paying attention to your talent. But this liveness of performance is the essence of theatre, its \u201cspirit,\u201d and so the answer to your question may be: both her talent and the theatre. When a young person discovers a talent, the change often happens quickly. You\u2019ve stepped onto a train, and it whisks you away with it. When I started writing, in high school, I don\u2019t remember feeling any resistance at all to it (except from my worried parents). My feeling was: why do anything else when it feels so right to do this<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Read more This Is What Trumpian Self-Dealing Looks Like<\/a><\/p>\n

For Adele, getting laughs while performing is like \u201cambrosia.\u201d Why do you think inspiring laughter (rather than, say, tears) is so addictive for her?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking for myself, I would never do a public reading that didn\u2019t seem likely to get laughs. Audiences are generally pretty polite\u2014they\u2019ll sit there quietly and listen to anything, but what they\u2019re thinking could be, like, \u201cWhen is he going to shut up?\u201d Unless they\u2019re laughing. Then I know I have their full attention. And not only that but\u2014since everyone enjoys laughing\u2014I know that I\u2019m delivering the thing that all artists, if they do nothing else, should deliver, which is pleasure. Tears will do the job, too, but they\u2019re harder to hear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Adele\u2019s mother paid little attention to her when she was a child. She was left in the care of a neighbor most of the time. When Adele becomes a mother, she behaves similarly, leaving her child in Bromley\u2019s care. Shouldn\u2019t she know better?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If people learned from their parents\u2019 mistakes, we novelists would be out of business. Adele probably does know better, but she also makes a choice, which is to pursue her talent, and you can\u2019t have everything. Artists aren\u2019t exactly famous for their sterling moral character. Actors take refuge in the mythology of art, the idea that they\u2019re serving the higher good of theatre. And maybe, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, they\u2019re right. What\u2019s leaving one unhappy child at home compared to sending five hundred people home from the theatre happy?<\/p>\n

The novel that \u201cA Talent for Seeming\u201d comes from will be a sequel to your novel \u201cCrossroads.\u201d How does Adele\u2019s story connect to the narrative of \u201cCrossroads\u201d? Does she or her son, Jasper, eventually cross paths with the Hildebrandts? Is there anything else you\u2019re willing to reveal about the new book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA Talent for Seeming\u201d has indeed been excerpted, with the help of your keen editorial eye, from a much longer piece of writing. Toward the end of those pages, an actual Hildebrandt appears in Adele\u2019s life. So quite a bit of coherent narrative has already emerged from the soup. But I\u2019m still far from finished. \u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Strange Emptiness of the Crowded Governor\u2019s Race in California<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deborah Treisman interviews the writer Jonathan Franzen about \u201cA Talent for Seeming,\u201d his story from the June 8, 2026, issue of The New Yorker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-this-week-in-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\nJonathan Franzen on Talent, Theatre, and His Next Novel - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=309\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jonathan Franzen on Talent, Theatre, and His Next Novel - 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