You said recently that nobody who has an Internet connection in their workplace could ever possibly write a good novel.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
You have said it takes you four to seven years of writing before a novel really gets going. Is the difficulty finding a plot?
No, I can construct a plot in an afternoon. It’s all about connecting with characters. When the characters have to be invented from scratch, it takes all the longer. And if the character’s not invented from scratch then it’s harder to access the stuff that really needs to come out.
People talk about the revival of the social novel. Is that your sense of what you’re trying to do?
I have that sense less than some commentators seem to. In the same way that I can plot a novel in an afternoon – but so what? – I can sketch out a book that connects with a dozen different aspects of contemporary society in a couple of days. But again, so what? The people I’m writing for don’t need me to tell them what the news is. They have other access to the news.
I’m not repudiating the social novel, I’m pointing toward its obsolescence as a news-bringing vehicle. I would say 98 per cent of the work I did on Freedom had to do with psychoanalyzing myself and developing characters, and 2 per cent of it finally went into direct attention to my social milieu.
D.H. Lawrence said writers write novels to change the world. Don’t you have that opportunity?
If there’s something in the world I’m really upset about, I’m going to do journalism about it. I don’t want to burden the novel with excess fact. More importantly, it would distract me from doing what a novel really ought to be doing, which is forge a connection between writer and reader at a much deeper level.
Nevertheless, to give you an example, I think adulthood has become seriously undervalued in recent years. I’m not morally blaming anyone for wanting to prolong childhood into his or her 30s. It seems like a natural response to the sense that the world is too complicated to do anything about, so I have sympathy for the position. Yet I do feel very specifically that Freedom was an attempt to celebrate something other than youth culture.
That’s not an ambition to change the world, maybe. It’s more an ambition to shore up certain parts of the culture that seem to be slipping, and provide company and support for other people who feel the same way.
A lot of novels I’m reading are about escaping the boundaries of the biological family and finding the freedom to choose one’s identity. But you’re saying that’s impossible.
In a culture of radical consumer choice, constraints of any kind become interesting to the writer. You can choose your friends, you can choose your clothes, you can choose all your products, but you can’t choose who your parents and your siblings are. That’s a fact. You can deal with it by running away. But in fact most people don’t finally run away. They find some way to deal with it. That’s a critical restriction on the somewhat phony kind of freedom that’s peddled by our political economy.
The whole enterprise is to try to get below the surface. If you want surfaces, they’re streaming at you 24 hours a day in our culture. The novelist’s domain has always been and nowadays even more critically remains the deep interior. So I find myself drawn to the things that are inescapable, because I’m trying to create situations that force people to deal with what’s inside rather than escape from it.
You said this novel was more personal. Does that mean you are dealing with characters you have more personal experience with?
