“I don’t like to hire people to do work that I can do,” Jonathan Franzen told the Financial Times over lunch at the Gore Hotel, which is in London. This summer, he repainted a room in his “rather small” house in Santa Cruz. “The fourth coat was just sheer torture.”

Hilariously, FT columnist Lucy Kellaway asked the Franz-man whether he dusts the apartment he lives in, with his girlfriend, in New York. “We do have a cleaner,” he said, “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.”

Lunch cost £77.50 ($120), but Franzen doesn’t like fancy restaurants. “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.” (He’s not wrong.)

Then again, it’s not as though Franzen hasn’t done well for 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.”

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.”

While I smart, he goes on: “I’m a poor person who has money.”

Haha. Sure! Read the whole thing, it’s great.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.