Ακόμα πιο μακριά

by Jonathan Franzen

Στο Ακόμα πιο μακριά, όπου συγκεντρώνονται δοκίμια και ομιλίες που έχουν γραφτεί κατά το πλείστον την τελευταία πενταετία, ο Φράνζεν επιστρέφει με ανανεωμένο ζήλο στα ανθρώπινα όσο και λογοτεχνικά θέματα που τον έχουν για καιρό απασχολήσει. Είτε αφηγούμενος το βίαιο συναπάντημά του με τους λαθροκυνηγούς άγριων πουλιών στην Κύπρο είτε εξετάζοντας τα ανάμεικτα συναισθήματά του από την αυτοκτονία του Ντέιβιντ Φόστερ Γουάλας, φίλου και ανταγωνιστή του, είτε προσφέροντας μια συγκινητική και ευφυή θεώρηση του πώς η τεχνολογία έχει αλλάξει τον τρόπο που οι άνθρωποι εκδηλώνουν την αγάπη τους, αυτά τα κείμενα τηρούν την αδήλωτη υπόσχεση του Φράνζεν να μην αποκρύψει τίποτα. Σ’ ένα ταξίδι στην Κίνα, προκειμένου να δει από κοντά την περιβαλλοντική καταστροφή εκεί, δεν παραλείπει να τονίσει τον ενθουσιασμό και το δέος του για τους ρυθμούς της οικονομικής ανάπτυξης της Κίνας· το ταξίδι γίνεται περιπέτεια πέρα από τη δική του προκατάληψη και ηθική καταδίκη. Όλα μαζί, τα δοκίμια αυτά χαρακτηρίζουν την εξελικτική πορεία ενός μοναδικού και ώριμου μυαλού που παλεύει με τον εαυτό του, με τη λογοτεχνία και με κάποια από τα σημαντικά ζητήματα των ημερών μας. Το Ακόμα πιο μακριά είναι σημαντικό, προκλητικό και ουσιώδες.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Memoir, Literature, Philosophy, American

384 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.

Reviews

[Jayson · Rating 3 out of 5]

(B) 75% | More than Satisfactory
Notes: A scrapbook patchwork of previously published prose, lucid though largely forgettable, and expectedly hit and miss.

[Chad]

A girlfriend took this with her after we broke up (along with many, many other books of mine). So I guess she did a far better job of teaching me how to be alone than Mr. Franzen ever could.

[Carly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok, Jonathan Franzen. WE GET IT. You're a martyr for truth and beauty and all that is good because you read books and don't like technology and smoke cigarettes and still use a rotary telephone. You are a superior human being because you don't watch t.v. You could've said that all in one paragraph, but you chose to do it in 300 palpably crotchety, Andy Rooney-esque pages. As Shruti rightly pointed out, it is surprisingly refreshing to read an author who annoys the shit out of you, especially with such hilariously self-righteous statements as: "We don't blame the audience for defecting, we know it hurts to have to stay conscious, we understand the need to drug yourself, to feel the warmth of up-to-the-minute hipness or whatever." Ha! I kind of love how ridiculous that sounds.

[Glenn Sumi · Rating 3 out of 5]

How To Be Alone – a.k.a., How To Make Some Quick Cash Between Novels

Full disclosure: I love Jonathan Franzen, novelist. The Corrections and Freedom are two of my favourite novels written in the past couple of decades. And I can’t wait to read his new book, out this fall.

But that’s Novelist Franzen. Do I really need to read Essayist Franzen? Especially when his prose is often fussy, whiny and awkward?

Here are two random passages from his uneven 2002 collection, How To Be Alone (take a deeeeep breath, folks):

That a distrust or an outright hatred of what we now call “literature” has always been a mark of social visionaries, whether Plato or Stalin or today’s freemarket technocrats, can lead us to think that literature has a function, beyond entertainment, as a form of social opposition.

and:

These lines are redolent with depression and the sense of estrangement from humanity that depression fosters. Nothing aggravates this estrangement more than a juggernaut of hipness such as television has created and the digital revolution’s marketers are exploiting.

Ouch. Reading prose like this, I go into editor/teaching assistant mode and want to write “Simpler language?” or "What are you trying to say?" in the margins.

So, yeah, not a total fan of Essayist Franzen. What about Franzen The Man? I partly hoped these essays might give me a glimpse or two at the guy behind the fiction. And they did, up to a point.

The first essay, “My Father’s Brain,” explores Alzheimer’s disease, and draws on Franzen’s memories his late father, who had the disease. For most of this piece he remains coldly clinical, until a simple moving passage near the end that displays the grace and humanity of his best fiction.

I also enjoyed reading his curmudgeonly essay about being an owner of near-obsolete technology: a rotary phone, an old stereo that plays vinyl. (In another article he talks about throwing out his old Sony Trinitron.) The guy's old school, and not for any hipster reasons.

I admired his long essay about the author William Gaddis (JR, The Recognitions), in which he brings up valid points about how we approach “difficult” fiction. This gives you some insight into his own approach to writing.

And then there’s the infamous “Harper’s essay” chronicling the author’s growing despair with the American novel, his disillusionment with the publishing industry and the media covering it and a reading public that has a dwindling attention span. The situation seems even more dire today, what with Twitter and Facebook, the explosion of cable and streaming services and binge-watching TV.

It’s a fascinating, if occasionally baggy (one of those awkward quotes above was taken from it) essay, which uses Paula Fox’s 1970 novel Desperate Characters as a springboard to make its points. And there are some intriguing theories about reading and social isolation.

The essay’s companion piece is another famous essay, one he wrote after being dis-invited from the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, which had chosen The Corrections as one of their selections before he publicly criticized it. This vivid and immediate piece is a dark satire about the book – and author – as manipulated product. It cleverly uses a couple of images (a memorial tree, a dish of peas in the refrigerator) to comment on memory, privacy and the soul-sucking nature of consumerist TV.

And then, well…. then there’s the rest.

A long article about Chicago’s terribly inefficient postal system is interesting, but Franzen didn’t have to write it; it’s a disposable piece of journalism, neither especially good nor bad. Ditto about a piece on Big Tobacco, which the author personalizes a little by talking about his attempts to quit smoking. Or an article on the prison-industrial complex.

Other essays – about the changing idea of the city, or an already dated piece about living in the digital age – feel like extended book reviews, of the kind published in The New York Review Of Books. Occasionally an essay’s subject will be make you think of a theme from one of his novels. But the ideas feel more organic when they're integrated into plot and character.

Most of these pieces lack any sense of urgency or passion; they feel more like assignments dashed off between his more serious, and lasting, works. They're brief jobs, not part of any a calling.

[Farren]

Subtitled, YOU KIDS AND YOUR VAN HALEN RECORDS. GET OFF MY LAWN! (by Jonathan Franzen.)

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always been a big fan of Jonathan Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City , and was excited by The Corrections when it first came out. I even liked Freedom, or at least I did while reading it, but found that it disappeared from my brain immediately thereafter, a signal I've grown to trust that says to me that whether the book is at fault or my brain is, the book-brain relationship is in any event a bit of a washout and it may soon be getting time to break up with the half of the relationship that I can conceivably leave and still keep on keepin on from. No one ever said that a literary love affair had to lead to literary nuptials, after all, let alone literary domesticity and the subsequent, inevitable, suburban staying-together-for-the-kids.

I never did officially break up with Mr. Franzen, though, in spite of Oprah/Twitter (not his fault, mostly) and those two Harpers essays (his fault, both, mostly—especially the one on William Gaddis, "Mr. Difficult," the title sez it all, but, n.b. that one is not collected in this volume) but there were actually three, it now appears one of which ("The Reader in Exile,") included herein is quite good indeed, as is a modified version of the first "Why Bother", also included (along with the original, magazine version of the essay, "Perchance to Dream", as an appendix and for comparison's sake.)

I never did officially break up with him because I loved that first novel so much, and in spite of the fact that the novel after Freedom, titled Purity, exacerbated both the page-turnability and forgetability factors to quite a significant and disheartening extent. But, really, the fire had gone out some time before then, and I did not anticipate that there would be anything resembling a rekindling of puppyish affections, either now or in the conceivable future.

But you know what? Thanks be to GR, cos, after so many of you had positive experiences with the new one, Crossroads, I gave a thought to tripping the light fantastic with the tall geeky one again, for old times' sake, at the upcoming high school reunion, but to hedge my bets I decided to do some lurking and suss out just what kind of guy I'd be meeting up with if I did.

Hence this re-read of a completely forgotten book. And again: you know what? I think I really like this guy once more, or maybe always did and am just too timid to admit it to myself, even in private on Twitter. The essays here displayed a thoughtful, caring, well-read, non-judgemental, unjerkish, maturing kind of fella—and all written only a clutch of years after the Oprah debacle had convinced the world that he was simply the worst dead white male still alive. Even Franzen himself thought so. Writing a little about the Oprah debacle in the essay "Meet Me in St Louis" (but mostly about returning to the city of his youth at the behest of Oprah's film crew—who were looking for what's called "B-roll" filler to splice into an interview—after the heartbreaking loss of his parents), look at what my Jonathan has to say about himself:

When I talk to admirers of Winfrey, I’ll experience a glow of gratitude and good will and agree that it’s wonderful to see television expanding the audience for books. When I talk to detractors of Winfrey, I’ll experience the bodily discomfort I felt when we were turning my father’s oak tree into schmaltz, and I’ll complain about the Book Club logo. I’ll get in trouble for this. I’ll achieve unexpected sympathy for Dan Quayle when, in a moment of exhaustion in Oregon, I conflate “high modern” and “art fiction” and use the term “high art” to describe the importance of Proust and Kafka and Faulkner to my writing. I’ll get in trouble for this, too. Winfrey will disinvite me from her show because I seem “conflicted.” I’ll be reviled from coast to coast by outraged populists. I’ll be called a “motherfucker” by an anonymous source in New York magazine, a “pompous prick” in Newsweek, an “ego-blinded snob” in the Boston Globe, and a “spoiled, whiny little brat” in the Chicago Tribune. I’ll consider the possibility, and to some extent believe, that I am all of these things.

He isn't all of those things, dear reader (or even most of of them most of the time, &c). He is, like us, just a fallible human being who loves books, whose little life, as a youthful outsider, was rescued by literature, and who fears for its future more than for his own.

I won't say too much about the other essays, except this: I thought them very much the impassioned, well-researched, relentless equal of his friend David Foster Wallace's, some of which (A Supposedly Fun Thing...) I read just before these. The range of his interests is as impressive as his willingness to be vulnerable, to be the object of his own journalistic inquiries ("My Father's Brain" on his father's affliction with Alzheimers, "Sifting the Ashes," about his addiction to cigarettes). He can even make the Chicago Postal Service interesting, much like DFW does with cruise ship life, and deservedly conducts the reader toward a state of righteous moral outrage in his essay on America's Geneva Convention-smashing SuperMax prisons.

I'll be reading another set of his essays very soon, and maybe even risk heartbreak again with Crossroads, sometime this year. How do I look? Shall I wear white flannel trousers in hopes of a walk along the beach? Forget St. Louis: I've put on Calexico's stunner of a version of Tom T. Hall's immortal classic on obsession, "Tulsa Telephone Book" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hpu...) and shall let my fingers do the walking (as the old Bell Yellow Pages ad used to say)—or the turning of the pages, rather.

Wish me luck!

[Axl Oswaldo · Rating 2 out of 5]

2025/07

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone

I don't tend to trust booktubers blindly, but when I do, it is usually because I have been a follower for quite a few years and our taste is fairly similar. So, I won't blame one of my favorite booktubers for saying this was the best book he had read in 2024 and highly recommending it, when in reality, the experience was far from what he said it would be. Again, I'm not blaming anyone, but I think I know what the problem with this book was, at least from my perspective.

In short, there are two reasons why this book didn't work for me: firstly, it reads too American, so to speak, and secondly, the essays included in this book are rather uneven, with only one being incredibly good, a couple more just decent, and the majority not worth trying. With my first statement, I mean that the book is very local; I feel there are situations that the author mentions here and there that can be understood by American people better, as it is more focused on their culture, society-wise. As for my second statement, the first essay, for instance, which is mainly about the author's father's illness and how his family dealt with it, was not only very realistic and heartbreaking, relatable to some degree, but it was also beautifully written. I remember texting a friend—who is not very fond of Jonathan Franzen and told me so before I picked up the book—and saying to him that he was not a bad writer after all. I stopped being skeptical about the author's writing, but lo and behold, it was too soon for me to say so. As soon as I started reading the second essay, everything collapsed. One more time, I'm not blaming this booktuber, a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy as I am, because I agree with him on many things, but just not on this book.

I also hate when a title can mislead you about the real content of a book, especially when it comes to nonfiction. How to Be Alone has nothing to do with solitude, the art of being alone, or anything about spending time on your own. The phrase I quoted at the beginning of this review is the only part where the author is explicitly talking about this topic, but that's not the main focus, and it never is. Franzen talks about reading and the passion that comes with it, but unfortunately, this is not mentioned very often in the book; instead, he focuses on things that, albeit intriguing at times, might not be for everyone outside of his audience. That being said, my favorite essay, right after "My Father's Brain", has to be "Why Bother?" because it takes you on a journey through the American novel and how the art of writing fiction has changed in recent decades. He focuses on the States, again, and shows how a novel, as an entity, used to be very impactful before the media took over. I wish this had worked through and through, though, because you see a lot of potential content-wise, but alas, the outcome feels weak and simple.

Reading How to Be Alone could have been a better experience, had I not been told, indirectly speaking, that it was an outstanding book. It is not. My conclusion would be, try to read it with low expectations, and something good might come out of it.

P.S. The audiobook narrated by the author himself was well performed. This is probably the primary reason I eventually enjoyed the content a bit more.

My rating on a scale of 1 to 5:

Quality of writing [2/5]
Pace [2/5]
Plot development [2.5/5]
Characters [N/A]
Enjoyability [2/5]
Insightfulness [3/5]
Ease of reading [3.5/5]
Photos/Illustrations [N/A]

Total [15/6] = 2.5 rounded down

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franzen hits the target when literature is being discussed. The career-making accidental cri de coeur ‘Why Bother?’ and ‘The Reader in Exile’ and the Gaddis love-in-cum-demolition ‘Mr. Difficult’ are all sublime pieces, if a little uncertain. The more reflective, personal essays show Franzen’s likeable man-on-the-street intellectualism, especially the Alzheimer’s piece ‘My Father’s Brain’ and the hilarious Oprah-era insight ‘Meet Me in St. Louis.’ He is less successful when broadsheet feature writing. ‘Lost in the Mail’ and ‘Control Units’ are niche articles written in a by-the-numbers journalistic style, with only a few flashes of insight. When it comes to presenting a non-personal alien experience, Franzen is no Foster Wallace. On the whole, a solid compilation of honest and entertaining (if unmemorable) non-fic licks.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review has been revised and can now be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud! I wish the title was more prophetic.

[Fred · Rating 1 out of 5]

to describe my objection to this book of essays i'm going to use a word that i don't quite understand in this context but that feels correct to me somehow: generous. these essays aren't very generous. i'd imagine they were cathartic to write. they certainly do a good job of demonstrating the author's intelligence. but in essay after essay, i found myself waiting for the part where i'd find out why i was supposed to give a fudge about what i was reading. to choose one example that crops up over and over: the author is obsessed with the disappearance of "serious fiction" from the cultural landscape. through several essays, many words, and at least ten different trains of thought, he explores why he (a successful author) need not despair that his life's work is becoming beside the point to most people, even (and this what i think really bugs him) smart, cool people who he would like to be admired by. ultimately he comes to the conclusion that being a blip on the cultural radar is a fine thing to be, and in no way diminishes the worth of his books as compared to flaubert, dickens and other authors who were writing in more novel-centric times. anyway, if you're a big fan of jonathan franzen you may want to check out this book. i liked the corrections alright, but these essays didn't do much for me.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perchance to Bother

This isn’t so much a review of the collection of essays called "How to Be Alone", but some responses to one of the essays, "Why Bother?" (also known as "The Harpers Essay" or "Perchance to Dream").

I’ve probably read the essay in one form or another half-a-dozen times since it was first published in 1996. I have to admit that each time the experience has become less satisfactory.

The essay is 42 pages long. Franzen cut about 25% of the Harper’s Essay and changed its name.

Still, the essay reveals a mind in flux rather than a mind that had come to a persuasive conclusion.

There is nothing wrong with failing to come to a conclusion, as long as your liberty, life or limb don’t depend on one. However, reading the essay is like watching a saucepan boil and trying to attribute value to every bubble. The exercise could have been a lot shorter and more rewarding for the reader if, with the benefit of hindsight, Franzen had known what he wanted to say or where he wanted his journey to take him.

Desperate Authors

The essay starts with despair and ends with an inadequately defined embrace of community. In a way, he hints that his journey has taken him from perdition to salvation.

However, did it really, and if so, how did it do it?

His despair is described as a despair about the American novel. However, even this statement, his very first paragraph, comes across as disingenuous, because in the very next sentence, he reveals that he and his wife had recently separated. Later, they reconcile, separate again and eventually divorce. So the reader has to wonder to what extent his dissatisfaction with the state of the novel reflects the objective state of the novel, his inability to say what he wants to say in a novel of his own, or his unhappiness with his lot in life.

Was he just projecting his own despair onto the state of the novel? How narcissistic was he? (Or was he just being ironic?)

Perchance to Dream of Escape

Franzen’s initial response was to dream of escape: "I wanted to hide from America". The singular state of the novel is compounded in the united states of America. No matter where he tried to hide, he discovered no haven. He felt he needed to be alone. He needed to retreat to a monastery, not to recover or to prepare for some achievement, but to dream, self-indulgently, without the accountability that living in the real world insists on.

His vision comes to him as he reads the words of a character in Paula Fox’ novel, "Desperate Characters":

"God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside."

Franzen, in the midst of his state of despair, can be no worse and no better than society. His crumbling marriage is no different from the crumbling social order. Still, he manages to ask whether his distress derives from an internal sickness or the sickness of society. Does he blame himself or does he blame society? He doesn’t really answer the question, for he recognises in his approach the desire to connect the personal and the social.

He has equated the two in adversity and despair. The challenge is to connect them in prosperity.

From a Distance

The irony is that Franzen didn’t so much try to join society on its own terms, to become "one of them" or "one of us". He continued to relate to society, to them, to us, as a writer looking on it from a distance. The only compromise he considered was to move a step from dark and contrarian to "culturally engaged".

Society rewarded him with "the silence of irrelevance". He responded to its diffidence by wondering whether the slow work of writing and reading had become incompatible with the "hyperkinesis of modern life". He gets more depressed. He speculates that:

"...the novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read. Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"

A Solitary Man

Franzen recognises that "the essence of fiction is solitary work". Then he realizes that the rest of society has also sought refuge in "an atomized privacy".

While we might embrace virtual communities as a remedy for our atomization, he tends to regard them as a symptom of infantilization, because our participation remains "terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user". There is no genuine, robust community, if we indulge our desire to control, to dictate, to marginalise and to ostracise at will.

Franzen can’t even determine whether reading is the cure or the sickness:

"It’s hard to consider literature a medicine...when reading it serves mainly to deepen your depressing estrangement from the mainstream."

Franzen then describes a character in "Desperate Characters" in language that could equally be applied to many readers and non-readers alike:

"No matter how gorgeous and comic [their] torments are, and no matter how profoundly human [they appear] in light of those torments, a reader who loves [them] can’t help wondering whether perhaps treatment by a mental-health-care provider wouldn’t be the best course all round."

Novelist and Audience

Ironically, again, at this moment of suggestion that character, writer and reader might share an affliction, Franzen returns to the differential between novelist and audience. He looks at the question of audience from the outside, not from within.

He doesn’t stop to acknowledge that every time he reads something written by another writer (whether an author, journalist or reader), he is a member of an audience.

The Social Isolation of the Author and the Reader

The analysis of audience throws up the term "social isolate", the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone else. Some even become authors who are perceived as antisocial and are prone to living in exile or seclusion, either way not playing the game of publicity that can link author and audience.

His friend Shirley Brice Heath gets straight to the point:

"You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."

Although he adds to this description the need to make money, or at least a subsistence living, it encapsulates some of the paradoxes of authorship.

The writer is essentially isolated, but needs to communicate.

The anomaly is that the object of the desire to communicate is not the audience, but the author’s own imaginary world. It is a personal construct, a self-contained product of the social isolate. No matter how much writers might feel their characters come alive, they don’t genuinely answer back, they don’t say or do anything without the author’s imprimatur.

While authors might not know the outcome of their work until they have written the last word, ultimately it is determined, if not predetermined by the author.

Unpredicabilty

In contrast, Shirley Brice Heath defines "substantive works of fiction" in terms of "unpredictability": they help the reader "come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life".

Readers find in these works of fiction "the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically."

Yet again, Franzen differentiates between writer and reader. Each requires the other. Together, they can form one community, but they are a community of differences. They do not share a perspective, they have contrasting needs and opposite perspectives on the same need:

"Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness."

The Role of Isolation

Again, there are paradoxes in this neat statement.

It can be construed as asserting that solitude is a means to an end, the end being the pursuit of substance in life and society. On the other hand, it might be suggesting that solitude is an end, that the solitude of the reader can escape loneliness and attain contentment by virtue of the illusion that the writing which we read and our response is internal. We look inwards to escape loneliness, but not necessarily so that we can look outwards.

It’s almost as if Franzen would be content with a happy solipsist.

The Identity of DeLillo

As Franzen’s essay reaches its conclusion, he quotes a private correspondence with Don DeLillo, in which DeLillo wrote by way of encouragement of our depressed essayist:

"Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture, but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."

In a postscript, DeLillo adds:

"If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end."

DeLillo’s script and postscript need each other to form a complete picture. The first passage is almost exclusively focused on the writer, while the second arguably focuses on the function of reading substantive fiction for the audience.

Perhaps DeLillo and Franzen both have in mind a benevolent didacticism. However, I think it’s a mistake if Franzen sees himself as having joined a community of like minds. All that he has managed to do is persuade himself that there is a legitimate reason for him to continue writing the type of novel he likes to write. The community he envisages is still differentiated between writers and readers. There is still a sense in which he believes that the reading of his fiction will give us, the audience, identity and character.

The Politics of Identity

Franzen doesn’t investigate the purposiveness of identity. There is still a sense in which identity is trapped within a solipsistic inner world of culture whereby authors slide trays of tasty morsels under the locked door of our prison.

I’d argue that, with a better sense of identity, we can interact with others better and do the things that life requires of us more effectively.

While writing might occasionally constitute "art for art’s sake", it doesn’t necessarily follow that reading does.

A reader reads something different to what the writer wrote. The reader’s reaction is not just the reciprocal of what the writer experienced or intended. It has the potential to launch a healthier, happier reader into the community of both family and society.

In other words, reading has the potential to remedy the isolation of the social isolate.

How to Be Social

I suspect that Franzen’s prognosis stops short of this remedy. He seems to be content with a mutual dependency between two social isolates, the writer and the reader. His conclusion might work for himself, the writer, but it stops short of what is required by the reader who wishes to play a full role in society.

Ultimately, Franzen instructs readers in how not be lonely, but is content to show us "how to be alone". He has simply moved the reader one step from "lonely" to "alone".

However, identity is of necessity social. Perhaps, the isolation of the reader needs to be seen as a means, not an end. Perhaps the role of writing and reading is not to sustain isolation, but to enhance the dynamic of society. Perhaps readers need equal guidance in “how to be social”.




Post Script:

My edition seems to be an early paperback edition that did not yet incorporate the 2002 essay, "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books". I'll return to this essay later.

[Andrew]

A lot of people bitch about Jonathan Franzen, and probably with good reason. Especially in a nation in which mainstream aesthetic values have become conflated with democracy (facepalm), he's viewed as an out-of-touch elitist, an academic leftist, who-- unlike other academic leftists-- actually winds up on bestseller lists, and thus forces his opinions into the national conversation. In fact, he's one of the few American writers today who actually seems willing to challenge the status quo, and furthermore is well-known enough-- even by, say, my mom's neighbors in Iowa-- to actually provoke a conversation. And if you're getting repped by Obama and Oprah, that doesn't hurt.

But I love the guy. I love his unapologetic defense of his stance, his unrelenting criticism, and his bizarrely hopeful fiction. And I loved these essays, ranging from journalistic investigation of dysfunctional institutions to personal recollections (probably not my favorite arrow in Franzen's quiver) to acerbic commentary on the '90s and its airheaded late-capitalist triumphalism.

And it's because I found myself agreeing with Franzen's narratives-- as the sort of person who tends to think of happiness as an indication of either ignorance or collaboration (unsure of which is worse), antisocial attitudes as a sign of a vigorous independent spirit, and "love" as going home with the same person from the same bar three nights out in a row, and recognizing that all of these are awful personal problems that need to be remedied. If you are similar, you'll probably wind up pumping your fist and shit. If not, there's a very real chance you'll hate it. Up to you.

[Mara · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Jonathan Franzen doesn't know I exist and couldn't possibly have written this just to show up as confirmation during a week when I needed exactly this sort of confirmation, right? So it just felt that way.

Also it could be the title attracted me because cultivating the sort of isolation required for reading and writing does mean being a little dangerously far from the herd and I am ambivalent about it, just as I have an odd little relationship with goodreads because it's a way of not being alone in something I do very much alone. I worry about letting it change my interaction with the books themselves, that I could become like one of those obnoxious hikers who "bags peaks" crossing them off a life-list rather than enjoying the mountain she's on, or that I could get distracted from the reading itself thinking about what I was going to say about it. But neither of those has really happened, mostly. The reading is still done in solitude, even if it becomes a place to connect with other people later -- and goodreads has served more than anything to help guide me towards other books I need to read, so maybe Mr. Franzen wouldn't disapprove.

I am coming up on a year of tracking my reading here and do feel strange about the absence of review-y type comments on the things I've read (this one's anomalous and is only tangentially about Franzen, maybe partly out of fear of spoiling it somehow for someone who hasn't read this book), but I am pretty sure I am not a reviewer/critic type. It's enough, I think, that the ideas I suck out of books get regurgitated in my journals. I know my star ratings are completely arbitrary and once in a while I even revise them. I also wish I used shelves better so that at least my Hessean glass bead game of associations could be played out virtually. But I don't. So I have to trust that there is value in the lists themselves, and in noting what my friends are reading.

And it isn't the whole value of the lists, but this morning I sat and counted how many books I have read in this last year and it was strange, because I think of myself as having finished an odd handful of books, that I read slowly and never have enough time, but the actual objective evidence actually surprised me, making me aware of how far apart one's self-image and reality can be. Which is one of the dangers of the alone thing.

Anyway, this book, and the fact that I can go on and on about everything else and then barely articulate except in breathless exclamations that I read every word of essays on prisons and post offices, which normally I'd be skimming, bored, and, and, and he had a better answer to the question of "Why write?" than I found in Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead, and I like how he handled the question of whose fault it is when a book is too hard, and, and, and the tobacco essay! and the essay "Meet Me in St. Louis" made me cry! and nothing being over-simplified, and nothing as depressing as the Birdwatching in America essay which I still think of as one of the most depressing things I have ever read, ever, (four years ago? five? I can call up the room I was in and the stunned inability to cope after I finished it). So I don't do it justice, which is a good reason NOT to do reviews, but I can say his was exactly the voice I needed to hear telling me that that one can be alone without being estranged from humanity, telling me that where I am is where I need to be and how I am is okay to be.

[Lyubov · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am sorry to say that this particular collection of essays turned out to be utterly boring. The only two of them, that are interesting are Why Bother? (a marvelous musings of Franzen over the importance of the novel and the reading as a whole as well as about the lesser interest towards literature in the modern world) and Meet Me at Saint Louis (you will learn the story of Franzen and Oprah`s dispute, how he was invited to be part of her book club with The Corrections and then uninvited because he was not telling the appropriate things in public).

You can just read these two essays and be done with the book.

[G.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

No offense to Jonathan Franzen—whose novels I’ve not yet read—but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this collection of his essays. Surprised because many of them were written more than twenty years ago and are about subjects that I’m completely unfamiliar with. Who’d have thought than an essay about the Chicago Post Office (“Lost in the Mail,” 1994), for example, or the (hitherto unknown to me) American novelist William Gaddis (“Mr. Difficult,” 2002) would be so interesting?

As an ex-smoker I found the essay on cigarettes (“Sifting the Ashes,” 1996) wonderfully nostalgic. “Time stops for the duration of a cigarette,” Franzen observes, “when you’re smoking, you’re acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious forward rush of life.”

Another essay, “Control Units” (1995), about the “Federal Correctional Complex” in Florence, Colorado, now seems positively prescient in this age of mass incarceration.

There’s also the wonderful “Meet Me in St. Louis” (2001), a painfully hilarious account of Franzen’s attempts to help provide “B-roll filler footage to intercut with ‘A-roll’ footage of me speaking” about The Corrections with Oprah Winfrey on her televised Book Club.

“The Reader in Exile” (1995) is a lengthy rebuttal of Sven Birkets assumption, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age “that books must somehow ‘serve’ us.

I love novels as much as Birkets does, and I, too, have felt rescued by them. I’m moved by his pleading, as a lobbyist in the cause of literature, for the intellectual subsidy of his client. But novelists want their work to be enjoyed, not taken as medicine.

Franzen ends with the aphoristic observation that serves as the collection’s title: “But the first lesson that reading teaches is how to be alone.” Yes, one feels: that’s exactly right.

Probably the most famous—and certainly the most moving—essay included here is “My Father’s Brain” (2001). Franzen doesn’t take issue with “the most common trope of Alzheimer’s: that its particular sadness and horror stem from the sufferer’s loss of his or her ‘self’ long before the body dies.” But observing his father’s decline, he is “struck, above all, by the apparent persistence of his will.” Returning from a Thanksgiving dinner at home to the secure dementia unit where he must now live, his father says, clearly and firmly, “Better not to leave than to have to come back.” Franzen understands that “he was requesting that he be spared the pain of being dragged back toward consciousness and memory”; and that the crash that followed “amounted to a relinquishment of that will, a letting-go, an embrace of madness in the face of unbearable emotion.” It’s a novelist’s view, or to put it another way, a story Franzen tells about his father—but then how else are we to comprehend what happens to us and to those we love?

[iva° · Rating 5 out of 5]

"prva lekcija kojoj nas čitanje uči jest lekcija o tome kako biti sam."

„kako biti sam“ zbirka je od 14 eseja koje je franzen pisao između 1994. i 2002. u kojima se bavi temama koje su –ma gdje god čitatelj bio- jednako aktualne. kažem „ma gdje god čitatelj bio“ jer franzen piše iz naglašeno američke perspektive i bavi se, prvenstveno, američkim sustavom, ali širina njegovog teksta omogućava stanovnicima svijeta da prepoznaju paradoks, frustraciju, glupost, tugu, besmisao itd. problema kojima se bavi. predmeti njegovog interesa u ovim esejima (poštanski sustav/služba, duhan i pušenje, mediji (tv i internet) protiv pisane riječi, zatvorski sustav, alzheimerova bolest, privatnost/intima, william gaddis, selfhelp knjige o seksu, njegove pripreme za gostovanje kod ophre..) globalno su prepoznatljivi i, po mom mišljenju, problematika nije svojstvena samo amerikancima, već svakoj zdravorazumnoj osobi.

kroz sve eseje poput maglice provlači se depresija kao temelj/polazišna točka/odredišna točka – bilo da franzen priznaje svoju depresiju ili ju iščitavamo kroz (ne)djelovanja njegovih aktera – na koncu, i depresija je jedan od tih općeraširenih problema (n)ovog doba.

silno mi se sviđa kako taj čovjek razmišlja i kako piše... dubok je, a istovremeno nije zamoran, duhovit je, punokrvan, širok, divnog jezičnog repertoara. makar nisam sklona esejima i vrlo, vrlo rijetko posežem za njima, nakon čitanja ove knjige osjećam se bogatijom... pročišćenog, urednijeg mišljenja. kao da mi je ušao u mozak i napravio reda tamo unutra. :D

[Ned · Rating 4 out of 5]

My interest in this author is based, in part, on how his life and mine intersect, however inconspicuously. He was born a few months before me, in Saint Louis, where I have now lived for over 30 years, and we both share a love of reading. I have visited the neighborhood of his well-worn neighborhood any number of times, and one of my favorite people in the world lived there – a lady 30 years my senior with whom I worked and, oddly, first introduced me to Cormac McCarthy. Like Franzen, she and I both shared a love of reading and did not shy from “difficult” books (mostly true, I’ve still not attempted many of the more challenging, great ones). Blanche is now long since gone, but our special kinship, and our many hours at work together in the corporate world of science, will forever remain a part of me. I retired this year, so my reading and reflections have picked up, and it was time that I resumed my plan to read all the Franzen books in order (having picked up an autographed copy of Crossroads last year). “How to be Alone” is a title that likely intended, in part (no thread of interpretation goes unanalyzed by Franzen), to represent his seemingly solitary life as a writer in New York City. The whole series of essays (written in the mid to late 1990s, a couple after the turn of the millennia). Being a Midwesterner by birth, Jonathan’s point of view is what I imagine mine might have been had I pursued seriously my own early love of literary fiction. His intellect and deep thinking on culture and the human condition are shockingly astute, far beyond what I could ever have achieved (instead I became a technical expert in an area of science, going full immersion in the delights of the molecular world and establishing a mode of analysis or two). Franzen’s path led him to commercial success, which he begrudgingly laments later in life, this book being published just before he hit it big with “The Corrections” and got into hot water with Oprah Winfrey. He lamented the death of the novel, due to a lack of serious readers in the information age of the 1990s. I look forward to reading his later essays, as his incredibly prophetic voice professed nearly 30 years ago. My journey will continue, as I plan to read his essays and his novels in the order in which they were published. This means I’m decades behind, but with hindsight I found these essays uniquely illuminating, as our whirlwind of culture and its immediate propagation through television, the internet and now, the ”social media” makes news stories a few years old nearly forgotten. Franzen catalogues the major news of the day in a way that preserves their truth forever in the written word, in actual books made of paper and sitting on shelves. We both worry about the ultimate fate of those bookshelves, living quietly in the studies of individual humans. What will become of them, where will those special, well-thumbed, dog-eared or revered hardbacks end up? It is with this trepidation that I ventured back to the events occurring when we were in our 30s, a time just before 9/11, a time before our obsession with worldwide extremism came to the forefront of ordinary Americans.

The first chapter is his accounting of his father’s descent into the horrors of Alzheimer’s disease, just beginning to be more seriously understood and publicized. My first book was The Corrections, where he chronicles in fiction the patriarch’s disease and an experimental treatment that, alas, did not significantly alter it. I did first read The Corrections, then read his first and second novels chronologically. Franzen and his three older brothers visit their mother as she deals with her intelligent husband, as he drifts away, mourning him long before his body stops breathing. His mother’s letters to him are heartbreaking. Franzen captures this in his essay, we feel it intensely.

The Imperial Bedroom obsesses on the fascination of the public for Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (remember when that was the top news story for months on end?). It seems almost quaint by today’s standards, where the Me-Too movement clashes with the plausible deniability of many affairs of our future commander in chief, who is blasting through our national psyche and rapidly readjusting the mores with shocking speed (I’ll be interested in seeing what Franzen says about this in later essays).

The third essay is the long lament about the lack of “serious” readers of fiction, as Franzen wonders if what he is doing will matter. He asks more of the reader than is customary in most fiction – don’t expect to be entertained, necessarily, though that is a requirement that is taken seriously and for which he certainly succeeded, for me, in the 3 novels I’ve read. He spends a great deal of time describing the best post WW2 novel, “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox – he esteems it higher than Heller, Updike, Bellow, DeLillo, Roth and the like. And I happen to have it beside me right now, having purchased it recently and seeing if I share his joy.

Jonathan covers a great deal of other territory in great depth, such as the Postal crisis in the city of Chicago, and the factors behind the gross incompetence and downright fraud – another tale of the dissolution of the capabilities of the modern large city beginning in the 1970s, when investment fled to the suburbs and experienced leaders and workers abandoned urban areas. He attacks the problem with the zeal of an investigative journalist, exposing the problems and explaining how our structure of our civilization accounts for these types of big city problems. His views are not colored by an apparent political bias, his point of view seemingly interested in true understanding. This is an example of where his voice has authority and importance, in the tradition of Christopher Hitchens.

Jon’s dalliance with smoking, all the while understanding the data and risks, he invokes, is described along with the big Tobacco industry. He makes some surprising findings, such as the labeling indemnifies this powerful industry and led to their continued success.

Another chapter discusses the perplexing state of the judicial system in the 1990s, where our incarceration rates soared. A modern state penitentiary and the way the federal government usurped and stole local power spoiled the booster’s hopes that it would save the economy of a small Colorado town.

As far as I know these essays were produced for their own sake, not reprints of magazine or news pieces that he’s also a major contributor for. Franzen seems to be protective of us readers, so those pieces with his name on it are original and fresh. He’s earned his reputation and its consequences honestly, coming from humble beginnings and creating a singular human individual voice in our culture of noise.

He spends a great deal of time breaking down The Recognitions (William Gaddis) which, impressively, he has read multiple times. His description scared me, and I have relegated this tome to the likes of Pynchon and DFW and that southerner Faulkner and the old Irishman Joyce. This holds a revered yet intimidating section on my shelf - to be approached sparingly and when I've got the energy to give them their due.

My impression of Franzen was heightened after reading these nonfiction essays, and I look forward to my journey as he (and I, vicariously) traverse the rest of the first quarter of the 21st century.

[Shibbo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minha preguiça mortal do Franzen já virou lenda entre meus amigos, que me olham cheios de condescendência pensando - imagino - coisas como "ah, mas ela não sabe ler/não leu direito/não entendeu/é retardadinha".

Jonathan Franzen é bom um escritor? É.
Jonathan Franzen é um bom ensaísta/jornalista/whatever? Depois de ler esse livro, me sinto forçada a responder que sim.
Jonathan Franzen é o melhor escritor da nossa época e merece todo esse incenso em torno de sua preciosa bundinha letrada? Mas nem fodendo.

Eu gosto bastante do Correções. Mas chorei sangue de vergonha alheia em boa parte do Zona de Desconforto e acho o Liberdade um dos livros mais supervalorizados da história. Eu também poderia dizer aqui que seria legal e de bom tom se o Franzen parasse de escrever uma cena memorável sobre cocô em cada um dos seus romances, mas não vou fazer isso.

Tem essa historinha que diz que após a morte do DFW, o Franzen resolveu que ia tomar para si o posto de grande promessa da literatura norte-americana. Eu não sei bem até onde isso é verdade - e se é verdade é uma história babaca tanto pelo simples fato de existir quanto pelo fato de ficarem escrevendo sobre isso (o que faz de mim uma perfeita babaca nesse momento), mas o ponto é que nem vale a pena ficar comparando JF e DFW. Não que um seja melhor que o outro, mas porque nem tem por onde começar a comparar. Os dois são escritores completamente diferentes, com temas diferentes, amplitudes diferentes, tudo diferente. Talvez a única coisa em que eles se irmanem seja no fato de que quando são chatos, os dois são chatos pra caralho.

Eu tenho esse projeto de ler tudo o que Franzen escreveu só pra poder ter total liberdade de antipatizar com ele e confesso que o "Como ficar sozinho" acabou atrapalhando meu intento. O livro tem tudo o que me faz achar o Franzen um chato. A saber: o lance de "estou aqui abrindo meu coração e, risos, meu coração é superior a todos os outros, então até meu lixo emocional é um excelente lixo emocional"; o ar de escândalo e de "vamos dizer um monte de verdades aqui!" gerador de longos parágrafos de mimimi que soam como uma soprano leve leve particularmente irritante soltando agudinhos por páginas e páginas; a aura professoral e os bracinhos balançando apopléticos enquanto ele denuncia num tom apocalíptico o mundo conectado e a tecnologia e o fim de tudo e todos; a mania de enfiar passarinhos e birdwatching em todos os contextos que você conseguir imaginar e mais um monte de manias bestas. O problema é que o livro consegue ter momentos excelentes que passam por cima de tudo isso. "O Fradinho Chinês", reportagem que era pra ser sobre a indústria chinesa e em algum momento vira um ensaio sobre observação de pássaros e "Qual é a importância", uma análise do papel do escritor no ~mundo contemporâneo~ são textos tão bons que nem a vozinha chata, entojada e neurótica do Franzen consegue estragar. E se um autor que pra mim é intragável escreve textos com sua vozinha insuportável e os textos não são insuportáveis, bom, eu tenho que baixar a cabeça, respeitar e recomendar o livro. E deixar bem claro que não me lembro de ter cocô nesse daqui.

[Girish Gowda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Firstly, you need to know, some of these essays have very little to do with the title of this book. And the ones that do, touch on the topic only tangentially.

In fact, not until I was past a couple of these essays, did I realize that Franzen was not on about the "physical" isolation or aloneness per se but on a metaphysical level, which is ok. About how do you maintain your sense of belongingness in the world when you're bombarded with otherness. How to be alone in your thinking and be ok with what you've made out of the world, where you've made few observations, and have serious thoughts about it. Here are a couple of compelling paragraphs (not full essays or pages, it reduces down to paragraphs and lines), but most of it is overwritten. Seamless writing is not Franzen's forte. He admittedly likes writing long-winded sentences generously peppered with uncommon words. There is some humour here and there that did make me giggle hard enough for someone to ask me what's the matter, but I can counter every bit of that with how unpleasant the rest of the experience was.

[Caryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book sounded interesting, but when it comes down to it, Jonathan Franzen's personality keeps getting in the way. He's got a pole up his ass, and he's so damned full of himself. Anything interesting he might have to say is mitigated by the annoyance caused by hearing his persnickety voice in my head. I might agree with some of his ideas if agreeing with him didn't make me feel somehow dirty.

[Filip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published over at my blog, The Grimoire Reliquary.

Whatever you say about Jonathan Franzen (and there’s plenty to say, no small amount of it critical), you can’t deny the man his insight. He’s a fine writer, as this collection of republished essays proves; though they all originate in the 90s and very early 2000s, few come across as dated; the topics Franzen addresses continue toi bear relevance, twenty, thirty years on. Most of them, anyway.

Like most essay collections, How To Be Alone is a mixed bag. Some of the essays, I couldn’t stand–“Control Units” in particular, committed the sin of boring me, despite an interest in the way the American prison-industrial complex works. The tedium of it exhausted me physically. Similiarly, I read the last essay, “Inauguration Day, January 2001,” two days ago and I already can’t recall what it was about.

The essays I found touching were personal in their scope–“My Father’s Brain,” a story about Franzen’s personal experiences with the Alzheimer’s that dismantled his father piece by piece, over several years. “Meet Me In St. Louis,” the second to last essay, helps frame this collection, being about Franzen’s revisiting of his home neighbourhood after his mother’s death. This latter essay is also about his troubled time as an Oprah author, which was…amusing, in part.

Franzen’s take on the commodification of sex in “Books In Bed” is on point; “Lost in Mail,” which ponders the fate of the Chicago Postal service, might’ve been good if I remembered it; “Why Bother,” the famous “Harper’s Essay” with an updated ending, I found to be thoroughly uninspiring; the essay itself is more haughty than anything else.

Did this collection of essays teach me how to be alone? Not really, no. If you’d like to learn more about loneliness from a collection of essays, read Rachel Cusk’s brilliant Canterbury. You’ll get far better value for the time you invest than you’ll get from this. And, I would argue, better rhetoric, too.

Ah, well. It was a fine first taste of Franzen.

[Nikola Jankovic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pročitao sam dve Frantzenova knjige. Na prvi pogled su dosta slične, govore o američkim porodicama iz predgrađa, i napisane su u istom stilu. Ali, dok me je Sloboda oduševila, Korekcije su me ostavile hladnog.

Slično je i sa ovom zbirkom eseja. Najbolji su "My Father's Brain" i "First City". Prvi je kombinacija porodične istorije i činjenica o Parkinsonovoj bolesti. Svakako je mnogo izdvojiti 10 dolara za Kindle izdanje zbog jednog eseja od par desetina strana - ali ako nekih tridesetak strana vredi toliko, onda vrede ove. Drugi je pogled na gradove - pre svega na američke gradove, a ponajviše na NYC. Zašto su američki gradovi manje interesantni od evropskih i zbog čega vredi živeti samo u New Yorku? Poklapa se sa mojim shvatanjima o privlačnosti života u centru vitalnih gradova, a i podseća me na argumente zbog kojih već tvrdim da je Beograd "mali New York" :)

Ostali tekstovi imaju nesporan kvalitet. Dobar je na primer i "Sifting the Ashes", esej u odbranu pušenja i o istoriji duvanske industrije, ali je problem da su napisani u periodu 1994 - 2001. Ako autor govori o uticaju tehnologije na književnost, a tekst je napisan u vreme prvih e-mailova, onda i nije više toliko relevantan. Ima i drugih primera socijalnih eseja i diskusija na aktuelne teme - ali džabe kad su napisane pre velikih promena u društvu. Šta kažete na tekst o najavi tehnoloških promena u narednih desetak godina - koji je napisan pre dvadeset?

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franzen is somewhat dark, but in a real world, plain in front of you real and dark. I like his explanations, his inclusion of family and his truthfulness. Perhaps his explanations are a mirror for me, but I had read a few of these essays before they appeared in this book. He is worth the poke of prod and read. He is infinitely human, and his work is readable, and ultimately, human in its dimension of honesty. I find it lovable and laudable, in that, he worries about readers understanding his writing. He is careful with words and hones the words to reflect exactly what he wants to convey. I am a teacher, and each day I try to go forth with optimism. Yes I say, I am going to succeed today. I am going to teach! They will learn! Ah, perhaps this is why I love Franzen - I would say that in the morning I am an optimist. I exchange breath somehow in the middle of the day and become, like the smoker in one of his essays, a pessimist. Franzen is just that, but he is a writer for those who are patient to read slowly, think deeply and, ultimately, love the reward of the interchange. You will think about some of the essays for a long time. I gave it 4 stars because I have read other works and felt this one had some tentative spots. In closing, he was not overly enthusiastic when Oprah chose him. He liked his little world and his choices. So perfect, so typically Franzen. Dip into it -- you can read an essay here and there and like a lovely cookie, you don't have to eat the whole box.

[Anni · Rating 4 out of 5]

The piece on his father's Alzheimer's disease alone is worth the four stars.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to Be Alone è una raccolta di saggi pubblicati in vari momenti, il cui trait d'union, a quanto pare, è "the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone". Inoltre l'intero libro vuole essere, almeno parzialmente, "a record fo a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance - even a celebration - of being a reader and a writer".

A differenza di "Zona disagio", gli argomenti non sono quasi mai personali (anche se vengono spesso trattati in modo personale): si parla di scrittura, di lettura e di ruolo dell'autore e della letteratura, sì, ma anche della question di privacy, di posta, di sigarette, di città e di carceri. Franzen scrive un paio di saggi personali: "My Father's Brain", che è molto commovente nonostante il tono apparentemente asettico, e "Erika Imports", brevissimo e, personalmente, dimenticabile.

Trovo l'approccio apocalittico di Franzen nei confronti della tecnologia imperante e della cultura/lettura/scrittura viste come progressivamente perdenti, nella società attuale, decisamente esagerato perlomeno nei toni se non nei contenuti. Le sue sono riflessioni interessanti, però, soprattutto quando si chiede se è corretto che l'autore scriva per il pubblico o per l'arte (ovvero è corretto abbassarsi al livello del pubblico oppure è meglio rispettare l'integrità artistica?), che cerchi di creare un romanzo sociale, oppure semplicemente parli di quello che gli interessa. E' interessante quando si chiede qual è il ruolo dello scrittore e della letteratura al giorno d'oggi, e su quanto l'avvento della televisione e della tecnologia siano influenti. Certo spesso i saggi sono evidentemente datati (parliamo fondamentalmente degli anni Novanta), però certi nodi tematici sono sempre attuali.

A posteriori, ammetto che non è stata una scelta molto illuminata. Molti dei saggi proposti affrontano temi che non mi interessano, anche se devo ammettere che l'autore riesce sempre ad essere piacevole nel suo approccio.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's rare I find myself agreeing with the New york Times, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, but their descriptions of Jonathan Franzen as a "pompous prick, an "ego-blinded snob", and a "spoiled,whiny little brat" are spot on.

While the language is just as complex and florid as in his novels, these essays reveal far to much about the man behind the typewriter, and none of it is flattering.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

The answer is books!

[Kathrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Franzen, we know you've been busy writing the Great American Novel and all, but you are overdue for a new collection of essays that embraces (or at least nods towards) the 21st century. Several of these essays claim a date somewhere in the 90's, but I swear his ode to rotary phones could be decades older. Has he not been introduced to the cell phone? He speaks of Touch-Tones as cutting edge communication devices. In 1995 he gave away a television that appears to have doubled as side table; how long did this antique crowd up his closet? Decades. Is it really forsaking something when that thing has been obsolete for ages anyway? More kudos for giving up that HD flatscreen that is actually tempting. Anyway, I'm crazy to hear Franzen's thoughts on the collision of technology and "high art" in the form of an ereader, a manifestation of Franzen's multiple contradictory notions of art and social/cultural relevance.

Franzen is full of contradictions, and what makes him so likable to me is his full willingness to admit them. "At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between a feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved." He's drawn to write both a Contract novel and the Status novel, a relationship of an author with his reader versus a relationship between the work and the genius works of our literary canon. He's both sympathetic to Oprah's ability to bring literature to television viewers, and he's an "ego-blinded snob" and a complete asshole. He's a smoker who hates it when other people smoke. He resents sentimental portrayals of himself as the Midwestern author, and yet voluntarily submitted his own personal space as a set-piece for a phony coming-home.

I jumped in to this book looking for answers to the questions I put to him during my reading of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, namely, can a person truly elevate their cultural understanding and artistic appreciation despite the gun at their head pushing their nose in a book? What if it's not a gun; what if it's pizza? (No reference here to Guernsey -- it's Pizza Hut's social charity of the late 90's, I believe...)The gods of commerce want you to read, and you'll be rewarded -- with pizza. Why do the gods of commerce want you to read? Well, it looks good in the ad space. Eh! says it worked for her, so I'm not going to knock it. Franzen tells us there are two kinds of serial readers -- those who have or had at least one serial-reading parent, and thus learned the habit through mimicry, or those who are just naturally "socially isolated." Not "anti-social," those are the techie nerds who find sanctuary in an inanimate world. Social isolates look for community in a fictional world of personalities, either because they have no realworld community of their own, or it doesn't fit their expectations. OK. So what's happening on Guernsey? No one here has demonstrated a serial-reading parent. Is this a group of social isolates? Well, this is a "society," (A group of social isolates doesn't even make sense), they are not feeling cut off from their own community, yet their community has been substantially "cut off," with all these Nazis around. Is the society fleeing the real world for the consolations of the imaginary? If so, I didn't see the authors writing it that way; most of the characters just seemed to have had a dormant identification with the works of Seneca or Wordsworth, and it wasn't until this experiment that the identifications were discovered. Really? Sentimental fairy dust, if you ask me, or, probably, if you were to ask Franzen.
So I'm glad I came to this collection looking for answers; I got more answers than I knew I was looking for. I enjoyed everything Franzen has to say about reading, however contradictory he poses it. His treatises on post offices, prisons, cigarettes, all interesting, if not already a bit too dated. His defense of reading difficult fiction, such as Gaddis, is both inspiring and equally off-putting, perhaps the same pleasantly contradictory experience I'll have in reading Freedom.

[Robert Isenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a stick in the mud.

Jonathan Franzen should appeal to a guy like me: hip, Gen X, a thorough essayist and reporter, and a beloved New Yorker writer to boot. We share a certain level of technophobia and affection for found objects. What's not to love?

First, he's one of these novelists who can't understand why nobody reads anymore, and his woe-is-me loathing for TV and pop culture becomes very, very wearying. Franzen is either (a) not a happy person at all, or (b) pretends to be unhappier than he is, which is potentially worse. He loves his Midwestern crystallis but keeps claiming to be a hardened New Yorker; he doesn't have to pick one or the other, but the embellished inner-conflict is as irritating as an armpit rash.

There are essays I loved, such as Franzen's exploration of the Chicago Postal Service (chaos incarnate), a history of the U.S. cigarette industry (surprisingly empathetic, even if the tobacco companies are indisputably evil), and a study of New York's history and topography (always enjoyable). But they are overshadowed by lugubrious tirades against all things modern -- a yearning for the good ol' days with a dull liberal twist. This is 1990's territory, the whimpering of a depressive too cool for actual therapy. It's no wonder the book was option in mid-2001 and published after September 11; this is the last volume in a dying genre -- The World According to Self-Loathing Novelists brand of nonfiction.

I'm currently reading Eco's "Turning Back the Clock," a similar collection of essays and editorials by an author obese with knowledge, reason, and wit. Franzen may be beloved for writing "The Corrections," a novel so autobiographical it's barely masked as fiction, but I hope never to have to stomach him again.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should preface this by saying that I don't really like books that are just repackaged essays or features from magazines, and if I'd been aware that that's what this was, I might not have been so eager to read it. As it was, I'd just finished reading 'The Corrections' and wanted to get my hands on anything Franzen related as soon as possible. This book slowed that urge to a screeching halt.

It's not as if Franzen is a bad writer. Far from it. He's amazingly smart and talented, and surprisingly honest. I just don't like repackaged essays. They tend to feel outdated (probably because they are), and the features in here just don't really ring true the same way they may once have in a pre-9/11 world. The article about mail delivery, for example, was boring and lacked weight, given that 1)I'm not from Chicago, and 2)Undelivered mail would be the least of the USPS' worries shortly after the article was published.

I didn't hate it though. There were some genuinely good articles, such as the "Harper's Essay" (which felt a bit outdated as well, but provided some insight into Franzen's thought process going into the writing of 'The Corrections') and the one about his father's battle with Alzheimer's was touching and real.

I like Franzen very much. He comes across as a bit of a pretentious guy, but he seems to be aware of that and can be self-deprecating about it as well, so I don't hold it against him too much. However, I'm simply not wild about this collection, but it has more to do with Franzen's choice of subjects than the writer himself.