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How to Be Alone: Essays

3.61 of 5 stars 3.61 · rating details · 5,219 ratings · 490 reviews

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 repr...more

Hardcover, 278 pages

Published October 1st 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published September 1st 2002)

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Oct 22, 2012 Steve aka Sckenda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Lonely Readers

Shelves: essays, about-books, writers, community

"How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader." (94)

"Picking up a novel after dinner represents a kind of cultural Je refuse!" (90)

How to Be Alone collects 14 essays by Jonathan Franzen that are centered around the theme of loneliness. I was intrigued with Franzen’s sense of how reading demands a life of solitude and how deep reading makes us an exile.

In “Why Bother?,” Franzen declares that books are not good for your mental health because good books serve mainly to deepen a dedicated reader’...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars

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

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Sep 22, 2008 Carly rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: elderly techno-phobes

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 wit...more

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Dec 15, 2007 Fred rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 a...more

11 likes · like · see review

Aug 05, 2010 Farren added it · review of another edition

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

17 likes · like · see review

Nov 13, 2008 booklady rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2008, autobiography, books-on-books, family, history, non-fiction, philosophy

Update: 13 November 2008 Franzen surprised me by saving the best for last. His second from the last essay, "Meet Me in St. Louis" turned out to be the best by far. It's the most personal and also brings the book back to where it started, his childhood home and mine, St. Louis. The first essay, "My Father's Brain" is about his father's slow drift into Alzheimers and the author's own reluctance to accept where his father's going. It is poignant in its understatedness.

In "Meet Me in St. Louis" Fra...more Update: 13 November 2008 Franzen surprised me by saving the best for last. His second from the last essay, "Meet Me in St. Louis" turned out to be the best by far. It's the most personal and also brings the book back to where it started, his childhood home and mine, St. Louis. The first essay, "My Father's Brain" is about his father's slow drift into Alzheimers and the author's own reluctance to accept where his father's going. It is poignant in its understatedness.

In "Meet Me in St. Louis" Franzen is reluctantly drug back to St. Louis 'to produce a short visual biography and an impressionistic summary of The Corrections' (his best selling novel) to be featured by Oprah. However, Franzen has called New York City home for many years; with his parents dead and his siblings moved away, St. Louis is an empty city for him. Franzen does an excellent job of describing the painful process of revisiting places which bring back memories he's tried to forget. He doesn't want to be there: this isn't home anymore; the final days of his mother's life come back to him; the house has become just a building--devoid of the people he loved who gave it any meaning. Yet with ironic self-deprecation, Franzen sees how his difficulty is making the director and photographer's jobs impossible and he attempts to ameliorate. Other reviewers have called him whiny. I think he's honest and through his honesty in admitting things which might be embarrassing or uncomfortable for some, his readers can see that perhaps they -- we -- are not quite so alone as we thought we were.

So I give the whole set of essays three stars, but they vary considerably. Besides the ones I have mentioned above and below, I thought "Control Units" was also very good; it's about the prisons built in Colorado.

Overall, recommended. I definitely want to read his novels.

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While I'm not a reader of essays as a general rule, I picked this up on a sale table because the title and cover (a woman in a bookstore) intrigued me. Franzen's essays cover a whole gamut of subjects from personal memoirs to very Upton Sinclair-ish, The Jungle-indictment of the U.S. Post Office, as if that needed proving--still it was arresting. There was a similar expose of the cigarette industry but with the author taking an atypical view. As a smoker himself, who had quit, started again and was obviously trying to quit again, Franzen wasn't blaming anyone for his habit, which is what makes that particular essay his strongest and also (probably) his least popular in the collection.

However, most of the essays have very little to do with 'being alone'; the title merely comes from the last line in the seventh essay, "The Reader in Exile", "...the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone." As an author, Franzen laments the slow social trend away from reading toward more technological behaviors. Also from the seventh essay, "For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born..." Understandably an author trying to earn a living is not going to be thrilled that people read less today than they did in years gone by. However, he also is quick to point out that there are also more readers alive today than in years gone. Does this even out the score for struggling, starving authors? I'm not sure.

I'm more than 3/4 through the book at this point and all the essays have been written in the mid-nineties. Although somewhat dated, they are still thought-provoking. (less)

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Sep 22, 2008 Kat rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: eyeopening

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 wri...more

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booklady You gave it four stars. What did you think of it? I got this on sale and have had it on my 'to-read' pile for a long time . . . but somehow I never se...more
Sep 22, 2008 12:03am

Kat 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 truthfuln...more
Sep 22, 2008 01:10pm

booklady What a perfectly delightful description! You have tantalized and intrigued me with your explanation and I had just vowed I wasn't going to keep adding...more
Sep 22, 2008 01:35pm

Dec 19, 2007 Patrick rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: boring magazine enthusiasts

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 h...more

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Aug 27, 2007 Nidhi rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone with an hour to kill

He is a fairly pompous writer. I will start with that because it's important to know the tone from which you will be inflicted pages and pages of advice on how to be "proper" reader in today's society. This book is a series of essays written by Jonathan Franzen recently as well as revisited essays from his past. He laments the fall of the novelist, the over-importance put to privacy and the lack of care afforded to the the public, and deteriorating postal systems (this essay, I must be honest, I...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Ariadna73 rated it 4 of 5 stars

Check out what I wrote in my blog: http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?bl...

11-21-2011: I loved each one of these essays. The one I enjoyed the most was the one about Oprah and how everything she does is so money-oriented; no wonder why she is so rich. I would re-read many of these to get ideas for my arguents when I try to defend obvious causes that everyone try to deceive in lieu of fashion or political correctness.

10-19-2011: These essays are fascinating. I read one about the corruption in the...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Karl Groll rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The following quotes are taken from How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. Page numbers are provided from the hardcover published by FSG in 2002, ISBN: 0-374-17327-3.

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One of the great adaptive virtues of our brains, the feature that makes our gray matter so much smarter than any machine yet devised, is our ability to forget almost everything that has ever happened to us. 9

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The world of the present is a world in which the richer lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single ve...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Ashley rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012, non-fiction

So this was my first Franzen experience, and the only thought that really comes to mind is "what took me so long?!"

I've been a big David Foster Wallace fan for about a year and obviously know of their friendship, but it wasn't until I read D.T. Max's biography (which, as a whole, I really didn't enjoy) and saw the letters between Wallace and Franzen that I was really inspired to check out his stuff.

I figured it would be pretty decent, but I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. There were...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Ben Dutton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jonathan Franzen is one of the wunderkinds of modern American letters. Justly praised for his 2001 novel, The Corrections, he nevertheless became the subject of much criticism when that novel was selected for the Oprah Winfrey book club only to have his inclusion rescinded when he expressed doubts about it. He was also targeted because, in 1996, in Harpers Magazine, he had published an essay entitled Perchance to Dream (now renamed Why Bother?) in which he posed a number of question about the pu...more Jonathan Franzen is one of the wunderkinds of modern American letters. Justly praised for his 2001 novel, The Corrections, he nevertheless became the subject of much criticism when that novel was selected for the Oprah Winfrey book club only to have his inclusion rescinded when he expressed doubts about it. He was also targeted because, in 1996, in Harpers Magazine, he had published an essay entitled Perchance to Dream (now renamed Why Bother?) in which he posed a number of question about the purpose of fiction in the present day and seemed to have promised that his next novel would be “a big social novel that would engaged with mainstream culture and rejuvenate American literature” and critics wondered if he had achieved it with The Corrections. Following the furore Franzen saw fit to release that original essay with a collection of other essays (including one about the Oprah fiasco) with the intention, it seems, of setting the record straight, to “Make clear what I had said and what I hadn’t said”.

Reading How To Be Alone in this light, one is forced to constantly ask the question: what is Franzen’s intent? Has he set the record straight? There are thirteen essays that make up this book and they cover subjects disparate as writing, the American prison system, tobacco companies, advertising and the Chicago postal service. One phrase crops up frequently in the first 100 or so pages and it is where the title comes from, as Franzen meditates upon the nature of solitude, of trying to find a quiet corner in a crazy world. There are moments of rage, of disgust, of misunderstand, of alienation. As with all the best essays, his discourse wanders – in one essay he will take in the gentrification of a suburb, encyclopaedias, sewers, rock stars, historical city development and the status of a city surrounded by wilderness. His knowledge is wide, his scope epic. Nobody could accuse Franzen of myopia.

As is the way with all such essay collections, How To Be Alone does not always work. Erika Imports is much too slight to make any impact, and Books in Bed fails to get into the depth of its subject. When it works, though, it works exceptionally well.(less)

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Jan 05, 2012 Christina Marie Rau rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The last time I was in the library, Jonathan Franzen written along a spine caught my eye. Why did I want to read this book? Where had I heard this name? The book looked brand new. However, most of its essays are from the late 90s and early 2000s. The political and social references are fascinating because they are now all in hindsight. Most (if not all) are pre-September 11th. They are all pre-current-economic-meltdown and new President Obama.

The essence of the essays are timeless. From learnin...more

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Aug 17, 2011 Shana Kennedy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Great quote from this book that I really relate to:
"...I admit an almost physical craving for the comforts of the suburban mall. Natural opiates flood my neural receptors when I step from the parking lot into the airlock...I have cash in my wallet, my skin is white, and I feel utterly, utterly welcome...
"My craving for city life feels entirely different... cities represent an older, less advanced stage in the development of buying and selling, in which producers work cheek by jowl with consumers...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Ron rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Franzen's essays are fairly wide ranging and somewhat mixed in quality, yet somehow manage all to be a little bit autobiographical in their expression of his alienation from the world.

The famous Harper's essay is as good as advertised, and Mr. Difficult is a wonderful mini-biography of Gaddis couched as a defense of difficult literature, but The Reader in Exile is insipid and Books in Bed does little more than illustrate Franzen's own sexual repression. The First City and Lost in the Mail (reall...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Rowena rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hmm, good, okay-but-something-went-a-bit-wrong

this is the first work i've read by jonathan franzen, and quite possibly the first work of nonfiction i've voluntarily read.

he started off well with the essay about his father, which was sad and for me, relatable to a degree. so i liked him.

then i got to "why bother?"/the harper's essay, and his lament of technology's growth didn't sit well with me. after all, without the internet, i wouldn't have known about him or found many of the authors/musicians i currently enjoy. and of course his anti-te...more this is the first work i've read by jonathan franzen, and quite possibly the first work of nonfiction i've voluntarily read.

he started off well with the essay about his father, which was sad and for me, relatable to a degree. so i liked him.

then i got to "why bother?"/the harper's essay, and his lament of technology's growth didn't sit well with me. after all, without the internet, i wouldn't have known about him or found many of the authors/musicians i currently enjoy. and of course his anti-technology sentiments then permeated almost all of his essays. so i read them and was alternately like 'ok this is a pretty good read' or like 'what' at some of the more ridiculous sentences which i can't recall atm. sometimes he seemed to forget that machines are manmade. and intended to enhance life.

and it's not like i am huge on technology either. i have a shitty ass phone and i don't even have texting which is unfortunate because apparently this leads to having no friends unless you want to call people all the time which is not always appropriate. BUT I DIGRESS. even if technology sort of stunts social situations, it's not like it's terrible and we should just do everything on typewriters and crappy old machines. it's certainly not destroying the future of the novel. come on, he really thinks someone who reads 'social novels'/'literature' would abandon reading just because he now has a tv?? give people some credit, jeez. he even mentioned that people in the less technologically advanced past preferred shitty books over 'literature'. it's always been this way!

despite this, though, there were enjoyable parts. my favorite essay was "meet me in st louis". i do like his writing, just not all his points. the book has an appealing concept, though sometimes i found myself wondering why i was reading about the post office or cigarettes (yes, he explained how they related to being alone, but the connections seemed kind of tenuous i guess).

not sure if i would recommend this collection, but i'm probably still going to read his fiction.(less)

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Dec 19, 2010 Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is actually the first Franzen book I've read; I plan to read The Corrections and Freedom in the not too distant future. HTBA is a collection of nonfiction essays, shorter versions of which previously appeared in magazines, which I've never read because I don't read magazines.

The first thing I noticed about his writing style is the comfort and ease with which he wields a large vocabulary. It is apparent early on that Jon Franzen isn't trying to impress you with words he knows, but at the sam...more

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Dec 15, 2010 Phillip Twining rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Throughout The Corrections and this book, the second I've read, I'm constantly oscillating from being at odds and being in accord with Jonathan Franzen. But whatever arguments or statements he makes in his essays, they seem to only be a departure point for him to try to figure out his own identity in the corporatized, neoliberal, and aggressive consumer culture of America... or at least most of them. I couldn't figure out where some of these essays found a place in this collection of "how to be...more

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Apr 27, 2010 Tim Smith rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There are interesting essays in this book! None of them are about being a novelist. Anyone who loved The Corrections should read "My Father's Brain" and "Meet Me In St. Louis" (and Bukowski fans will appreciate "Lost in the Mail") but anyone who doesn't themselves write literary fiction would be best-served by giving themselves permission to quickly page through the agitated hand-wringing over the Fate of the Novel or the Corrosive Effect of Technology on Culture or Isn't It Terrible, How We Tal...more

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Jun 14, 2009 Chelsea rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really, really liked this book, well, collection of essays. It's something
that I picked up for C. T. for Christmas (he posted a brief review but I can't find it) as well as for myself at the same time, it looked so interesting. The title, I've found, is a little misleading, it's not so much about how to achive the state of alone-ness as it is about how to spend that alone time. But even then, it's makes no directives, merely puts forth ideas for you to ponder at your leisure. And ponder I did....more I really, really liked this book, well, collection of essays. It's something
that I picked up for C. T. for Christmas (he posted a brief review but I can't find it) as well as for myself at the same time, it looked so interesting. The title, I've found, is a little misleading, it's not so much about how to achive the state of alone-ness as it is about how to spend that alone time. But even then, it's makes no directives, merely puts forth ideas for you to ponder at your leisure. And ponder I did. So much, in fact, that it took me literally months to finish. The essays rang in topic from the nature of fiction, to the state of the US Postal Service, to sex self-help books. Some are stronger than others, but all are at least worth a read.

Of the dozen or so essays, I found "Why Bother?" (otherwise known as "The Harper's Essay") to be probably the most thought provoking, but I don't feel right talking about it here until I've gotten a chance to read it again, when my brain's a bit less rusty, and I can take notes. In this essay he writes about reading, what it means to be a reader, what people are reading, and the state of fiction (good fiction) in today's digital, drive-thru age. I will leave you with the following quote:

Last summer... as I talked to readers and writers and and pondered the Heathian "social isolate," there was growing inside me a realuization that my condition was not a disease but a nature. How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader. My nature has been waiting for me all along, and now it welcomed me... How could I have thought I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the "real" world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it.

The next quote I have for you is a thing of beauty. An example of why I love his writing style. It's from an essay titled "Sifting the Ashes" (about smoking and the tobacco industy.)

When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchai, the monoxide and cyanide binding to theirr hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts. Cigarettes are a distillation of a more general paranoia that besets our culture, the awful knowledge of our bodies' fragility in a world of molecular hazards. They scare the hell out of me.

In addition to discussion his own history with smoking and his thoughts on the habit, he talks at length about the tobacco industry and its development over the years. He shifts the guilt in poisoning millions of people from the CEOs and CFOs of the mega-million dollar corporations to the lawyers representing said organizations. The management, he says, have wanted to make their products safer and have spent money developing safer products, but the lawyers convinced them that in releasing something branded as "safe" they're acknowledging that
they are indeed not safe. While true, I still say that these men (and they are for the most part men) retain the free will with which they were born. If they, as companies, hadn't dug themselves a hole in the first place, refusing to admit when they were beginning to get defintive information about the health risks associated with smoking. At the same time, I can't believe that the American legal system continues to grant large sums of money to winners in civil suits against the manufacturers of products that are clearly labeled and well known to be dangerous. It just blows my mind. Like "duh. if you supersize every time you eat at McDonald's, yes, you are going to get fat."

This is one essay in particular for which I would have liked to have seen an extended bibliography and some more formal citation. It's clear that he's done a lot of research, I would just like to know where it was he's drawing all of these conclusions from.

Well, flipping back through the pages that I dog-eared to note they contained passages of interest, I realized that without really really long quotes, they would make no sense out context. I well leave them, then, to you to discover on your own. I will close by saying again that this is a fantastic collection of essays. At times, I can't help but feeling that Franzen is more than just a little full of himself (something which he'll readily admit in certain contexts) then again, it's hard to make such strong assertions without at least a strong foot to stand on. His ruminations can sometimes be self-centered, but usually in such an intro-spective way that the reader can come along for the ride, thinking for themselves how they would stand in the same situation.(less)

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Jul 27, 2012 Cailin Deery rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This collection of essays started off very strong for me; the first was an essay about his father’s brain, at least superficially, after he received a disturbing Valentine’s Day package from his mother. The package included a few innocuous, V-Day-related items along with a factual report of how much his father’s brain weighed after it was removed as part of a post-mortem examination. This piece then explores what memory is – both in terms of Franzen’s own self-awareness (from the details he reme...more This collection of essays started off very strong for me; the first was an essay about his father’s brain, at least superficially, after he received a disturbing Valentine’s Day package from his mother. The package included a few innocuous, V-Day-related items along with a factual report of how much his father’s brain weighed after it was removed as part of a post-mortem examination. This piece then explores what memory is – both in terms of Franzen’s own self-awareness (from the details he remembers from the morning this package arrived to the episodes from his childhood that come back to him time and again), as well as the more impersonal developments in cognitive sciences/neurochemical research at the time. When his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it was a trendy new disease just achieving currency; much of the essay synchronizes Alzheimer’s as the general public learned more about the disease alongside his own father’s deterioration. I love what he says about memory: “according to the latest models, [memory constitutes] a set of hardwired neuronal connections among the pertinent regions of the brain” … it is a “’temporary constellation’ of activity – a necessarily approximate excitation of neural circuits that bind a set of sensory images and semantic data into the momentary sensation of a remembered whole.”

It’s also implied from ‘My Father’s Brain,’ that Franzen has digitally scanned every fragment of written text he has, and every scrap of otherwise digitizable communication, to create a kind of personal corpus. When he wonders if “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” were ever mentioned, a query pulls up only one instance in all of his mother’s letters (when she once mentioned an old German woman Franzen worked for in his teens).

Also, on Alzheimer’s: “[It’s a] slowing down of death, a prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its otherwise tightly conjoined parts – death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, and then death of body.” Franzen’s understanding and then account of Alzheimer’s reminded me of Ramachandran’s in its accessibility and elegance.

From here, however, this essay collection strikes me as extremely dated. It’s a bit unfair to say, since the referents are what tipped me off to start with (Kenneth Star, America Online, moaning about CDs taking over cassette tapes (which, by the way is a term that was taken out of the Concise version of the OED: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08...)) (My god, I really love parentheses). Franzen is unbecoming in much of this essay collection. I kept revising titles in my mind to ‘Yet Another Chip on Franzen’s Shoulder.’ He moans about the postal service, about others’ affinity towards lingerie, about declining literacy and the death of the novel (at one point, if I remember correctly, he likens not reading to self-immolation!), about the promise of the internet, blah blah BLAH blah blah. Though as Franzen seems to have quite clearly modeled some of the characters in the Corrections on his own life, well, Chip taught Critical Theory. The collection also includes ‘the Harper’s Essay,’ which he received a great deal of attention for (real title, “Perchance to Dream.”). In the introduction to this collection, written in 2002, he says this about that famous essay: “I opened the April 1996 Harper’s and found an essay, evidently written by me, that began with a five-thousand-word complaint of such painful stridency and tenuous logic that even I couldn’t quite follow it. In the five years since I’d written the essay, I’d managed to forget that I used to be a very angry and theory-minded person. I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don’t read much Henry James.” Rereading the introduction after enduring much of the moaning is actually quite a relief. Franzen finds himself just as insufferable as I do! I feel a bit reconciled with the older version of himself now.

So if you’re inclined to pick this collection up, I’d recommend the first and last essays, definitely, and the Harper’s Essay if you’d like to gawk at a bit of a roadside accident.(less)

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Jun 13, 2012 James rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is my first audiobook review on Goodreads. I've probably listened to a dozen or so audiobooks over the years, but I'm not a fan because I don't really care for being read to. My attention wanders too much. I don't feel as if I've really 'read' the book in question. It has been my practice to listen to radio show podcasts on my Ipod when driving to North Carolina to visit my girlfriend, but with the Ipod and my CD player on the fritz, I've been forced lately to listen to books on tape.
I'm t...more This is my first audiobook review on Goodreads. I've probably listened to a dozen or so audiobooks over the years, but I'm not a fan because I don't really care for being read to. My attention wanders too much. I don't feel as if I've really 'read' the book in question. It has been my practice to listen to radio show podcasts on my Ipod when driving to North Carolina to visit my girlfriend, but with the Ipod and my CD player on the fritz, I've been forced lately to listen to books on tape.
I'm the only person I know, it seems, who hasn't read The Corrections. I had read a number of the pieces in this collection when they first appeared in Harper's, most notably the notorious lament for the American novel called "Perchance to Dream," which is revised and retitled here as "Why Bother?". Franzen is, without question, an accomplished stylist. His prose is snappy and there is great pleasure to be had, sentence by sentence, in its clarity and precision. His sensibility, however, couldn't be less congenial to me. He is a birder. He loves Henry James and he believes, with an off-putting moral fervor, that you should, too. Unlike, he smugly asserts, seemingly every other American man, he finds lingerie "scarcely less hokey than a Superbowl half-time show." In fact, he goes on, "What I feel when I hear that the mainstream actually buys this stuff is the same garden-variety alienation I feel on learning that Hootie and the Blowfish* sold thirteen million copies of their first record, or that the American male's dream date is Cindy Crawford. In a sense, I'm proud of not being like everyone else." Gee, you don't say. I, on the other hand, am the kind of fellow who prefers a garter belt to Wings of the Dove every single time.
I don't have to agree with or like the writers I admire. I love Celine and Flannery O'Connor, and I am neither an anti-Semite nor a Catholic. I guess I feel about Franzen about the way I feel about Spike Lee. I enjoy the work (although Franzen needs to eschew the subject of the literary novel's shrinking readership for a while), but find the public personality tiresome.
*Cheap shot. Even the writers on the tv show Friends felt hip enough to hate on Hootie.(less)

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Feb 24, 2011 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

The thing that I like about this book is that it's written by a fellow curmudgeon who likes to complain about the current state the world. Hey! I like to do that too! For most of the book Mr. Franzen bemoans the decline of the literary novel, the wastefulness of modern society, the miserly plight of the working author, the degeneration of culture and the questionable morality of the criminal justice system. He complains a lot.

But Mr. Franzen's complaints are not like my complaints. That's to say...more

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Sep 19, 2007 Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars

I bought this used hardcover at the Williamsburg Flea Market. I wish I had read this collection of essays, reviews and whatnot a few years ago, when it came out, because about half of it seems pretty dated (railing against touchtone phones and CDs). But still worth reading. I've come to enjoy Franzen's vinegar drinking non-fiction voice, probably more than I would enjoy actually knowing the man. I guess I should bite the bullet and read The Corrections, like everyone else.

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Jun 21, 2012 James Payne rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, journalism, media, memoirs, nonfiction

The literary equivalent of the DLC or New Labor.

This dude is every white dude over 35 that lives in Chicago.

Internet-phobia really takes me back to when people were unbelievably myopic and were paid to write about it in the New Yorker, a.k.a. no it doesn't, I was like 10, I can't believe anyone ever wrote that they wondered if the Internet was actually "big news," I was like 10 and I knew the Internet was a "big news." This is who people pay $$$$ to write about the world?

("In a culture of false...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Kathrina rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: essays-interviews

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 l...more 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.(less)

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Sep 22, 2010 Dhitri rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: jonathan-franzen

I usually steer clear from a book that merely repackages past essays but as I was waiting for my turn to borrow Franzen's latest work from the library, I figured I may as well pick up this book (another was his memoir) to fill in the gap. So I went into the book with minimal expectations, hoping to just skim through it. But I was transfixed the moment I read his opening essay, an account on Alzheimer and how his father, suffering long from the terrible disease, had slowly drifted into oblivion a...more

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Jan 24, 2013 Brandon Floyd rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Franzen is ferociously intelligent -he knows it, he wants us to know it too. How to Be Alone is curated as well as any book of essays can be, and even trends toward exceptional in relating seemingly disparate topics to one another by way of the collection's central theme. But there's such a removed voice here, of privilege, or an awareness of self-entitlement that borders on celebration, that makes these otherwise engaging essays seem smug and oddly labored. Not labored in a working sense, but a...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Andrew added it · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, jonathan-franzen

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 fu...more

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About Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction; the novels The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion; and two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, all published by FSG. His fourth novel, Freedom, was published in the fall of 2010.

Franzen's other honors include a 1988 Whiting Writers' Award, Granta's Best Of Young Ameri...more

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“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.” — 164 people liked it

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.” — 111 people liked it

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