How to Be Alone: Essays | Jonathan Franzen

How to Be Alone: Essays | Jonathan Franzen | Superb collection

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How to Be Alone: E...

	How to Be Alone: Essays Jonathan Franzen, 2002 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jonathan Frantzen's "The Harper's Essay" is reprinted in "How To Be Alone", alongside the personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage. 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 struggle with Alzheimer's disease and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

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Amazing.

I was looking at the wide range of reviews this book has gotten, and it completely strikes me as appropriate that this books garners the reviews that it does. Consider a quote within the very book:

"The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us - we don't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow."

Franzen does not appear to be writing to appeal to everyone - he intends to speak directly on a particular subject that has riled his heart from the beginning, a riling that only a select set of people will embrace. Those that recognize what he speaks of will quickly see the subtext behind all of his writings and see how his selection of essays paints a grand picture of aloneness without seeming to really touch upon the issue directly. Instead, he attacks the idea of it from every angle he knows, as a novelist, from the view of prisons and technology, as one dealing with the past and the present. All is said without saying anything on the topic and it is in this tremendous work that his words carry the careful reader through.

Not all readers will make it to the end. But that is the nature of the book. As many saw only in Catch-22 absurdity and stupidity, I am sure people will regard this book to be likewise. Yet, 'tis not to his audience he writes.

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Superb collection

"How To Be Alone" by Jonathan Franzen is the most remarkable collection of essays I've read so far. Perhaps there's a better one, perhaps there are other authors whose mastery of language is sufficient enough to awaken my curiosity about the power of words over feelings. Perhaps, but I'm simply not aware of any other (hint! Help me find them). And in all honesty, I'm not sorry. Because once I've read Franzen, I've discovered the reasons behind my personal amazement of what language is. It is the realization that words carry feelings. Well, not quite. Words possess meaning and their poetic use delivers perception (yes that sounds better). Think about it. 7 million years of humanoid evolution and while the body slowly adapted its physiology to the demands of the environment, our brains played sluggish catch-up. And now, here we are, utilizing a language created only about 100,000 ago with a mind that is still learning how to cope with the billions of thoughts and physiological responses to everything imaginable, and at the same time being bombarded with words, most of which have already lost their sparkle even before the second cup of coffee is finished, and suddenly we discover Franzen's essay - the one beacon in the darkness of the mundane ocean of the familiar, the cliché - and it's shining like a sun, pointing to the only source of emotions and meaning, reminding us of why we think, why we feel, why we live. Like a skillful organ player, Mr. Franzen manipulates the keys and pedals of words to create in me a frame of mind, feelings and dreams. And that's what I call art.

I recommend this book to everyone who has ever wondered what it means to be a skillful writer. Even if you don't agree with what Mr. Franzen stands for, you are obligated (by the power of the written word) to take some time and read one of his essays (my recommendation is the 'Harper' essay. You won't be disappointed).

- by Simon Cleveland

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As a novelist, Franzen is a great essayist

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

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Delving into America's psyche

Franzen's collection of essays is about a variety of different topics, but it is ultimately about the isolation and alienation a person can feel in today's modern world.

Each of the essays is well crafted and thoughtful. Topics as divergent as a father's death, fame, and the postal service come up here. But, at the core, Franzen explores how we grow apart as more things are created to bring us together.

The most poignant essay is the one about the deterioration of Franzen's dad. It gives a son's account of what it feels like to slowly lose a parent. The reader can feel the slow dread and sorrow that the failing of a once mighty human being can bring. Another interesting essay concerns Franzen's thoughts about the Oprah controversy.

If you want to know more about the American psyche, read this.

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Brilliant but Outdated

First off I'll say that I love Franzen's writing style and his dry sense of humor. The problem I had with this book is that because most of the essays were written in the mid to late 90s and all were written before 9/11, much of his observations have been rendered, in my opinion, obsolete. The world became a different place after 9/11 and the start of the war, etc. - and his observations on the zeitgeist, obviously, don't reflect that change.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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