与FT共进午餐 乔纳森弗兰岑
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.
我坐在肯辛顿戈尔酒店(Gore Hotel)餐厅的一盏装饰吊灯下，独自守在一张仿古餐桌旁。餐厅里非但不见乔纳森•弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)的影踪，连个人影都没有。整间餐厅空荡荡的。
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.
我一边等候弗兰岑，一边在Twitter上看人们对他的评论。一位《泰晤士报》(Times)的专栏作家在抱怨《普丽蒂》(Purity)满篇废话。有人指出弗兰岑的小说里从没出现过黑人。还有些人对他最近在《新闻之夜》(Newsnight)上的表现十分不满，其实他只不过是做了自己常做的事——抨击互联网。
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”.
人们的这些反感情绪令我十分不解。就我个人而言，不管是2001年出版的《纠正》(The Corrections)，2010年的《自由》(Freedom)还是最近出版的《普丽蒂》，我全都拜读过，而且都很喜欢。《普丽蒂》被誉为是查尔斯•狄更斯(Charles Dickens)和《绝命毒师》(Breaking Bad)的结合体。这本书让我爱不释手，连着一个星期每天都看到很晚。如今书看完了，我会怀念书中那些智慧的语句，那些人生一团糟的角色，以及书中那种复杂的情感。真是令人不解，能写出这样一本书的人，为何会成为——用《洛杉矶书评》(Los Angeles Review of Books)的话来说——“可能除了坎耶•维斯特(Kanye West)，全美国最受非议的艺术家”？
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.
下午快两点时，餐厅门开了，这位伟大的美国小说家悄然登场。他穿着一件蓝色的旧线衫，一头乱蓬蓬的黑发已经有些花白，但他看起来不像56岁，更像40岁出头。他鼻子上还架着那副笨重的黑框眼镜，上次他在伦敦宣传小说时就戴着这副眼镜，当时有个爱开玩笑的家伙从他鼻子上抢走了这副眼镜，然后跳进了九曲湖——离他现在所站的位置不远，就几分钟路程。
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?”
弗兰岑刚坐下，服务员就拿着菜单快步走向我们，他似乎很高兴终于能有事做了。弗兰岑非常客气礼貌地说：“请给我一杯水，谢谢。再来一杯健怡可乐之类的饮料，可以吗？”
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.
我问他知不知道“与FT共进午餐”。弗兰岑慢吞吞地说道：“我觉得我肯定是见过的。”听上去他很尴尬，我估计他是想表现得友善，可惜不善撒谎。
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.”
我对这家餐厅过时的装潢批评了几句，弗兰岑并不同意。在他看来，它的不受欢迎是一个优点。“在高档餐厅用餐给人感觉有点千篇一律，至少在纽约是这样，这种餐厅的顾客有些让我厌烦。他们的行径完全就是那群‘1%’，而且每天都这样，让人有些作呕，完全就像《动物农场》(Animal Farm)里那群猪。”
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.”
可是从14年前《纠正》取得轰动性成功后，他自己不也成了“1%”的一员？“就我的收入而论，是的，我确实属于1%。”他没有看向我，而是看着我们旁边一张空桌子：“但我会花时间去了解穷人，因为我是一名小说家，而穷人是人类的根基。”
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.”
我提出异议，他并没有描写过穷人。他所描写的是跟他一样的人，以及他熟悉的人的焦虑。弗兰岑盯着邻桌的桌面，眼神中露出不耐烦：“顺便说一下，这句话是弗兰纳里•奥康纳(Flannery O’Connor)说的。”
While I smart, he goes on: “I’m a poor person who has money.”
我正觉得不快，他又说道：“我是个有钱的穷人。”
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.
弗兰岑不怎么花钱。他身上这件毛衫已经穿了有10年。他不喜欢购物，讨厌浪费。他的酒店房间就在楼上，房间的冰箱里放着打包带回去的剩饭，他会及时吃光。他唯一的奢侈品是一套昂贵的观鸟装备。
“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.”
弗兰岑说：“只要我是力所能及的事，我都不喜欢雇人来做。”这么说，他与女友在纽约住的那套公寓是由他负责清扫喽？弗兰岑的表情有些难以捉摸：“我们确实雇了一名清洁工，不过我还是有正当理由的，因为我们付给她的工资比一般人家高，她是一个善良的菲律宾女性，我们待她非常好，而且我们给了她工作机会。”
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.
从某种层面而言，这种中产阶级的内疚还挺可爱的，但也很荒谬。如果基于这一理由，他应该尽量雇佣更多的人。
“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.”
“有些事不太适合。我觉得我不太想脱离……比如我们在圣克鲁斯有间很小的公寓，今年夏天我重新粉刷了这套房子的客房。”
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.”
就是这个！我几乎要喊出来。装修房子也是我的爱好，于是我开始聊起我对遮蔽胶带的看法，试图以此引起他的兴趣，但他继续面无表情地说道：“如果当时我能雇人来刷，肯定要刷得更好，而且到后来我非常讨厌干这活，可这件事貌似还很重要。刷头两层漆的时候我还挺高兴的，刷到第三层时我已经开始感到厌倦，第四层纯粹是折磨人。”
. . .
. . .
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.”
就在他说话间，我们一人面前摆上了一个白色的大盘子，盘中是两个干瘪的小点心，边上配了一罐温乎、浑浊的液体。弗兰岑不声不响地享用了他那份点心。我问道：他是否知道自己为什么让人们这么生气？“好吧，我必须承认我可能是个糟糕的人。”
He recites the line with a practised irony. Evidently he acknowledges no such possibility at all.
他说这话时带着惯有的讽刺，显然他认为绝对没有这种可能。
“My other answers would all be sort of self-flattering, right? Because I tell the truth; people don’t like the truth.”
“我答别的都有些像在自夸，对吧？其实是因为我讲实话，而人们不喜欢听实话。”
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.”
他跟我说起他在2015年3月份《纽约客》上发表的一篇关于气候变化和鸟类保护的文章。他在文中的主张令所有人，包括观鸟爱好者都难以忍受。“我指出人类在25年前开始减少碳排放，经过这么多年的不懈努力之后，我们的碳排放量在去年创下新高。我进一步指出，有些人说我们还有10年时间来防止平均气温上升超过2摄氏度，这些人要么是容易轻信，要么是满口谎话。因此我们或许该反思一下，我们是否要将如此过大的精力，投入到一场基本无望的战斗中。”
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.”
他觉得自己是因为讲真话才让人们对他如此愤怒，这只是一部分原因。人们反感的还有他身上的某些特质，以及他那种男性优越感。《普丽蒂》中虽然有一位聪慧可爱、言语犀利的女主人公，但仍激怒了一些女权主义者，因为书中有个“控制狂”妻子，她命令自己的丈夫坐着尿尿。比如记者珍妮•罗素(Jenni Russell)曾发文表示弗兰岑的所有书里都有个本分老实的男人受制于一个霸道女人。“比如，你都是从哪儿找到这类素材的？有些人不知道怎么阅读小说，他们只会骂“讨厌鬼”、“厌女症”，因为他们看不懂。我的人物未能符合他们心目中惯有的粗俗的男性白种人形象，其实比这种形象本身更令他们愤怒。正是这种中间立场让那些偏激的人感到烦躁不安。”
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.
我们的头盘菜已经撤下，换上来的菜几乎完全是灰色的。在一条灰色的鲻鱼下面，铺了一层灰色的朝鲜蓟菜泥，菜泥里撒了些白色杏仁。
This tastes weird, I say. “I’m not fussy about my food,” he says, taking a forkful. “It’s not bad.”
我尝了一口后表示味道很怪。“我对食物不挑剔。”弗兰岑边说边拿起叉子：“味道还不错。”
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.”
我问他是否看过《金融时报》上关于《普丽蒂》的评论文章（这篇文章认为《普丽蒂》是本“通俗”(middlebrow)小说）。弗兰岑说他从不看人们对他的评论。“我都不明白‘通俗’是什么意思。我觉得商业作家之所以会感到威胁，是一个畅销作家竟然获得了文学界的尊重；而那些作品卖不动的文学作家感到威胁，是一个文学作家竟然还获得了商业成功。”
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.”
他的作品让我介怀的并不是其通俗性，而是那种自以为是的调调。比如《普丽蒂》里有一首双语离合诗，我并不认为弗兰岑能借此证明自己比读者更聪明——虽然上世纪八十年代他在柏林获得过富布莱特(Fulbright)奖学金，还曾翻译过奥地利讽刺作家卡尔•克劳斯(Karl Kraus)的作品，一位在德语圈外鲜为人知的作家。弗兰岑说：“我的经纪人也读不懂这首诗，很多人都读不懂。要是整本书都这样，你的确可以说这个作者令人无法忍受。但我觉得一个人必须读点自己需要去咀嚼才能理解的东西。”
As if on cue, a loud cracking noise comes from his mouth. “Teeth hitting each other sort of sideways, glancing, catching,” he explains.
就在这时，他嘴里应景地发出一声巨响，他解释说：“上下牙齿咬偏了，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.”
我问他是不是牙齿不大好。他却说他的牙非常好，“我可是美国人。”
He laughs and at once the ponderous gloom lifts. I get a glimpse of what are very good teeth indeed.
说完他笑了，一扫沉闷的气氛。我趁机看了一眼，他的确长了一口好牙。
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.”
可惜这种轻松的气氛没持续多久。弗兰岑问我有没有看过尤瓦尔•赫拉利(Yuval Noah Harari)的《人类简史：从动物到上帝》(Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)？当我回答没看过，他便开始解释农业革命如何是个错误，以及他认为人类在狩猎采集时更快乐。他暗示这一理论同样适用于互联网的出现。难道他是说互联网出现以前人们更快乐？弗兰岑没有正面回答：“我没这么说。但我直到四十岁才开始感到快乐，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.”
幸福对于弗兰岑来说稍微有点麻烦。他经常说最好的作品来自苦闷。弗兰岑曾经历痛苦——他提到了自己与作家瓦莱丽•康奈尔(Valerie Cornell)14年的不幸婚姻。所以我有些好奇，如果他一直像现在这样开心，会不会就……他打断了我：“我以前是的。我以前是一个爱笑、聪明、健康、正统的美国中西部男人，上的是好公立学校——是我们概念里的公立学校，进一流大学。我以前就没有不开心的地方。”
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.”
我有种他在逗我的感觉，但依然坚定地接着问道：难道他不认为，一个人如果感受不到痛苦是写不出好小说的吗？“保罗•科埃略( Paulo Coelho)显然办得到。”他又露出大大的笑容，虽然看上去很快活，却又有点令人不快。“我在跟你开玩笑。我们现在讨论的是真正的小说家，这种人会非常敏感，对事物有强烈的感受，这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么，却会给他们留下持久的伤疤。”
. . .
. . .
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.”
《普丽蒂》里有许多疤痕组织。有一段叙述视角转到第一人称，还写到一个男人和他妻子打电话，这段对白是那样狂乱、可怜、丢脸、偏执，没有类似经历是写不出来的。我看到这段时目瞪口呆，钦佩得不行，但又忍不住好奇他的前妻会怎么想。“我不是唯一一个曾经陷入某种疯狂关系的人。另外，描写一段疯狂关系不会损害任何人。”
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.”
所以他的意思是没问题了？“不，曾经的伤口还在淌血，这道疤痕是永远好不了的。不过某种程度上，我最痛苦的是写到了我的父母，虽然我是在他们过世后才开始写作的。更多是因为他们的教育背景不足以让他们理解我的工作，以及我为什么从事这份工作。”
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.”
那么，为什么要背叛他爱的人呢？ “嗯，这里面有种功利主义的观点。当你分享自己经历过的折磨、悲哀和耻辱时，人们会感激你，他们会觉得自己没那么孤单。”
The waiter brings him a bowl of fruit salad so large he looks at it in dismay, as if fearing the inevitable waste.
服务员给他端上了一大碗水果沙拉，他惊愕地看着它，仿佛在担心不可避免地浪费。
“Would you like a little bit of this? Even just one bite would help,” he pleads, shovelling fruit on to my plate.
“你想来一点沙拉吗？哪怕一口都行。”他一边请求着，一边将水果拨到我的盘子里。
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?
《纠正》里的阿尔贝(Albert)是一位严厉但不失慈祥的家长，其人物原型就是弗兰岑的父亲。《普丽蒂》中的家长就可怕多了，书里有位母亲让七岁的儿子看她的阴道，还有一位则通过操纵和镇压施加精神暴力。我好奇如果他自己有了孩子，还会写得这么阴暗吗？
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.”
弗兰岑叹了口气：“我相信一切都将不同。也许我会退休，写一本关于内战的历史小说，在波特兰州立大学(Portland State University)教小说——如果我有孩子的话。”
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.”
我体会到了话中的责备之意，不过后来我才体会到那层清高。但的确有段时间，弗兰岑动过要孩子的念头。据《卫报》(Guardian)的文章说，有段时间他曾考虑要收养一名伊拉克孤儿，以便他了解年轻人。这是真的吗？弗兰岑答道：“这篇报道是一个怀有恶意的人写的。”然后他对我讲了真实情况：“当时我正创作第四部小说，写得非常艰难，我怀疑原因可能是我与世界断了联系，又或是我来自一个强势的家庭，再或许我注定是个居家男人。但这与为了研究年轻人收养战争孤儿也差太远了。有些人认为我是个非常可怕的人，这一谣言给那些人提供了证据。”
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.
看起来这一切让他感到非常厌倦，因此我问他是否觉得成名是个负担。是成功让他变得不那么友善吗？不，他说成功让他变得没那么容易生气，而且没那么爱嫉妒。“作家的嫉妒心是疯狂的，而且几乎没有边界，但到了某个阶段，这种嫉妒显然是不合适的。”现在如果有人写了一本好小说，他不会再感到心烦意乱，而会感到高兴。唯一的问题在于这种情况几乎从未发生过。
“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.”
“我非常感谢村上春树(Haruki Murakami)写作《发条鸟年代记》(The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)。眼下我还感谢埃莱娜•费兰特(Elena Ferrante)。我很难找到让我真心感激的书籍。”
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，作家凯瑟琳•切特科维奇(Kathryn Chetkovich)在嫉妒方面表达得要更坦率些。2003年《纠正》取得成功后，她给《格兰塔》(Granta)杂志写了一篇令人印象深刻的文章，描述了自己多么难以忍受男友的成功。弗兰岑说如果当时把他俩调换一下，他就不会嫉妒她。一部分原因是他对“凡是与我一起生活的人”都会加以全力支持，另外也因为他一般只跟男性竞争。他说，总之如果他不是个成功的作家，他肯定早放弃了。
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.
服务员问他要不要喝咖啡，他回复道：“我可以了，谢谢，暂时不用。”我在回看这次午餐谈话的内容时才注意到他用“我可以了”来表达“不，谢谢”，真希望当时能就这一点向他发问。弗兰岑对某些词汇有强烈的感觉，他曾写过一篇长长的文章谈论“then”作为连词的弊病，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.’ ”
我试着造了个句子：“乔纳森•弗兰岑倾身向前，然后他又靠回到椅背上。”这句话有什么问题吗？“这只是一句连写句。糟糕的英语文章里会出现这样的话，‘他倾身向前然后又开口道’。”
Sounds OK to me, I say. “Read my essay,” he says.
我坦言在我听来没什么问题。他说：“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.”
午餐即将结束了，不过我还有件事要问他。他曾说过，好的小说家都会被自己笔下每一部作品所改变。那么《普丽蒂》改变了他什么呢？他闭着眼睛，脸冲着桌子沉思了许久，以致我怀疑他是不是睡着了。“这本书对我的改变在于，它让我认识到我真的是一个小说作家，我已经没有多少年了，我得想法再多写几本小说。”
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.”
他起身准备离开时，我告诉他我们在这一个半小时里聊了太多话题，如果要把此次午餐访谈内容全部写下来无异于一场噩梦。他说：“那就多要些版面。也许他们会让你分成上下部，就像开胃菜和主菜。我随便说说。”
Lucy Kellaway is an FT columnist
露西•凯拉韦(Lucy Kellaway)为英国《金融时报》专栏作家
Illustration by James Ferguson
插图：詹姆斯•弗格森(James Ferguson)
Bistro One Ninety, Gore Hotel
戈尔酒店Bistro One Ninety餐厅
190 Queen’s Gate, Kensington, London SW7
伦敦SW7肯辛顿Queen’s Gate190号
Pre-theatre menu (tortellini, grey mullet) x 2 ￡49.90
Pre-theatre套餐（意大利饺，鲻鱼）2份，49.9镑
Fruit ￡8
水果，8镑
Diet Coke x 2 ￡7
健怡可乐2罐，7镑
Mint tea ￡4
薄荷茶，4镑
Total (inc service and VAT) ￡77.50
总计（含服务费和增值税）77.5镑
