How To Be Alone

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002

Jonathan Franzen was depressed.

He was worried that the Internet was accelerating American culture on a fast track to becoming a banal, unreading homogeneity. He despaired over the disappearance of true community into the vacuous ether of the World Wide Web. He fretted over what this meant for America. What will become of a culture once all the readers have gone extinct? But, he was also afraid of becoming obsolete. He is, after all, a novelist.

And novelists, he felt, have a hard time of it nowadays. Gone are the times when writers can reclusively garner illustrious reputations like J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy. Serious novelists, it appeared to Franzen, must compete for an ever-dwindling audience of serious readers in a market increasingly saturated with non-serious readers and books.

Franzen recounts his despair with wry humor. He describes his emergence from it with humility:

I recognize that a person writing confessionally for a national magazine* may have less than triple-A credibility in asserting that genuine reclusiveness is simply not an option, either psychologically or financially, for writers born after Sputnik. It may be that I’ve become a gregarious traitor. But in belatedly following my books out of the house, doing some journalism and even hitting a few parties, I’ve felt less as if I’m introducing myself to the world than as if I’m introducing the world to myself. Once I stepped outside my bubble of despair I found that almost everyone I met shared many of my fears, and that other writers shared all of them.

I picked up Franzen’s collection of essays, How To Be Alone, because the title exuded immediacy and humanity. Franzen is frank with his fears, but circumspect with his evaluations.

The plight of the contemporary novelists, he realizes, is laughable compared to Herman Melville’s life and toil. It may be necessary for a writer to resist shallow fame, even to the point of obscurity, if he is to resist a culture of inauthentic mass-marketed image. But, it also doesn’t hurt to be in touch with the world.

Many of Franzen’s conclusions are most germane to writers. Everyone, however, should feel resonance with his observations. His distrust in the claims of technology, pop-psychology and mass-media entertainment are balanced by his distrust of the nostalgia that once gripped him.

Franzen’s style is immediate and human, his concerns are relevant and his elucidations are poignant. Read him.

*An earlier version of “Why Bother” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1996 under the title, “Perchance to Dream.”