How to Be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen (2002)

All the rhetoric currently being thrown around thanks to the recent Franzen inspired media maelstrom about the commercial/literary or popular/serious dichotomies feel like the same tired arguments over legitimacy, popularity and media coverage being rehashed for us yet again. In part I feel like these discussions are intended to create hype for the publishing industry itself – look, we are still relevant, look at the impassioned discourse that is happening about our product, I mean, artform! – an industry struggling to maintain footing in a culture that is rapidly shifting toward a preference for the visual and the hypertextual. Thanks to uncanny timing, reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection How to Be Alone felt like his voice, strangely silent amid the social media mavens, and his position in the conversation. And yet, these essays were mostly written over ten years ago, when the technological landscape looked nothing like it does today.

The majority, and the best, of these non-fiction essays are written about literature, the book and its position in the society of the spectacle. Surprisingly, for a collection of pieces written at different times for different publications, it contains a strong thematic cohesiveness. “Imperial Bedroom,” an essay about the concern over the demarcations between public and private spheres is rich in foresight, having been written in 1998, that is, a pre-Facebook world. Franzen makes a compelling argument about the appearance of loss of privacy versus the reality of an increasingly isolated existence. Facebook is the medium that tirelessly intrudes on discussions of personal privacy online. Is Facebook a reaction against the privacy we’ve been given/worked for (personal isolation through architecture, landscape, transport, communication, etc.), is it a way to make ourselves visible in an imaginary “public” space, to make ourselves the tabloid stars of our own social circles? (In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m pretty anti-Facebook. It’s the internet for people who don’t know how to use the internet.) Intriguingly, it is Franzen’s personal anecdotes and observations in this essay that lends it its power.

Then there is the shining jewel in this collection, the apparently infamous “Harper’s essay” on the death of the novel, “Why Bother?” written in 1996. What a slow, horrible death the novel must be suffering! Again, it is Franzen’s personal input that gives the essay the extra level of understanding, he talks about his depression, his writing “process”, his own position as a reader; like many of us, Franzen feels he was saved by literature. For readers who constantly face accusatory remarks from people who don’t have time to read, “Why Bother?” is the ideal antidote, an affirmation. Franzen examines the cultural context and consumer economy that he sees as oppositional to the longevity of the book, the incompatibility between “the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life.” He does suggest the problematic divide between “serious” and popular fiction, though doesn’t define his terms. I like to think of this as a technique to allow us to define the terms for ourselves: what does serious fiction mean to me? Despite reading “teaching us to be alone” as he states in a latter essay, it also ties us in with a disjointed communal group of increasing rarity: readers.

Readers aren’t “better” or “healthier” or, conversely, “sicker” than non readers. We just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community.

While many of the essays struggle with the distinction between the personal and the public, the social and the act of reading, others focusing on unconnected topics can also be read through Franzen’s main concerns. An essay on the Chicago postal crisis of 1994 looks at the social, political and spatial issues that led to the decline in the services in the area; Franzen visits a small community disappointed that a new local prison hasn’t been the boom to their economy that they expected; the pleasures and contradictions of cigarette smoking; filming a segment for Oprah in his hometown, briefly touching on the scandal when he expressed discomfort at the Oprah’s Book Club label would discourage male readers. However, ultimately the best and most engaging essays in How to Be Alone are about fiction, and the possibility of it remaining a potent social medium. I loved it, the message, Franzen’s willingness to bear his vulnerabilities and thoughts, the erudite and considered style, and the obvious love of literature and reading.

Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner should read it. I’m going to leave you with this quote from “The Reader in Exile”:

Elitism is the Achilles’ heel of every serious defense of art, an invitation to the poisoned arrows of populist rhetoric. The elitism of modern literature is, undeniably, a peculiar one – an aristocracy of alienation, a fraternity of doubting and wondering. Still, after voicing a suspicion that nonreaders view reading “as a kind of value judgment upon themselves, as an elitist and exclusionary act,” Birkerts is brave enough to confirm their worst fears: “Reading is a judgment. It brands as insufficient the understandings and priorities that govern ordinary life.”

Tags: 2002, August 2010, book review, How to Be Alone: Essays, Jonathan Franzen, non-fiction