AMY DAVIDSON: Why did you want to write a Profile of the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert?
JONATHAN FRANZEN: It was a great opportunity to spend the summer hanging out with Republicans. I live in Manhattan, where we don’t really have Republicans. We have Mike Bloomberg, who is the fundamentally Democratic mayor of a city with fundamentally urban-populist politics. I don’t know any genuine Republicans around here. I just never spend time with them—which means that I sit at my breakfast table, morning after morning, and read about these insane-sounding people in Washington with their special subsidies for Hummer drivers, and their plans for drilling in the Arctic, and their élitist tax policies, and their thuggish notions of diplomacy, and so forth, and before long I’m convinced that the country’s government has been hijacked by hideous sulfur-smelling evil demons. I become enraged, in other words. I feel myself personally participating in the polarization of the electorate.
