How to Be Alone: Essays [Hardcover]

Jonathan Franzen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 exposé 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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374173273
• ISBN-13: 978-0374173272
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of three novels--The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion--and two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

117 of 123 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I am a sucker for melancholy, November 26, 2003

By 

D. Sean West (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Be Alone: Essays (Hardcover)

If nothing else the title is enough to make this book engaging. In our popularity oriented, herd minded society there is an almost compulsive urge to at least pick up this book.
But this book goes far beyond its title; comprising an incredibly engaging set of essays touching on many different aspects of self, especially in relation to our ever more complex and noisy society, as well as delving into the state of literature today. Often seemingly gilded with melancholy, Franzen's heartfelt seeking of truth and understanding resonates within those who read it. From the story of his father's slow death through Alzheimer's in "My Father's Brain" to the self-discovery brought on by his love of literary culture, and the rediscovering the source of that love in "The Reader in Exile" the reader is reminded of hard lessons learned.
Aloneness has a stigma in our society as something to be feared and avoided. While this book does not seek to celebrate isolationism it does show it as something not to be feared. Reading itself is the very act of indulgent alones and Franzen exposes the beauty there, as well as our own desire for the individuality that comes with aloneness.

166 of 184 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Franzen doesn't deserve this much criticism..., November 14, 2002

By 

J. Smith "nikenlg" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How to Be Alone: Essays (Hardcover)

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.

96 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing Look At Contemporary Society!, October 2, 2002

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Be Alone: Essays (Hardcover)

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!