Being dubbed "The Great American Novelist" comes with no small share of controversy, as Jonathan Franzen knows well. His novels, The Corrections and Freedom, were bestsellers worldwide, with the latter declared a "masterpiece" by the New York Times. But the attention triggered a backlash, with some journalists eager to take potshots at Franzen.

Subsequently, Franzen's latest work, Purity, was talked about for months before it hit stands on September 1, 2015. In Purity, Franzen brings together a disparate group of characters and issues. The protagonist, Purity Tyler, takes an internship with the Sunlight Project, a Wikileaks-like organization run by a man named Andreas Wolf, who grew up in East Germany amid the Stasi secret police.

Franzen's interview marks the start of Writers & Company's 25th season. Eleanor Wachtel interviewed him at his home in Santa Cruz, California.

They wouldn't let me do English because English was a dead-end thing. There was basically no conventional middle-class job you could do and I was told, "You have special abilities. You owe more to society." I mean, it was like a weekly lecture, one's responsibility to society… I wanted to do art. I wanted to do writing, which seemed to me not socially useful. In fact, I think it's still not socially useful, certainly not by my parent's [standards]. It was, as my mother said, "What is a novel? It's lies!" I became a professional liar, whose work existed for no other reason than to entertain. That was total anathema to that Midwestern protestant sense of responsibility and contribution to society.

​I had a certain mistrust of the lionization of these leaker figures. I'm not saying they are all bad. I think there's something to be said for whistle-blowing. I could make a case for Edward Snowden's actions. I could also make a case against them, but I can make a case for them. Nevertheless, these were now in the tech world the heroes — [which] rubs me the wrong way. Like, heroes, why? Isn't there a kind of ghastly hypocrisy with these tech companies who guard their secrets so tenaciously, lionizing these figures who give away people's secrets? So, I realized there was some thematic things I could do with a leaker character.

[Wolf] was saying there's something totalitarian about the internet and he says, "If you think I'm exaggerating it's because you have misunderstood the essence of totalitarianism. It's not parades…it's not the secret police, it's not the ideology. It's that here is something that you have no choice but to be in a relation with. All the time. Every aspect of your life." That's the ambition of the tech people; that you will never not be in relation to technology.

M​usic to close the interview: "Willow Weep for Me" performed by Art Tatum, composed by Ann Ronnnell. From the album Art Tatum: The Complete Capitol Recordings.