By Bo Emerson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It’s not the future of the free world that’s at stake in literary heavyweight Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom.”

No, it’s more important than that. It’s the future of literature, the fate of the literary novelist, the very survival of culture itself.

Or so it seems.

Much freight is loaded onto “Freedom,” Franzen’s first novel in nine years, and the stress seems to be showing.

Lauded on the cover of the current Time magazine (“Great American Novelist,” it says), the fashionably tousled and unshaven Franzen is described in the story as too hunched and worried to enjoy his moment in the limelight.

Take a chill pill, suggests Time. Everything’s cool.

“It’s great advice, but it’s not going to happen,” says the 51-year-old writer, speaking from Santa Cruz, Calif., where he and his girlfriend recently spent an evening with the widow of fellow literary heavy-hitter and friend David Foster Wallace.

“It’s not my nature,” Franzen says. “For me, the interesting work comes directly out of the discomfort I feel in the world.”

Now, that may seem disingenuous, coming from the magazine cover guy who seems to have the world at his feet. But there are plenty of things that make Franzen uncomfortable.

As a child, the list was long and hilarious: His 2006 memoir “The Discomfort Zone” lists “spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls” and his parents.

Those fears may be gone, but there are plenty of adult troubles to replace them, among them destructive foreign wars, ecological disaster and the dumbing-down of American culture.

Plus, there’s that Oprah flap.

Culture, take heart. On Tuesday, Franzen unloads “Freedom,” a broadside across the bow of the Good Ship Bonehead, and his first novel since “The Corrections,” which won the National Book Award in 2001. (“The Corrections” was also famously disinvited from being an Oprah book club choice after Franzen expressed reservations.)

In advance of his appearance at the AJC Decatur Book Festival Friday, Franzen recently spoke about his hopes for the new book, for the literary novel in general and his bond with Wallace. This conversation was edited for space.

Q: You wrote a while ago that the era of the social novel was over. But isn’t there a lot of the “social novel” in “Freedom”?

A: We don’t need people telling us about the surfaces of being a human being. We’re bombarded with surfaces 24 hours a day now. More than ever I think it’s the novelist’s responsibility to blow the lid off and get at what’s going on in deeper places. People need to read tormented stories to get at the deeper stuff.

I don’t think the novelist needs to or wants to bring the news. That’s my idea of what a social novel is. At the same time, I don’t want to write books that are set in times that no longer matter to me, and all of my feelings now, even in my most personal life, are about the world we live in, about environmental legislation, the Iraq war. To me, those things are in the book to serve the stories and the characters. That’s a fundamental distinction between what I’m trying to do and the old-fashioned social novel.

Q: A critic once said he wouldn’t want to spend time with the Lamberts, the characters in “The Corrections,” but the Berglunds from “Freedom” are nice folks. In “Freedom” did you try to create characters you want to live with?

A: I spent a lot of time with earlier versions of those characters, but they didn’t come into focus until last year. The big task for me when I’m working on a book is to develop a set of characters that I do love and I do want to hang out with. It seems to be probably a prerequisite for the reader having the same feelings. If I didn’t like them, then the kind of hell I put them through would be very cruel.

Q: You fret about the survival of the literary novel, but you’re on the cover of Time. Isn’t that a good sign for the literary novel?

A: It’s been a long time since any novelist was on the cover of Time. Obviously for me at this moment things are going great, but the task of writing novels that can cut through the digital noise gets harder and harder. So I don’t think we’re in trouble, but I think that there’s an ongoing and increasing challenge to the person who’s trying to use that medium to make sense of his or her life and the world we live in.

Q: In your translation of “Spring Awakening” you criticize the new musical version of the play for, among other things, turning a rape scene into a love scene. But does a musical, created for mass entertainment, need to be that faithful to the original?

A: I guess it depends on what you find entertaining. What I find particularly noxious about that musical was that it was pandering to an adult audience with adolescent sexuality, and it was baselessly congratulating young people simply for being young. And, sure, you don’t have any responsibility to the source material ... but there are degrees of that, and that was a particularly ghastly instance.

Q: How did you spend your birthday [Aug. 17]?

A: We spent it with Dave Wallace’s widow, who had a birthday a few days before mine.

Q: Can you talk about his state of mind before he died? [Wallace took his own life in September 2008.]

A: There was the private Dave that was very different from the public Dave and that discrepancy was only larger in the last two years [of his life]. People made of him what they wanted him to be.

Q: You and he both had big ambitions and it didn’t surprise me to find out you were friends.

A: We were both Midwesterners growing up within a couple of hours of each other and we were lucky enough to find our way to each other at a pretty young age. I don’t think Midwesterners have a lock on moral seriousness by any means, but there is something in the water out there. It’s a deep northern European Protestant heartland value. At my house a sense of social responsibility was drummed into one at an age so young, I don’t even remember it.