Jonathan Franzen's latest novel has drawn attention for its depiction of the internet, but a deeper thread concerns mothers and children. On his recent visit to Australia, he spoke to Sarah Kanowski about these family relationships, Freudian psychoanalysis, and writing about his first marriage.

Jonathan Franzen burst onto the literary scene with The Corrections in 2001. For millions of readers this was the sort of novel they were hungry for—a big, smart, heartfelt book about family and society, life and death. With the publication of his next novel, Freedom, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline 'Great American Novelist'.

I am a writer, and there is blood on the floor surrounding pretty much every writer. Jonathan Franzen, author

Publicity around his latest novel Purity has focused on the character of Andreas Wolf, a Julian Assange-like 'internet outlaw' from East Berlin. But a deeper thread of this novel concerns mothers and children, beginning with the character of Pip with whom the novel starts.

In these edited excerpts from the Books and Arts interview, Jonathan Franzen reflects on the power of the mother-child bond, what Freud can still teach us, and the tough matter of turning his own first disastrous marriage into fiction.

'It's so easy to blame the mother'

Sarah Kanowski: A section of your book includes the wonderful phrase: 'The essence of the handicap she lived with; the presumable cause of her inability to be effective at anything—was that she loved her mother.'

I know there's been a lot of discussion about the depiction of the internet in this novel, but it seemed to me that there are all these crazy mothers in this book, and the first one we meet is Pip's mother who is so suffocatingly smothering of her child.

Jonathan Franzen: Her mother is a big child, this grey-haired woman who never grew up, and so Pip from the age of six has had to be the adult of the house. Not an entirely unfamiliar phenomenon for children of the 1960s and '70s.

SK: At the end of this first section, Pip's mother says to her, 'I have the right to love you more than anything in the world,' and Pip cries out in kind of psychic self-defence: 'No you don't! No you don't! No you don't! No you don't!'

JF: It is really, really hard to be the person that another person depends on utterly. Pip's mother basically says 'I don't need anyone but you'—great for her, tough to be Pip. But yes, there did emerge a compare-and-contrast situation with the various mothers in the book; some nutty and some probably mentally ill, and some of them neither, like Tom's mother.

SK: The novel swings from Pip to East Berlin during the dying years of the Cold War, to show us Andreas Wolf in his twenties, where he's bedding many young, attractive dissidents. But Andreas has got his own strange sexual confusion stemming from his childhood relationship with his mother. The parallel given is with Hamlet and Gertrude. In their early years though, they are besotted with one another. The depiction Andreas gives of his early childhood with his mother is one of mutual infatuation.

JF: They were besotted with each another. I wanted to try to do a character who was a big figure. He's just sort of born to succeed, Andreas. I mean he's a terrible risk taker—he kills somebody. But he keeps getting away with it partly because he's compelling.

You can posit as a writer—'this character has an amazing charismatic effect on people'—but it doesn't really add up unless you get into the psychology of the kind of person who has that effect on people. And often, often there's some pretty weird stuff in the basement with that sort of charismatic, almost cult-like leader. They're great but they're also terrible.

We shouldn't sling too many psychological terms around, but narcissistic personality disorder is in the picture with both the mother and her son.

The first line of his childhood recollections is, 'It's so easy to blame the mother.' And it's so easy to blame the mother because you get your genes from your mum and you spend your early years with the mum, and mothers get a tough rap in literature because it is so easy to blame the mother.

'The most shameful moment in my life'

SK: One of the things that struck me about Andreas was that although he is at one extreme end of the spectrum of human behaviour, we can see in him the 'id let loose' which we all sense in ourselves as humans. Maybe unexpectedly I was reminded of a wonderful moment in your memoir The Discomfort Zone where you as a kid mooned the little girls across the street.

JF: We're casually discussing what for much of my life was for the most shameful moment of my life!

SK: You had that moment and you immediately run off in horror, you can't believe you've done that and you think, 'I've got to lock that guy up! That guy is so dangerous!' The thing is Andreas didn't lock that guy up. But for most of us we have that moment, an experience where we see: 'That's the guy. If I don't have my super-ego working hard, that's the guy that's going to get out!'

JF: We're beginning to sound a little Freudian here, and Freud is laughable and easily discredited in any number of ways, but it wasn't like Freud was just making the stuff up. If nothing else, he was drawing on people who made really good stuff up, like Dostoyevsky and Sophocles.

The idea that you might have different parts, that you're not the unitary persona you like to present, the idea that you're not in control of what all these parts are doing and that these parts are in conflict and that you do stuff for completely unaccountable reasons that are actually not in your interest—there's a whole body of pretty basic observations about how humans actually operate that I fear have become kind of unfashionable.

Instead it's now, God, the discourse of brain chemistry! 'Oh, we'll soon be able to map exactly...!' So now we'll have to wait 100 years for you to be as smart as we were 100 years ago about how human beings really work?

There is a certain side project in my work of trying to keep alive the notion that there are these demonic forces and you may feel you have a really bad thing in you—as Andreas feels—and you might spend your entire life trying to fight this thing inside of you.

'There is blood on the floor'

SK: Often in a Jonathan Franzen novel when you already feel like you're reading about three novels in one, another appears. So it is in Purity.

Following on from the story of Pip in America, and then Andreas in East Berlin, we meet Tom and Annabel. They fall in love at college, get married, and then things, well they go downhill. This bitter, blackly funny depiction of a mutually destructive relationship is at the heart of the novel in a number of senses.

Annabel is a magnificent creation. Her whole identity is around examining who is hurting her and how, particularly Tom. She has very clear rules on everything, including—when it comes to sex—that she can only 'achieve satisfaction in the three days when the moon was fullest'. You must have had a lot of fun writing this section.

JF: Fun is an interesting word for the time I had writing this section. Normally I like to write 1,000 words a day when things are rolling along, and this was a one page a day section.

I had some experience with that sort of relationship. I too married young; I married too young. And yet your own life is not the stuff of fiction exactly, so to try to exaggerate it and still somehow stay within some boundaries of realism, that was really hard work.

I was trying to do something funny, or something that people who had been in a relationship that they couldn't get out of might find funny. But it was actually really hard.

SK: You had written about this difficult first marriage in memoir form. Did dealing with your own biography in that way perhaps allow you to treat in differently in fiction, more lightly or more satirically?

JF: It is a sore subject. My ex-wife is a human being. I don't like to talk much about the autobiographical sources. It was very carefully done when I did it in non-fiction because I am trying to protect people as well as I can.

And of course I can't protect them because I am a writer, and there is blood on the floor surrounding pretty much every writer.

