Of all the interviews I have done, this encounter is one of the strangest. For most of the interview the writer looks as if he has acute indigestion, with twinges each time I open my mouth. Between my questions and his answers are gaps commodious enough to house freight trains . . .
. . . Oddly, we get along famously as long as we stick to small talk; it's only when I ask about his work that it all seems to get tricky. About halfway through I suggest he might find it more amusing were I to knock him over the head and extract one of his molars without anaesthetic. He looks despairing and wails: "You're asking me these really serious questions, and you're inviting me to be abstract, and it's, like, 11.30 in the morning."
There are some mitigating factors. He is suffering the effects of a late night and a lot of wine at the London launch of his memoir, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, and I am probably far too big a fan of Franzen's writing to be entirely professional. It's hard to be objective when you keep a copy of The Corrections, his 2001 novel, on your bedside table.
But there may be more to it than that. The Corrections, a hefty, hilarious and profound blockbuster about the five members of the Lambert family, is also a book about the US in all its pill-popping, consumerist glory. Published in September 2001, just a week before 9/11, it was considered by many to be the first big book of the 21st century.
As a slightly gory sideshow to the book's reception - it went on to win the 2001 National Book Award - Franzen caused a furore by questioning his inclusion in Oprah Winfrey's book club. He was promptly uninvited by Winfrey and, just as promptly, demonised as the worst kind of intellectual snob.
"My first experience of celebrity was the day when the editorials in the New York Times were on anthrax, Osama bin Laden, the patriot act and 'what an embarrassing and terrible person Franzen is'. I was public enemy number two for some weeks there in fall 2001," he says drily.
After The Corrections, which was his third novel, Franzen produced a book of essays, the critically acclaimed How to Be Alone. The Discomfort Zone is a collection of humorous essays in which, in his inimical style, Franzen describes his childhood while dissecting the cartoon Peanuts and gives an account of his romances in the context of a new-found love of birdwatching (title: "My Bird Problem").
Of fiction, though, there has been not a word. "What happened after The Corrections was published," Franzen says wearily, "and it's the same thing that happened with my two other novels, is that fiction didn't go so well. I kept producing watered-down versions of The Corrections. So I started doing these essays, which were kind of a continuation and extreme version of the essays I'd already been doing, and they happened to be the work that was alive."
It was his American editor who suggested publishing the essays, some of which had appeared in the New Yorker magazine, as a memoir. Franzen was at first unwilling. "I was embarrassed. I felt like I ought to be publishing a novel next, but I was so close [ to completing a book of memoirs] I just went ahead. Now I'm suffering the consequences of having actually written a memoir, which I never expected to do."
Yet, in many ways, a memoir makes perfect sense for Franzen. Whether in fiction or essay form, his skill is an ability to take a kaleidoscopic look at the bigger picture by peering through fragments of the personal: the stock-market lottery through the fortunes of Alfred Lambert in The Corrections or the tobacco industry through his own struggle to give up cigarettes in How to Be Alone.
For many, what set Franzen apart are his clear-sighted polemics, although his vantage point has changed. "I think I've come to feel more implicated in that which outrages me," he says. "In my 20s and 30s I was one of those very righteous guys who could stand outside American society and tell you everything that's wrong with it. But now, probably because I've become successful and middle-aged, I can't do that any more. I have to recognise that I'm implicated . . . I'm outraged, but I feel less inclined to simply denounce and more inclined to confess culpability."
In The Discomfort Zone Franzen focuses on his parents, both now dead, and on his childhood in the small town of Webster Groves, outside St Louis, Missouri.
"The country changed so much in precisely the years when I was a kid. There was this great distance between 1959, when I was born, and 1977, when I went off to school, so I just can't help seeing my parents as these dear people whom I loved but also as representatives of some much earlier, almost 19th-century America which was swept away. It's hard to talk about wanting to leave them without also talking about wanting to get away from the universe of expectations and values they represented."
Getting away was something he did extravagantly well, moving to Boston, Spain, New York and Philadelphia with his wife and then, when his marriage broke down, back to New York, where he now lives with Kathryn Chetkovich, a fellow writer. Although Franzen writes lovingly and openly of their relationship, he refers to her only as "the Californian" in The Discomfort Zone. "I just liked the conceit of calling her the Californian," Franzen says with a laugh. "In the same way that I came to see my parents as cartoons, and to some extent see myself as a cartoon, I very much see her as a cartoon as well. I think of cartooning as a very affectionate thing to do."
Chetkovich published an astonishingly honest essay in a 2003 Granta magazine, detailing how gruelling she found living with a more successful writer. "It became, and remains, the thing we don't talk about," she wrote.
Franzen's first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, are very different from The Corrections. Strongly plotted, with the narrative lure of thrillers, they were well reviewed but made little splash when they were published, in 1988 and 1992.
Franzen's struggle to write The Corrections is well documented. In essays and interviews, he describes years of working fruitlessly on a similar novel to his earlier works until, finally, the death of his father, in 1996, cracked him open and he began work on the book that would be The Corrections.
He is in the process of writing another novel, but the goalposts have moved dramatically. Now he is the author of The Corrections trying to write another novel, and in the middle of that grinding, gruelling process he has been winkled into the light to explain himself to the world's press. No wonder he feels a little ambiguous about memoir.
"I think the fear we fiction writers have is that soon all there will be is memoir. A hundred years ago most of what we knew came in the form of written narrative. We had to use our imagination. Now so little is left to the imagination that only if we're sure there's something literally true and real about the narrative we're getting can we get our fix. We are like drug addicts who have to keep upping the dosage and going to the harder and harder stuff. I think that was the fear lurking in me as a novelist contemplating actually publishing a memoir. I thought, whoa, why this and not another novel?"
Does he feel under pressure to write another novel? "I feel like I'm one of the few American writers who is exempt from that pressure, because I already delivered my novel," he says, guardedly. "I don't have anything to prove right now. I guess I have to prove that I can write another novel, but that's not what gets you to the desk in the morning." So what does? "A wish to be writing another novel. A wish to dwell in that miserable place, happily, for a few years. A sense that my life is meaningless and empty if I don't have some story to tell. And, to a lesser degree, a sense of responsibility to the community I feel part of, the community of readers and writers. But, no, why would I feel pressure?"
I find I can't leave it at that. I want to know why he persists. I want to know how he keeps faith in his ability to find fiction. He pauses for a long time and looks miserably at this hack doctor coming at him with a drill. "I have noticed that however discouraged I get, I can't help waking up within the next two or three days with a new plan," he says slowly.
"Another day, another plan. It's remarkable how many years you can keep doing that. It reaffirms for me that I'm really not good for much else but being a writer. I don't know if I'll ever do any work similar to what I've done before, but I do know that I can't seem to stop trying."
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is published by Fourth Estate, £16.99 in UK