- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate (7 Oct 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007147252
- ISBN-13: 978-0007147250
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.4 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 157,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Novelist Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone is a collection of 14 essays that take the preservation of individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture as its main theme. Franzen sees himself, rightly, as one of a dying breed of reader/writers coming to terms with the fact that his world (or at least his audience) is shrinking and struggles with the temptation to give in to the techno world for the sake of health and happiness. We're told that "individuality and complexity" is the main theme but in truth the book is much more interesting than it sounds.
The opening essay entitled "My Father's Brain" is a fascinating and deeply poignant story about Alzheimer's disease that begins with a letter--sent by his mother--containing the autopsy of his father's brain. Instead of a self-regarding piece of "feel-my-pain" sentimentality Franzen describes in minute detail the mechanics of the disease itself, the history of its discovery and its effect on his father's personality and behaviour. It's also about the history of a marriage; a reflection on our need to think of ourselves and our loved ones as a distinct personality and the corresponding need to resist the idea--suggested to us by the progress of the disease--that personality is the function of a lump of grey meat: the brain. It ends with Franzen's post-humous discovery of his father's letters that reveal his secret attempt to stay in the light through force of will.
Besides marriage, memory, disease and death, Franzen also deals with subjects as different as smoking, the sex-advice industry, the workings of maximum security prisons, the fall of the Chicago Mail service and his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author. The collection also includes a revised version of the famously misunderstood "Harper's Essay"--Franzen's 1996 look at the fate of the novel. Those expecting a series of naval-gazing, deadly earnest essays from a snobbish elitist who turns his nose up at popular culture and the benefits of electronic communication should think again. What's refreshing and unusual about these essays is that they are serious, funny, poignant, unpredictable and unashamedly elitist--but not in the way you might expect. --Larry Brown
Review
Praise for THE CORRECTIONS
• 'Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike & Roth. That's why there is so much excitement about it.'
DAVID SEXTON, EVENING STANDARD
• 'A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch.'
JEREMY TREGLOWEN, FINANCIAL TIMES
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
54 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I really struggled with The Corrections, repeatedly described as the most remarkable novel of our century to date. And reports of Franzen's snooty sounding behaviour to Oprah Winfrey didn't send me rushing to his other work either. Luckily I came across a reprint of Franzen's famous 1996 "Harper's Essay" when I had nothing else to read, and everything changed. That essay is reprinted here, with fourteen others, equally provocative, densely yet lucidly written, and all with a quite unexpected layer of humour, wit and self-deprecation.
Although the essays cover a wide range of subjects, from a surprisingly gripping forty page account of the chaos facing Chicago's postal service, through to a very moving piece on his father's decline into Alzheimer's disease, Franzen underpins them all with his central concern - the status of contemporary fiction and the lives of those who need it, in a postmodern, mass media saturated world.
For those of us who immediately recognise Franzen's experience of reading and/or writing as a means of reaching inward for a way out of loneliness, the modern world can be a very hard place to inhabit. Again and again he returns to the fragility of any community of readers and writers, the decline of the social novel, the rise of what he calls the tyranny of the literal. No longer simply finding it "apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read Henry James", Franzen moves on to examine some disturbing possible reasons for the ascendance of what he calls "technological consumerism" at the expense of personal integrity and dignity.
One particularly unsettling suggestion is that "the average man or woman's entire life is increasingly structured to avoid the kinds of conflicts on which fiction . . has always thrived", with the finger being pointed at, among other targets, self-help literature, television and far too many prescriptions for anti-depressants. Well, clearly vast numbers of the world's population don't share the luxury of avoiding conflict with the average middle class white American male writer, but that just makes his point even more distressing in its implications.
His observations on the relationship between solitude, privacy, isolation and loneliness are thought provoking too. Although these are linked to his overall theme of the necessity of literature - "the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone" - they go much further than that, into the erosion of civic life and the meaninglessness of a shallow, consumerist definition of privacy which is purchased at the cost of meaningful shared human experience.
Does Franzen offer any ways forward out of this thoroughly depressing situation that he describes so exquisitely? Well, no, not really, more just a way of living with it. He calls this approach tragic realism and I find it strangely comforting to be sharing it with him.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
A book of miscellaneous essays written betwen 1995 and 2002.
Some essays cover Franzen's life, including an excellent first essay about his father's decline and death from Alzheimer's. These are a foretaste of Franzen's excellent memoir the Discomfort Zone.
Some essays cover the themes of writing novels and reading them. About these I would say that Franzen only gradually sketches out an interesting and coherent position - the 2002 essay about William Gaddis is reflective, persuasive and entirely coherent. In the Foreword, Franzen says he made substantial cuts to one of the earlier essays on this theme - he could see with the benefit of hindsight that the argument wasn't clear and the tone was ranting. I would say that this remained true of that essay even it is edited form...but it does have interest, as you can see Franzen struggle towards a theoretical position that supports the kind of novel that he would like to write - and that he has certainly since written.
A third group of essays cover topics such as the Chicago Post Office and its shortcomings; and maxmimum security prisons in the US...Maximum security prisoners may need to learn how to be alone, in that they are mostly in continuous solitary confinement, but the thematic links here to the first two groups of essays are forced or obscure. And ater reading Franzen's essay Lost In the Post, I've learned that I'm just not THAT interested in the shortcoming of the Chicago Post Office in and of itself...
Some essays cover Franzen's life, including an excellent first essay about his father's decline and death from Alzheimer's. These are a foretaste of Franzen's excellent memoir the Discomfort Zone.
Some essays cover the themes of writing novels and reading them. About these I would say that Franzen only gradually sketches out an interesting and coherent position - the 2002 essay about William Gaddis is reflective, persuasive and entirely coherent. In the Foreword, Franzen says he made substantial cuts to one of the earlier essays on this theme - he could see with the benefit of hindsight that the argument wasn't clear and the tone was ranting. I would say that this remained true of that essay even it is edited form...but it does have interest, as you can see Franzen struggle towards a theoretical position that supports the kind of novel that he would like to write - and that he has certainly since written.
A third group of essays cover topics such as the Chicago Post Office and its shortcomings; and maxmimum security prisons in the US...Maximum security prisoners may need to learn how to be alone, in that they are mostly in continuous solitary confinement, but the thematic links here to the first two groups of essays are forced or obscure. And ater reading Franzen's essay Lost In the Post, I've learned that I'm just not THAT interested in the shortcoming of the Chicago Post Office in and of itself...
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Densely written" is right - you're not going to whistle through this, it's one of those books in which sentences and paragraphs have to be read and re-read to grasp their meaning, and which once understood have to be framed in the context of the argument.
But it's worth the perserverence as these essays are extraordinary inciteful, of value as much for the individual reflections they'll trigger in the reader, as for the arguments Franzen himself puts forward.
But it's worth the perserverence as these essays are extraordinary inciteful, of value as much for the individual reflections they'll trigger in the reader, as for the arguments Franzen himself puts forward.
It's a call to arms for a personal, private revolution; for a quiet, polite, unobstrusive, individual, almost invisible resistance to the overwhelming invasions of contemporary life, one you may already be part of, one unlikely to gain many converts, but one that fundamentally challenges the bankruptcy of that which it opposses, and in which one's fellow travellers are instantly recognisable.
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