與FT共進午餐 喬納森弗蘭岑
I sit alone at a reproduction antique table under a fake chandelier in the dining room at the Gore Hotel in Kensington. There is no sign of Jonathan Franzen; nor of anyone else. The place is entirely empty.
我坐在肯辛頓戈爾酒店(Gore Hotel)餐廳的一盞裝飾吊燈下，獨自守在一張仿古餐桌旁。餐廳裏非但不見喬納森•弗蘭岑(Jonathan Franzen)的影蹤，連個人影都沒有。整間餐廳空蕩蕩的。
While I wait, I look at what people are saying about Franzen on Twitter. There is a Times columnist moaning thatPurity is a load of tripe. Someone else points out that Franzen has no black people in his novels. Others are incensed by his recent performance onNewsnight, in which he did what he oFTen does — disparage the internet.
我一邊等候弗蘭岑，一邊在Twitter上看人們對他的評論。一位《泰晤士報》(Times)的專欄作家在抱怨《普麗蒂》(Purity)滿篇廢話。有人指出弗蘭岑的小說裏從沒出現過黑人。還有些人對他最近在《新聞之夜》(Newsnight)上的表現十分不滿，其實他只不過是做了自己常做的事——抨擊互聯網。
All this loathing is baffling. I have read and loved The Corrections (2001),Freedom (2010) and now Purity, the latter billed as a cross between Charles Dickens and Breaking Bad. It has kept me up every night for a week, and now that I’m done, I’ll miss its wit, its messed-up characters and its emotional complexity. It is a mystery how the man who wrote it could have become, in the words of the Los Angeles Review of Books, “with the possible exception of Kanye West — the most bitched about artist in America”.
人們的這些反感情緒令我十分不解。就我個人而言，不管是2001年出版的《糾正》(The Corrections)，2010年的《自由》(Freedom)還是最近出版的《普麗蒂》，我全都拜讀過，而且都很喜歡。《普麗蒂》被譽爲是查爾斯•狄更斯(Charles Dickens)和《絕命毒師》(Breaking Bad)的結合體。這本書讓我愛不釋手，連着一個星期每天都看到很晚。如今書看完了，我會懷念書中那些智慧的語句，那些人生一團糟的角色，以及書中那種複雜的情感。真是令人不解，能寫出這樣一本書的人，爲何會成爲——用《洛杉磯書評》(Los Angeles Review of Books)的話來說——“可能除了坎耶•維斯特(Kanye West)，全美國最受非議的藝術家”？
It is nearly 2pm when the door opens and the great American novelist makes a modest entrance. He’s in an old navy fleece. His dark hair is tousled and even though it is going grey he looks closer to 40 than 56. He is wearing the same heavy black glasses that, last time he was in London promoting a novel, were snatched from his nose by a prankster who proceeded to jump into the Serpentine lake, just minutes round the corner from where he stands now.
下午快兩點時，餐廳門開了，這位偉大的美國小說家悄然登場。他穿着一件藍色的舊線衫，一頭亂蓬蓬的黑髮已經有些花白，但他看起來不像56歲，更像40歲出頭。他鼻子上還架着那副笨重的黑框眼鏡，上次他在倫敦宣傳小說時就戴着這副眼鏡，當時有個愛開玩笑的傢伙從他鼻子上搶走了這副眼鏡，然後跳進了九曲湖——離他現在所站的位置不遠，就幾分鐘路程。
Franzen has barely sat down when the waiter, evidently excited to be given something to do at last, is bearing down on us, pad in hand. “I would love some still water if I may, please,” says Franzen, all politeness and diffidence. “And maybe something along the lines of a Diet Coke?”
弗蘭岑剛坐下，服務員就拿着菜單快步走向我們，他似乎很高興終於能有事做了。弗蘭岑非常客氣禮貌地說：“請給我一杯水，謝謝。再來一杯健怡可樂之類的飲料，可以嗎？”
Does he know about Lunch with the FT, I ask. “I think my eye has literally fallen on it.” Franzen speaks slowly and sounds so uncomfortable, I conclude he’s trying to be nice but is a rotten liar.
我問他知不知道“與FT共進午餐”。弗蘭岑慢吞吞地說道：“我覺得我肯定是見過的。”聽上去他很尷尬，我估計他是想表現得友善，可惜不善撒謊。
I make some disparaging remarks about the restaurant’s frumpy decor but he declines to join in. For him its unpopularity is an advantage. “There’s a certain sameness to high-end restaurant experiences, at least in New York, I’m kind of nauseated by the clientele. They’re total 1 per centers and they’re doing it every day and there’s something kind of just disgusting and like the pigs in Animal Farm about the whole thing.”
我對這家餐廳過時的裝潢批評了幾句，弗蘭岑並不同意。在他看來，它的不受歡迎是一個優點。“在高檔餐廳用餐給人感覺有點千篇一律，至少在紐約是這樣，這種餐廳的顧客有些讓我厭煩。他們的行徑完全就是那羣‘1%’，而且每天都這樣，讓人有些作嘔，完全就像《動物農場》(Animal Farm)裏那羣豬。”
But since the rip-roaring success of The Corrections 14 years ago, isn’t he a 1 per center himself? “I am literally, in terms of my income, a 1 per center, yes,” he says, his eyes not on me but on the empty table next to us. “I spend my time connected to the poverty that’s fundamental to mankind, because I’m a fiction writer.”
可是從14年前《糾正》取得轟動性成功後，他自己不也成了“1%”的一員？“就我的收入而論，是的，我確實屬於1%。”他沒有看向我，而是看着我們旁邊一張空桌子：“但我會花時間去了解窮人，因爲我是一名小說家，而窮人是人類的根基。”
He doesn’t write about poverty, I protest. He writes about the angst of people like him and the people he knows. Franzen gives the neighbouring table top a weary look. “That’s a quotation from Flannery O’Connor, by the way.”
我提出異議，他並沒有描寫過窮人。他所描寫的是跟他一樣的人，以及他熟悉的人的焦慮。弗蘭岑盯着鄰桌的桌面，眼神中露出不耐煩：“順便說一下，這句話是弗蘭納裏•奧康納(Flannery O’Connor)說的。”
While I smart, he goes on: “I’m a poor person who has money.”
我正覺得不快，他又說道：“我是個有錢的窮人。”
Franzen doesn’t spend anything. The fleece he is wearing is 10 years old. He doesn’t like shopping and hates waste. Upstairs in the fridge in his hotel room are the leftovers from meals, all of which he will eat in due course. His only luxury is expensive kit for birdwatching.
弗蘭岑不怎麼花錢。他身上這件毛衫已經穿了有10年。他不喜歡購物，討厭浪費。他的酒店房間就在樓上，房間的冰箱裏放着打包帶回去的剩飯，他會及時吃光。他唯一的奢侈品是一套昂貴的觀鳥裝備。
“I don’t like to hire people to do work that I can do,” he says. So that means he does his own dusting in the New York apartment he shares with his girlfriend? Franzen looks slightly shifty. “We do have a cleaner, although even that I feel some justification because we pay her way more than is standard and she’s a nice Filipino woman who we treat very well and we’re giving her work.”
弗蘭岑說：“只要我是力所能及的事，我都不喜歡僱人來做。”這麼說，他與女友在紐約住的那套公寓是由他負責清掃嘍？弗蘭岑的表情有些難以捉摸：“我們確實僱了一名清潔工，不過我還是有正當理由的，因爲我們付給她的工資比一般人家高，她是一個善良的菲律賓女性，我們待她非常好，而且我們給了她工作機會。”
In a way this middle-class guilt is sweet. But it’s also absurd. By the same argument he should be employing as many people as possible.
從某種層面而言，這種中產階級的內疚還挺可愛的，但也很荒謬。如果基於這一理由，他應該儘量僱傭更多的人。
“Something doesn’t sit well. It seems to me that I don’t want to lose touch with . . . Like I repainted our guest room this summer in our rather small house in Santa Cruz.”
“有些事不太適合。我覺得我不太想脫離……比如我們在聖克魯斯有間很小的公寓，今年夏天我重新粉刷了這套房子的客房。”
Bingo, I want to shout. I love decorating too and start trying to interest him in my thoughts on masking tape, but he continues deadpan: “If I had hired someone, it would’ve been done better, and I was very sick of doing it by the end, and yet it seemed important. The first two coats I enjoyed and the third coat I was getting tired of it and the fourth coat was just sheer torture.”
就是這個！我幾乎要喊出來。裝修房子也是我的愛好，於是我開始聊起我對遮蔽膠帶的看法，試圖以此引起他的興趣，但他繼續面無表情地說道：“如果當時我能僱人來刷，肯定要刷得更好，而且到後來我非常討厭幹這活，可這件事貌似還很重要。刷頭兩層漆的時候我還挺高興的，刷到第三層時我已經開始感到厭倦，第四層純粹是折磨人。”
. . .
. . .
While he has been talking we have each been given a large white bowl with a pair of tiny, shrivelled pastries in them and a jug of tepid, cloudy liquid on the side. Franzen eats his without comment, and I ask: does he understand why he makes people quite so cross? “Well, I have to acknowledge the possibility that I’m simply a horrible person.”
就在他說話間，我們一人面前擺上了一個白色的大盤子，盤中是兩個乾癟的小點心，邊上配了一罐溫乎、渾濁的液體。弗蘭岑不聲不響地享用了他那份點心。我問道：他是否知道自己爲什麼讓人們這麼生氣？“好吧，我必須承認我可能是個糟糕的人。”
He recites the line with a practised irony. Evidently he acknowledges no such possibility at all.
他說這話時帶着慣有的諷刺，顯然他認爲絕對沒有這種可能。
“My other answers would all be sort of self-flattering, right? Because I tell the truth; people don’t like the truth.”
“我答別的都有些像在自誇，對吧？其實是因爲我講實話，而人們不喜歡聽實話。”
He tells me about a piece he wrote in the New Yorker in March about climate change and bird conservation in which he managed to alienate everyone, including bird watchers. “I pointed out that 25 years after humanity collectively tried to reduce its carbon emissions, they reached an all-time high last year; further pointed out that the people who say we still have 10 years to keep the average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius are, charitably, deluded or, uncharitably, simply lying. And, therefore, maybe we should rethink whether we want to be putting such a large percentage of our energies into what is essentially a hopeless battle.”
他跟我說起他在2015年3月份《紐約客》上發表的一篇關於氣候變化和鳥類保護的文章。他在文中的主張令所有人，包括觀鳥愛好者都難以忍受。“我指出人類在25年前開始減少碳排放，經過這麼多年的不懈努力之後，我們的碳排放量在去年創下新高。我進一步指出，有些人說我們還有10年時間來防止平均氣溫上升超過2攝氏度，這些人要麼是容易輕信，要麼是滿口謊話。因此我們或許該反思一下，我們是否要將如此過大的精力，投入到一場基本無望的戰鬥中。”
His idea of himself as a truth-teller is only partly why people find him so aggravating. There is something about the man himself, and his variety of superior maleness, that also annoys. Purity — which has a clever, lovably sarcastic woman as its heroine — has, nevertheless, enraged some feminists because there is a mad manipulative wife in it who makes her husband wee sitting down. The journalist Jenni Russell, for example, writes about how all Franzen’s books have dutiful men trapped in relationships with manipulative women. “It’s, like, where do you even begin with stuff like that? People who don’t know how to read fiction, they just shout words like ‘loathsome’ and ‘misogynist’ because they can’t deal with it. I fail to conform to the brutish, white, male stereotype and that is actually more enraging than the brutish, white, male stereotype. It’s the middle ground which is precisely what’s upsetting to people on the extremes.”
他覺得自己是因爲講真話才讓人們對他如此憤怒，這只是一部分原因。人們反感的還有他身上的某些特質，以及他那種男性優越感。《普麗蒂》中雖然有一位聰慧可愛、言語犀利的女主人公，但仍激怒了一些女權主義者，因爲書中有個“控制狂”妻子，她命令自己的丈夫坐着尿尿。比如記者珍妮•羅素(Jenni Russell)曾發文表示弗蘭岑的所有書裏都有個本分老實的男人受制於一個霸道女人。“比如，你都是從哪兒找到這類素材的？有些人不知道怎麼閱讀小說，他們只會罵“討厭鬼”、“厭女症”，因爲他們看不懂。我的人物未能符合他們心目中慣有的粗俗的男性白種人形象，其實比這種形象本身更令他們憤怒。正是這種中間立場讓那些偏激的人感到煩躁不安。”
Our starters have been replaced by an almost entirely grey dish. The grey mullet lies on a grey bed of puréed artichokes with some whitish almonds.
我們的頭盤菜已經撤下，換上來的菜幾乎完全是灰色的。在一條灰色的鯔魚下面，鋪了一層灰色的朝鮮薊菜泥，菜泥裏撒了些白色杏仁。
This tastes weird, I say. “I’m not fussy about my food,” he says, taking a forkful. “It’s not bad.”
我嚐了一口後表示味道很怪。“我對食物不挑剔。”弗蘭岑邊說邊拿起叉子：“味道還不錯。”
I ask if he saw the review of Purity in the Financial Times , which called it “middlebrow”. He says he never reads what people write about him. “I don’t know what ‘middlebrow’ even means. I think it’s threatening to commercial writers that someone who’s selling well is also getting literary respect, and it’s threatening to literary writers who don’t sell that somebody who’s literary also is getting commercial success.”
我問他是否看過《金融時報》上關於《普麗蒂》的評論文章（這篇文章認爲《普麗蒂》是本“通俗”(middlebrow)小說）。弗蘭岑說他從不看人們對他的評論。“我都不明白‘通俗’是什麼意思。我覺得商業作家之所以會感到威脅，是一個暢銷作家竟然獲得了文學界的尊重；而那些作品賣不動的文學作家感到威脅，是一個文學作家竟然還獲得了商業成功。”
The thing that bothers me about his prose is not the popular bits but the clever-dick ones. In Purity, I took exception to a bilingual acrostic that allows Franzen (a Fulbright scholar in Berlin in the 1980s and translator of the work of obscure Austrian satirist Karl Kraus) to prove he’s smarter than his reader. “My agent didn’t get it, either,” he says. “Many, many people didn’t get it, and yet if the whole book were like that, you could say the writer’s being insufferable. But I think you have to have a few things that you have to kind of chew on to get.”
他的作品讓我介懷的並不是其通俗性，而是那種自以爲是的調調。比如《普麗蒂》裏有一首雙語離合詩，我並不認爲弗蘭岑能借此證明自己比讀者更聰明——雖然上世紀八十年代他在柏林獲得過富布萊特(Fulbright)獎學金，還曾翻譯過奧地利諷刺作家卡爾•克勞斯(Karl Kraus)的作品，一位在德語圈外鮮爲人知的作家。弗蘭岑說：“我的經紀人也讀不懂這首詩，很多人都讀不懂。要是整本書都這樣，你的確可以說這個作者令人無法忍受。但我覺得一個人必須讀點自己需要去咀嚼才能理解的東西。”
As if on cue, a loud cracking noise comes from his mouth. “Teeth hitting each other sort of sideways, glancing, catching,” he explains.
就在這時，他嘴裏應景地發出一聲巨響，他解釋說：“上下牙齒咬偏了，斜着碰到一起了。”
I ask if his teeth are bad, but he says they are very good. “I’m an American.”
我問他是不是牙齒不大好。他卻說他的牙非常好，“我可是美國人。”
He laughs and at once the ponderous gloom lifts. I get a glimpse of what are very good teeth indeed.
說完他笑了，一掃沉悶的氣氛。我趁機看了一眼，他的確長了一口好牙。
The levity doesn’t last: have I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, he asks? When I say I haven’t, he explains how the agrarian revolution was a mistake and argues we were happier as hunter-gatherers. With the internet, he implies, the same may apply. Is he really saying people were happier before the internet? He ducks the question and says instead: “I wasn’t. But I didn’t start feeling happy, really, until my forties.”
可惜這種輕鬆的氣氛沒持續多久。弗蘭岑問我有沒有看過尤瓦爾•赫拉利(Yuval Noah Harari)的《人類簡史：從動物到上帝》(Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)？當我回答沒看過，他便開始解釋農業革命如何是個錯誤，以及他認爲人類在狩獵採集時更快樂。他暗示這一理論同樣適用於互聯網的出現。難道他是說互聯網出現以前人們更快樂？弗蘭岑沒有正面回答：“我沒這麼說。但我直到四十歲纔開始感到快樂，真的。”
Happiness for Franzen is slightly problematical. He has often said the best writing comes from discomfort. He has had his share of pain — he has referred to the unhappiness of his 14-year marriage to writer Valerie Cornell — so I wonder, if he had always been as happy as now, would he . . . He cuts me off. “I was,” he says. “I was a smiling, smart, healthy, straight, Midwestern American male who went to decent public schools, what we call public schools, and an excellent college. I had everything it took.”
幸福對於弗蘭岑來說稍微有點麻煩。他經常說最好的作品來自苦悶。弗蘭岑曾經歷痛苦——他提到了自己與作家瓦萊麗•康奈爾(Valerie Cornell)14年的不幸婚姻。所以我有些好奇，如果他一直像現在這樣開心，會不會就……他打斷了我：“我以前是的。我以前是一個愛笑、聰明、健康、正統的美國中西部男人，上的是好公立學校——是我們概念裏的公立學校，進一流大學。我以前就沒有不開心的地方。”
I have the feeling he’s playing with me, but still I plough on. Doesn’t he believe that if you haven’t felt pain you can’t write good fiction? “Apparently Paulo Coelho can.” He gives another dazzling smile that manages to be both beatific and slightly nasty. “I’m giving you a hard time. We’re talking about real novelists, who are going to be very sensitive, experience things intensely. That’s basically a recipe for pain. Things that a less sensitive person may experience as nothing create lasting scars.”
我有種他在逗我的感覺，但依然堅定地接着問道：難道他不認爲，一個人如果感受不到痛苦是寫不出好小說的嗎？“保羅•科埃略( Paulo Coelho)顯然辦得到。”他又露出大大的笑容，雖然看上去很快活，卻又有點令人不快。“我在跟你開玩笑。我們現在討論的是真正的小說家，這種人會非常敏感，對事物有強烈的感受，這基本上是痛苦的配方。有些事，不太敏感的人可能感受不到什麼，卻會給他們留下持久的傷疤。”
. . .
. . .
There is a lot of scar tissue in Purity. At one point the narrative switches into the first person, and a man and his wife have an exchange on the phone that is so mad, miserable, undignified and perverse, no one could have written it without having experienced something similar. When I read the passage I was slack-jawed with admiration, but couldn’t help wondering what his ex-wife would make of it. “I’m not the only one who’s been in a kind of nutty relationship. And so simply the fact of writing about a nutty relationship is not compromising anyone.”
《普麗蒂》裏有許多疤痕組織。有一段敘述視角轉到第一人稱，還寫到一個男人和他妻子打電話，這段對白是那樣狂亂、可憐、丟臉、偏執，沒有類似經歷是寫不出來的。我看到這段時目瞪口呆，欽佩得不行，但又忍不住好奇他的前妻會怎麼想。“我不是唯一一個曾經陷入某種瘋狂關係的人。另外，描寫一段瘋狂關係不會損害任何人。”
So it’s fine, then? “No, there’s blood on the floor. It’s never fine. In a way, the thing I feel worst about is writing about my parents, even though I did all my writing after they were dead. It has more to do with their not having had an education that would have enabled them to appreciate what I was doing and why I was doing it.”
所以他的意思是沒問題了？“不，曾經的傷口還在淌血，這道疤痕是永遠好不了的。不過某種程度上，我最痛苦的是寫到了我的父母，雖然我是在他們過世後纔開始寫作的。更多是因爲他們的教育背景不足以讓他們理解我的工作，以及我爲什麼從事這份工作。”
Then why betray people he loves? “Well, there’s a utilitarian argument to be made. People feel grateful and feel less alone with what had been a private torment, a private sorrow, a private shame.”
那麼，爲什麼要背叛他愛的人呢？ “嗯，這裏面有種功利主義的觀點。當你分享自己經歷過的折磨、悲哀和恥辱時，人們會感激你，他們會覺得自己沒那麼孤單。”
The waiter brings him a bowl of fruit salad so large he looks at it in dismay, as if fearing the inevitable waste.
服務員給他端上了一大碗水果沙拉，他驚愕地看着它，彷彿在擔心不可避免地浪費。
“Would you like a little bit of this? Even just one bite would help,” he pleads, shovelling fruit on to my plate.
“你想來一點沙拉嗎？哪怕一口都行。”他一邊請求着，一邊將水果撥到我的盤子裏。
In The Corrections, Albert, who was based on Franzen’s father, was a benign if stern parental figure. In Purity parents get a tougher time of it. One mother shows a seven-year-old son her vagina. Another inflicts psychological violence by manipulating and stifling. I wonder if he would have written anything quite as dark if he had children himself?
《糾正》裏的阿爾貝(Albert)是一位嚴厲但不失慈祥的家長，其人物原型就是弗蘭岑的父親。《普麗蒂》中的家長就可怕多了，書裏有位母親讓七歲的兒子看她的陰道，還有一位則通過操縱和鎮壓施加精神暴力。我好奇如果他自己有了孩子，還會寫得這麼陰暗嗎？
Franzen sighs. “I’m sure everything would’ve been different. Maybe I would’ve been retired and working on a historical novel about the civil war and teaching fiction at Portland State University if I had had kids.”
弗蘭岑嘆了口氣：“我相信一切都將不同。也許我會退休，寫一本關於內戰的歷史小說，在波特蘭州立大學(Portland State University)教小說——如果我有孩子的話。”
I get the reproach, but it’s only later that I get the snobbery. There was a time, though, when Franzen wanted to have kids. According to the Guardian, for a while he considered adopting an Iraqi orphan so he could get to know young people. Was that true? “The story was the work of a nasty personage,” he says, then tells me what really happened. “There came a point when I was struggling with my fourth novel and I suspected the reason was that I had lost touch with the world, that I came from a strong family, and maybe I was meant to be a family man. But it’s a long way from that to adopting a war orphan to study young people. It fed into what everyone wanted to believe, which is I am an absolutely horrible person.”
我體會到了話中的責備之意，不過後來我才體會到那層清高。但的確有段時間，弗蘭岑動過要孩子的念頭。據《衛報》(Guardian)的文章說，有段時間他曾考慮要收養一名伊拉克孤兒，以便他了解年輕人。這是真的嗎？弗蘭岑答道：“這篇報道是一個懷有惡意的人寫的。”然後他對我講了真實情況：“當時我正創作第四部小說，寫得非常艱難，我懷疑原因可能是我與世界斷了聯繫，又或是我來自一個強勢的家庭，再或許我註定是個居家男人。但這與爲了研究年輕人收養戰爭孤兒也差太遠了。有些人認爲我是個非常可怕的人，這一謠言給那些人提供了證據。”
He seems so weary of all this that I ask if he finds fame a burden. Has success made him less nice? No; he says it has made him less angry, and much less envious. “Writer’s envy is insane and knows nearly no bounds, but at some point it becomes obviously inappropriate.” These days if anyone else writes a good novel, he doesn’t feel upset; he is glad. The only trouble is that it hardly ever happens.
看起來這一切讓他感到非常厭倦，因此我問他是否覺得成名是個負擔。是成功讓他變得不那麼友善嗎？不，他說成功讓他變得沒那麼容易生氣，而且沒那麼愛嫉妒。“作家的嫉妒心是瘋狂的，而且幾乎沒有邊界，但到了某個階段，這種嫉妒顯然是不合適的。”現在如果有人寫了一本好小說，他不會再感到心煩意亂，而會感到高興。唯一的問題在於這種情況幾乎從未發生過。
“I am very grateful to Haruki Murakami for writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I feel the same way right now about Elena Ferrante. I have trouble finding books that really do it for me.”
“我非常感謝村上春樹(Haruki Murakami)寫作《發條鳥年代記》(The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)。眼下我還感謝埃萊娜•費蘭特(Elena Ferrante)。我很難找到讓我真心感激的書籍。”
Envy is something his girlfriend, the writer Kathryn Chetkovich, is more straightforward about. In 2003, after the triumph of The Corrections, she wrote a devastating essay for Granta, on just how hard it was for her to bear her boyfriend’s success. If the boot had been on the other foot, Franzen says he would have felt differently, partly because he roots so seriously for “whoever I’m living with” but also because he is usually only competitive with men. In any case, he says, if he hadn’t been successful as a writer, he would have given up.
他的女朋友，作家凱瑟琳•切特科維奇(Kathryn Chetkovich)在嫉妒方面表達得要更坦率些。2003年《糾正》取得成功後，她給《格蘭塔》(Granta)雜誌寫了一篇令人印象深刻的文章，描述了自己多麼難以忍受男友的成功。弗蘭岑說如果當時把他倆調換一下，他就不會嫉妒她。一部分原因是他對“凡是與我一起生活的人”都會加以全力支持，另外也因爲他一般只跟男性競爭。他說，總之如果他不是個成功的作家，他肯定早放棄了。
The waiter asks if he’d like coffee. “I’m good, thank you, right now.” It’s only when I see the transcript of our lunch and notice the phrase “I’m good” to mean “No, thank you”, I wish I’d challenged him on it. Franzen has strong feelings about certain words. He has written a whole essay on the evils of “then” as a conjunction, which strikes me as entirely baffling.
服務員問他要不要喝咖啡，他回覆道：“我可以了，謝謝，暫時不用。”我在回看這次午餐談話的內容時才注意到他用“我可以了”來表達“不，謝謝”，真希望當時能就這一點向他發問。弗蘭岑對某些詞彙有強烈的感覺，他曾寫過一篇長長的文章談論“then”作爲連詞的弊病，令我完全不知所云。
I try out a sentence: “Jonathan Franzen leaned forward, then he leaned back again.” What’s wrong with that? “That’s just a run-on sentence,” he says. “What you will find in bad English prose is, ‘He leaned forward then spoke again.’ ”
我試着造了個句子：“喬納森•弗蘭岑傾身向前，然後他又靠回到椅背上。”這句話有什麼問題嗎？“這只是一句連寫句。糟糕的英語文章裏會出現這樣的話，‘他傾身向前然後又開口道’。”
Sounds OK to me, I say. “Read my essay,” he says.
我坦言在我聽來沒什麼問題。他說：“看看我的文章吧。”
Lunch is nearly over, and there is one more thing I want to ask him. He has said that all decent novelists are changed by every book they write. So how did Purity change him? He stares at the table for so long with his eyes closed that I wonder if he has gone to sleep. “How I changed was I realised that I really am a fiction writer, I don’t have all that many years, and that I’ve got to find a way to write another couple of novels.”
午餐即將結束了，不過我還有件事要問他。他曾說過，好的小說家都會被自己筆下每一部作品所改變。那麼《普麗蒂》改變了他什麼呢？他閉着眼睛，臉衝着桌子沉思了許久，以致我懷疑他是不是睡着了。“這本書對我的改變在於，它讓我認識到我真的是一個小說作家，我已經沒有多少年了，我得想法再多寫幾本小說。”
As he gets up to leave, I tell him that we have covered so much ground in 90 minutes it will be a nightmare trying to write the lunch up. “Ask for more space,” he says. “Maybe they’d let you do a two-parter, the appetiser and the main course. Just saying.”
他起身準備離開時，我告訴他我們在這一個半小時裏聊了太多話題，如果要把此次午餐訪談內容全部寫下來無異於一場噩夢。他說：“那就多要些版面。也許他們會讓你分成上下部，就像開胃菜和主菜。我隨便說說。”
Lucy Kellaway is an FT columnist
露西•凱拉韋(Lucy Kellaway)爲英國《金融時報》專欄作家
Illustration by James Ferguson
插圖：詹姆斯•弗格森(James Ferguson)
Bistro One Ninety, Gore Hotel
戈爾酒店Bistro One Ninety餐廳
190 Queen’s Gate, Kensington, London SW7
倫敦SW7肯辛頓Queen’s Gate190號
Pre-theatre menu (tortellini, grey mullet) x 2 ￡49.90
Pre-theatre套餐（意大利餃，鯔魚）2份，49.9鎊
Fruit ￡8
水果，8鎊
Diet Coke x 2 ￡7
健怡可樂2罐，7鎊
Mint tea ￡4
薄荷茶，4鎊
Total (inc service and VAT) ￡77.50
總計（含服務費和增值稅）77.5鎊
