Important is a problematic word, particularly when prefaced by the modifier most and especially when prefaced by the modifier only. To classify a man as important is very different from merely calling him great, because an important person needs to matter even to those who question what he's doing.

There are at least four ways an author can become semi-important: He (or she) can have massive commercial success. He can be adored and elevated by critics. He can craft "social epics" that contextualize modernity and force op-ed writers to reevaluate What This All Means. He can even become a celebrity in and of himself, which means that whatever he chooses to write becomes meaningful solely because he is the person who wrote it. There are many, many writers who fulfill one or more of these criteria. However, only Jonathan Franzen hits for the cycle. Only Franzen does all four, and he does them all to the highest possible degree. This is why Franzen is the most important living fiction writer in America, and—if viewed from a distance—perhaps the only important one. He's the most complete. But the deeper explanation for Franzen's import is something that's hard to quantify but easy to feel: For whatever reason, people just care about him more. They love him more, they criticize him more, and they think about him more. They can tell he's different, and they want that difference to matter. And Franzen understands this, which is both how it happened and why it's less implausible than it should be.

"I think there is a space in our culture—in the living memory of people over 40, and probably in the collective memory of people under 40—for the American novelist," Franzen says, sounding exactly how you'd expect him to sound. "And for various reasons, after Mailer and Updike and maybe Anne Tyler went into eclipse, there was a wish to have some new people in that position. But culture had changed so much that it became hard for someone to fulfill that role. So when someone came along who could be easily mistaken for that type of novelist, there was a hunger to latch onto that person. I had an interest in being that kind of novelist, and I worked at it for thirty years, even during periods when I didn't think it was possible for that position to exist."

Now, the depth and language of that response prompts a question that was posed to me every single time I mentioned (to anyone) that I'd just interviewed Jonathan Franzen: Is he arrogant? Because that's always the first thing people want to know. Franzen is the only author who consistently engenders this kind of emotional conflict from the public at large; people want to understand what he's like as a person, even if they haven't read his multiperspective 562-page masterwork, Freedom, or 2001's National Book Award-winning The Corrections.1 And here's the answer: He's a little arrogant. But he's not remotely unlikable, and there's no element of his self-perception that seems inflated or misplaced. At one point, we talk about his appearance on the cover of Time magazine, something that hasn't happened to a living novelist in a decade. He casually mentions that the profile in Time was good. But he also says this, and he laughs as he says it: "I think of myself as an ordinary person with a lot of friends, and the picture that came out of that article was of a monastic person who's incredibly focused on writing. My favorite line of the piece was that I'm supposed to be 'spectacularly bad'2 at managing my public image. Well, if that's true, maybe they should look at the cover of their own magazine."