Jonathan Franzen's fiction bears the mark of a Midwest upbringing, his books preoccupied with quiet lives nurtured there and broken apart by contact with the rest of the world.
The scale of Freedom's rapturous reception isn't yet evident on the morning of our first conversation, though the book has already been called 'the novel of the century,' and its author has just become the first writer in a decade to appear on the cover of Time magazine; a visit to the White House is soon to come.