character

Trying to compete head-on with the national political narrative was a dead end. You know, the novel is a bourgeois liberal form, and it succeeds to the extent that it confers importance on relatively Everyman figures—on the non-famous, on the non-consequential. It’s not a tragic form. It works just the opposite of Macbeth. It’s a matter of what you’re able to experience as you read. What a president is able to experience is so far beyond most readers’ ken as to not produce a recognizable texture. There are obviously exceptions to this, but I think the broad majority of novelistic production is based on forging some kind of connection between the texture of a fictional character’s life and the ordinary reader’s life. Somehow it’s a lot easier to do with a child soldier in Africa than with Idi Amin. The child-soldier character gets to live as a character, whereas the Idi Amin character walks around in the chains of being Idi Amin. There is a large body of historical fiction about these great figures and about the specialness of them, and I find it unreadable, pretty much to a book. There are a very few exceptions, like Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a few others. By and large, though, fiction thrives on the anonymous. The anonymous life can be inhabited, the public life is closed to you. Historical fiction works more like a kind of non-fiction. It’s non-fiction in all but name to write about the king, the president, the great one. I prefer straight biography and imagination.

—Jonathan Franzen on character (from an interview in boundary2)