No matter how much steam is coming out of my ears as I’m stuck in traffic between Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek, no matter how ridiculous and sick my rage against the slow driver ahead of me might be, I can’t help putting my rage in the context of gasoline prices, exurbanization, sprawl, consumer-based individuality, consumer “freedom”— all those things that being stuck in an automobile now brings to mind. I don’t write about these things because I want to be a “social novelist.” I do it because I can’t ignore them as a person.

—Jonathan Franzen (from an interview in boundary2)

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)