How to Be Alone: Essays

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How to Be Alone: Essays

by: Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen is smart and brash, the kind of person you want as your social critic but not as a brother-in-law. Many of the 14 essays in How to Be Alone, by the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and elsewhere. A long, much-discussed rumination on the American novel, (newly) titled "Why Bother?," is included, as well as essays on privacy obsession, the U.S. post office, New York City, big tobacco, and new prisons. At his best, as in "My Father's Brain," a piece on his father's struggle with Alzheimer's, Franzen can make the ordinary world utterly riveting. But at times, it can be difficult to discern where Franzen stands on any particular subject, as he often takes both sides of an argument. Valid attempts to reflect ambiguity s! ometimes lead to obfuscation, especially in his essays on privacy and tobacco, although his belief that small-town America of years gone by offered the individual little privacy certainly rings true. Franzen can write with panache, as in this comment after he watched, without headphones, a TV show during a flight: "(It) became an expos of the hydraulics of insincere smiles." A few of the shorter pieces appear to be filler. Franzen shines brightest when he gets edgy and a little angry, as in "The Reader in Exile": "Instead of Manassas battlefield, a historical theme park. Instead of organizing narratives, a map of the world as complex as the world itself. Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data."
--Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca From Publishers Weekly
Bestselling and National Book Award- winning novelist Franzen (The Corrections) urges readers to say no to drugs, but not the pharmaceutical kind; his opiates are those "technology offers in the form of TV, pop culture, and endless gadgetry," soporifics that "are addictive and in the long run only make society's problems worse." Franzen's just as hard on intellectual conformity-on academe's canonization of third-rate but politically correct novels, for example. As a serious artist, he knows that the deck is stacked against him; after all, a great novel is a kind of antiproduct, one that is "inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable." The problem, he says, is that instead of being allowed to enjoy our solitary uniqueness we are all being turned into one gigantic corporate-created entity, a point Franzen makes tellingly when he says that while a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian might appear totally different, the truth is that both "watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance... both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman." These canny, well-researched essays (which have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and elsewhere) range over a variety of subjects, from the antiquated and bizarrely inefficient Chicago postal system to the bizarrely efficient new privatized federal prisons, but they are united by a single passionate insistence that, in a cookie-cutter world, people who want simply to be themselves should have the right to do so.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal
In this collection of 12 essays, Franzen, the author of the most-written-about novel of 2001, The Corrections, focuses on the growing commercialism and alienation in postmodern America. Presenting a number of variations on that theme, he addresses such personal topics as his smoking habit, an interview for the Oprah show, and his father's battle with Alzheimer's, a poignant account of the disease's impact on his family. In addition, pieces on the shortcomings of the Chicago post office, the supermax prison in Colorado, and the isolating effects of an increasingly computerized society show Franzen's skill as a journalist and social critic. Also included is "Why Bother?," a revision of his 1996 critique of the American novel. He has cut this version considerably and softened its strident tone, although, as he points out, "there's still plenty to be mad and scared about." This book will appeal to serious readers who appreciate penetrating yet entertaining social commentary. Enthusiastically recommended for public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From AudioFile
There is nothing like a book that makes the reader think, and Jonathan Franzen's latest puts the mind on overtime. But this collection of essays performs an interesting balancing act: It is insightful without preaching, provocative without ranting, and realistic without raving. Brian D'Arcy James reads with appropriate inflection and just the right amount of involvement, but for the most part he allows the commentary to shine through on its own. The essays range from a melancholy recollection of the author's father's battle with Alzheimer's to more biting reflections on modern life and how we Americans live it. This audiobook is far from "light listening," but you don't have to be an intellectual to enjoy it. L.B.F. AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright AudioFile, Portland, Maine From Booklist
Franzen won the National Book Award (and, prior to that, Booklist's Top of the List award) for his sharply comedic and deeply compassionate novel The Corrections [BKL Jl 01], but he also drew fire for his fumbled response to being chosen as an Oprah author. Here, in his first essay collection, the qualities of mind that make him a relentlessly questioning thinker, and piercing and candid writer, one willing to ponder the finer points regarding reading, publishing, and the packaging of authors raised by Oprah's Book Club, are revealed, and Franzen's standing as a significant, indeed, essential literary voice is resoundingly reaffirmed. Here is the now infamous Harper's essay about the state of the novel, conscionable skepticism regarding popular culture and the addictive technologies that disseminate it, concern with our obsession with privacy and concomitant degradation of the public sphere, inquiries into the prison system and urban life, insights into depression, and, underlying all, love for and faith in literature. Franzen also quietly illuminates the intense emotions and personal experiences, most movingly his father's succumbing to Alzheimer's, that went into the writing of The Corrections and his inability to transform himself from artist into commodity. Donna Seaman Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved Review
"A graceful meditation on reading and writing in a digital age . . . Franzen probes two very simple ideas: 'the movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptanceeven a celebration闗of being a reader and a writer' and 'the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture.'"
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., The Altanta Journal-Constitution "Franzen believes the monolithic quality of the U.S. media, its jingoistic flattening of complex issues and the rush to hop on the information superhighway are a constant assault on the internal lives of Americans . . . These are essays about the pain of being an American in a time when the means to alleviating pain threaten to dehumanize pain itself, when the means for entertaining ourselves have become so sophisticated it's almost hard to complain. There's some boldness, then, in how Franzen reclaims his pain on the page, owning up to it and, as any good journalist will, making it our own, too."
John Freeman, The San Francisco Chronicle "Although Franzen calls them 'essays' many of these pieces are reportage. He's good at it . . . All these pieces place both writer and reader on firm ground . . . He goes out on many a limb (as essayists should) and gives us a good many things to think about, such as the blurring line between private and public behavior in the age of the 24-hour news cycle."
Dan Sullivan, Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If Franzen had not been anointed to the Higher Calling of Literature, he might have made a terrific journalist . . . Two of the reportage pieces are models of the New Journalism."
Roger K. Miller, South Florida Sun-Sentinel "Franzen is a charming and sagacious writer, even an important one, a man who cares about literature and who cares about the problems of modernityrace, urban sprawl, corporate hegemony. Books matter, is the final message. A keen intellect is at work here, even though Franzen often seems to be arguing with himself; perhaps How to Be Alone is most brilliant when the author is arguing with himself. Jonathan Franzen has a restless mind and we are better for it."
Corey Mesler, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis) "A collection of essays diverse and entertaining . . . Smart, solid, and well-paced: a pleasure for Franzen's many admirers."
Kirkus Reviews "[Franzen] demonstrates his remarkable capacity for evaluating the American scene . . . The journalistic pieces included in the book show that Franzen ain't afraid to face facts . . . Essays covering the tobacco industry and the 2001 presidential election, as well as consumerism and the nature of privacy in America, offer rare evaluations of the modern world as we know it."
Bookpage Review
"A graceful meditation on reading and writing in a digital age . . . Franzen probes two very simple ideas: 'the movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptanceeven a celebrationof being a reader and a writer' and 'the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture.'"
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., The Altanta Journal-Constitution "Franzen believes the monolithic quality of the U.S. media, its jingoistic flattening of complex issues and the rush to hop on the information superhighway are a constant assault on the internal lives of Americans . . . These are essays about the pain of being an American in a time when the means to alleviating pain threaten to dehumanize pain itself, when the means for entertaining ourselves have become so sophisticated it's almost hard to complain. There's some boldness, then, in how Franzen reclaims his pain on the page, owning up to it and, as any good journalist will, making it our own, too."
John Freeman, The San Francisco Chronicle "Although Franzen calls them 'essays' many of these pieces are reportage. He's good at it . . . All these pieces place both writer and reader on firm ground . . . He goes out on many a limb (as essayists should) and gives us a good many things to think about, such as the blurring line between private and public behavior in the age of the 24-hour news cycle."
Dan Sullivan, Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If Franzen had not been anointed to the Higher Calling of Literature, he might have made a terrific journalist . . . Two of the reportage pieces are models of the New Journalism."
Roger K. Miller, South Florida Sun-Sentinel "Franzen is a charming and sagacious writer, even an important one, a man who cares about literature and who cares about the problems of modernityrace, urban sprawl, corporate hegemony. Books matter, is the final message. A keen intellect is at work here, even though Franzen often seems to be arguing with himself; perhaps How to Be Alone is most brilliant when the author is arguing with himself. Jonathan Franzen has a restless mind and we are better for it."
Corey Mesler, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis) "A collection of essays diverse and entertaining . . . Smart, solid, and well-paced: a pleasure for Franzen's many admirers."
Kirkus Reviews "[Franzen] demonstrates his remarkable capacity for evaluating the American scene . . . The journalistic pieces included in the book show that Franzen ain't afraid to face facts . . . Essays covering the tobacco industry and the 2001 presidential election, as well as consumerism and the nature of privacy in America, offer rare evaluations of the modern world as we know it."
Bookpage Book Description
Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author. As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics. Download Description
Here, in fourteen essays, are fourteen fresh answers to the question of how to be alone in a noisy and distracting mass culture. These essays show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics. About the Author
Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award for Fiction for The Corrections in 2001, and is the author of two other critically acclaimed novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's.

A good dream interpreter will offer multiple possibilities from which you might pick. One will make sense to you and surpass "reasonable" or "plausible" to attain "feeling right." In a similar sense, I enjoy Franzen's essays most when they elicit instant affirmation. At those moments, you can nod, say he's hit upon something, notice what nifty way he's found to express what you should have known before. Surprisingly, he seldom achieves that exalted state when he's speaking personally, for himself. He seems more effective when he triangulates his own views with contributions from other smart people. Reading this collection of essays, you occasionally detect the prickliness that makes him--rightly or wrongly--a literary bad boy. His indignation can veer into stridency. However, you also see a sort of warmth that, for me, The Corrections sometimes lacked. As Franzen suggests in his essay "Why Bother?," I read for confirmation that life is complicated. At its best, How to Be Alone does so in a way that suggests not just solidarity with Franzen--and with those he quotes--but with what Franzen observes.

Reviews:

Well, I don't fully understand all of the criticism that is thrown Franzen's way. I really engaged with this book and found the essays interesting, well-written and thought-provoking. All-in-all, Franzen's insights into reading culture, writing, memory and American society were right on the money for me. I think those who don't like this book would be more at home with Newsweek and Time magazine and find USA Today sufficient for their daily news. Criticism of Franzen as "elitist" is over-stated. If you, like I, are one of those "isolates" who starts reading early in life, you will likely find sympathy with Franzen's perspective as I did. I think "elitist" is a word thrown at those who read and think like Franzen by those who don't. I don't believe the book is elitist so much as representative of a different class of readers in American society who are a little more isolated from American consumer culture and generally find the consumer-driven, media-saturated, conformist version of America unsettling to say the least.

It is amusing and instructional when someone so far removed from the social sciences as this author obviously is makes the intriguing connection between the deadening aspects of the social surround and its effect on individual consciousness. What Franzen bemoans here is really the entire intellectual sweep of the materialistic culture we are embedded in, yet the individual characteristics he uses in the several essays included here in order to illustrate each of his well-taken points are better described as symptoms of the hollowness and lack of intellectual depth and meaning of most of our social artifacts and habits than as simply being problems in and of themselves. He hits the problem dead on when discussing the pandemic use of technology in the form of television, pop culture, and endless games and gadgetry in an attempt to stave off boredom and "entertain' ourselves. What we really are doing is what Aldous Huxley warned of so presciently in "Brave New World"; submerging ourselves in petty diversions and banal preoccupations, deadening ourselves to our environments and to the social world that would other act to engage us in some fashion. Likewise, his discussion of how widespread use of "serotonin reuptake inhibitors" such as Prozac feeds into a general lack of awareness is quite thought-provoking. If pain, even mental anguish such as depression, can be thought of as a warning from the body that something is wrong, then the whole cultural approach now in vogue to anesthetize the pain is the functional equivalent of a denial of the pain, a quite deliberate attempt to paper it over and therefore disregard the important message it is sending to the individual that something is very wrong. By treating depression as a simple medical problem that can be medicated away as easily as athlete's foot, any hope of using the pain as a starting point for the very necessary discovery process through which one might learn what was wrong and what needed to be done to correct it is gone. In essence, doctors now simply `treat' depression by medicating the symptoms out of existence, without any regard for the very serious questions such physical and emotional manifestations of pain and discomfort may mean for the overall health and well being of the patient. Under such circumstances, the doctors are no different from a guy selling shiny new sports cars to middle aged guys like me, who want a boost out of life and are willing to pay to get it. Oops! Time to take my Zoloft and feel better. Each of the essays make the reader think, and that is the single highest compliment anyone can make about anyone's writing. I may not agree with what Franzen has to say in each case, but I enjoyed his open attitude and his keen sense that something is amiss in a nation so addicted to Oprah and easy answers that he has to stand back and say "Enough!" His criticisms of the current academic fashion of political correctness are especially interesting, as they show the absurd ways in which even the academics have "dumbed themselves down" to accept such superficial tripe as being the gospel. His notice of the fat that more and more Americans seem to becoming frightened, lonely, and isolated recalls similar observations made by social critics like Philip Slater long ago in a tome called "Pursuit Of Loneliness; American Culture At The Breaking Point" (see my review). This is an absorbing, bright, and intriguing attempt to ask some honest and penetrating questions, and while I may not agree with what he argues or with his conclusions, it is a wonderful book that raises one's intellectual curiosity and one's self-awareness in terms of how easily it is for each of us to slip into the burgeoning cultural habits he so cleverly exposes. Enjoy!

I was looking at the wide range of reviews this book has gotten, and it completely strikes me as appropriate that this books garners the reviews that it does. Consider a quote within the very book: "The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us - we don't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow." Franzen does not appear to be writing to appeal to everyone - he intends to speak directly on a particular subject that has riled his heart from the beginning, a riling that only a select set of people will embrace. Those that recognize what he speaks of will quickly see the subtext behind all of his writings and see how his selection of essays paints a grand picture of aloneness without seeming to really touch upon the issue directly. Instead, he attacks the idea of it from every angle he knows, as a novelist, from the view of prisons and technology, as one dealing with the past and the present. All is said without saying anything on the topic and it is in this tremendous work that his words carry the careful reader through. Not all readers will make it to the end. But that is the nature of the book. As many saw only in Catch-22 absurdity and stupidity, I am sure people will regard this book to be likewise. Yet, 'tis not to his audience he writes.

First off, I loved the book cover- spine and all-- one of my all time favorites. It's what first attracted me to this book amongst the other forward-facing covers on the store's front table. Then the title, I loved that just as much. Both share the characteristics of being straightforward, to the point, and revealing. Both are perfectly simple. I read most the essays and came to think that a. this guy really does his homework and b. he has a vocabulary more voluminous than the decimal numbers of pi. I constantly begged for my dictionary. It's probably what gets him the press I knew before I picked this up: an intellectual snob. I guess he got that from the Oprah incident. But I also guess that there's lots of worse name calling that can happen to anyone in their career. What's up with this culture that it's so unacceptably horrible to be labeled an intellectual snob and so enviously warming to be called a pop culture icon? The attraction to Franzen's work is that he investigates and reveals- in a binary way: He's researching facts, he's listening to feelings; he's processing both to give an opinion. The best example of this is My Father's Brain in which he relates the Alzheimer induced decomposing of his father's brain. There is lots about the history and science of memory in this essay; as much as there is about how a family discovers and lives with its loss. Reading it you sympathize, you empathize and you learn. Equally as insightful are : Lost in the Mail- a look into possible reasons behind Chicago's underperforming mail system The Reader in Exile- a great reflection on the intellectual and emotional fruits of reading
First City- a historical and pensive piece about what pulls us towards cities
Meet Me in St. Louis- a piece that shares the two-sided feelings in a trio of situations (including the Oprah incident).