“I’m now at this weird place where what had been this subjective project is now objective in the world,” said Jonathan Franzen on Wednesday at an event held at Book Expo America (BEA) in New York. He was being interviewed by Laura Miller, the book critic for Salon, who had read his forthcoming novel Purity. But most of the audience, though BEA is attended mostly by book industry people, had not.

The novel will not be published until September, and though advance copies are circulating, the people who have completed its 500-plus pages are keeping the contents quiet. Yet, as is always the case with a new book by Franzen, the book has already generated considerable advance speculation in the literary press. The mere release of the American cover was much buzzed about: it shows the blurry image of a girl overlaid with royal blue lettering. One of the few facts disclosed about the book was that its protagonist was also reportedly named Purity – or Pip, for short.



Franzen told Miller he actually thinks of the book as having four protagonists. “Her name is on the cover,” Franzen said of Pip, but “I would find it a little creepy if I’d written an entire book about a young woman.” And therefore, he added, “I am at pains to stress that half the book is from a male point of view.”

He seemed, on some level – perhaps unconscious – to be responding to those who have written critically about his gender politics, and perhaps even to those who had sharp comments about the title, which he had his doubts about. “I don’t know why I chose to put that title on the book and I kept wishing I could come up with a better one, because there’s something vaguely icky about ‘purity’.” He went on: “Just the letters P-U-R, there’s something about them ... It’s like, I consider it an act of courage to say the name of my novel is Purity.”



The book also departs, a bit, from the realistic mode of his last two novels, The Corrections and Freedom, insofar as it has rather more action than one came to expect from those other two, some kind of heightened narrative energy that borders on postmodernism. “There’s a murder,” Franzen said when asked about this, insisting he wasn’t spoiling the book by saying so because an excerpt will appear in the New Yorker next week. (There’s also a fairly elaborate conspiracy plot.)



To explain this slight change in strategy, he said: “The situation for the writer is that it gets harder to write novels, not easier, as time goes by.” The reason, in Franzen’s view, is that at least initially a writer’s subjects are what he called “the easy stuff”. But the longer one writes, the more one wants to drill down into harder subject matter. “A certain kind of really low-key realism isn’t going to generate enough energy,” he mused. “Maybe there was a wish to go for these stronger story formulations, more extreme situations to try to get the energy up to comfortably blow the lid off.”



Miller pointed out to Franzen that he has developed something of a reputation as a misanthrope. While she did not specify the precise remarks which might have led to that, experienced Franzen-watchers can tick off controversies easily: Franzen has, in recent months, raised the ire of the Audubon Society by writing against their bird conservation plans in the New Yorker. He also has a habit of complaining about the internet in print and at public appearances, which tends to set off a flurry of ripostes in opinion sections across the internet. So, Miller asked him, is Franzen misanthropic?



“No,” he said, sounding genuinely pained. “No, not at all. What makes you even say that?”

Franzen insisted that he actually quite liked the characters he created, for example, and even resorted to pointing out that he had family members whose company he enjoyed. He suspects, he said, that people are misreading his philosophical disagreements as a general dislike of people. “We live in a world of cant, of received opinion, and widely shared ideologies,” Franzen said. “And the writer who is not satisfied with those sometimes-simplistic ideologies is going to end up seeming in opposition to the vast majority of people who happen to hold those opinions.” He thinks the people who see him attack beliefs that many hold are thinking he’s attacking the people themselves. “Something is being elided there,” he said.

Perhaps he’s right. Franzen did seem to have a certain sense of humour about himself, and in person has a wry, awkward charm. When the floor was opened up for questions, the first petitioner identified herself as a “rising sophomore at the University of Connecticut”. Then she said she was doing a class project on The Corrections and the “depressed male in post-9/11 literature”. The audience began to laugh as she read out her question, which was: “How do you think the depressed male character’s identification and experience of his white masculinity relates to American society and culture in our day and age?”

Franzen asked her to repeat the question because the laughter was too loud to be heard, and the young woman said: “I’m basing my thesis on this.” He then very seriously replied, echoing her syntax: “White male masculinity is alive and well.” He cited publishing as a milieu that is still plagued by diversity problems. And, he added, “it takes a particularly anxious and damaged white male to embrace how anxious and problematic that makes it for the white male”.

He also responded graciously to a questioner whose lengthy query started with Charlie Hebdo and ended with: “What do you think of Russell Brand and the double-edged sword of freedom of speech?”

“I’m certainly not going to take back my support of free speech because of Russell Brand,” Franzen replied.

He also fielded a question on how he planned to “avoid going the way of Hemingway”, meaning depression and suicide. “In my heart of hearts, I am deeply miserable,” Franzen replied, clearly kidding.



Jonathan Franzen will be in conversation with John Mullan at a Guardian Book Club event on 6 October.