Mark Bold

The best essays in Jonathan Franzen’s collection How To Be Alone are really only a set of appendices to his bestselling novel The Corrections; some of the others, although often thought-provoking and very well-written, seem to exist only to crave attention, and have little substance other than providing an insight into the author’s self-absorption and exploration of his American identity. But in the interstices of the collection, there are some refreshing and revealing insights into the nature of modernity, and into a mass culture that is frighteningly out of control.

Perhaps the most poignant piece of writing in the collection is not an essay, but the memoir ‘My Father’s Brain’, about Franzen’s father’s decline and death from Alzheimer’s disease, and the effects this has on his family. This casts revealing autobiographical light on the suffering of Alfred Lambert in The Corrections, who succumbs to Parkinson’s Disease and throws such a long shadow over the actions and ambitions of the other characters in the novel. Franzen’s reflections on his own father’s decline show up, perhaps, some of the painful experience and reflection that found its way into the bestseller. There is a telling discussion on the status and nature of personal health in modern American society. Franzen notes, “our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism – our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution”. He seems to want to understand the illness in a completely rational way, almost without any compassion, and almost with a degree of annoyance, you begin to feel. On hearing about the disease, he describes his suspicion, “It seemed to me another instance of the medicalization of human experience, the latest entry in the ever-expanding nomenclature of victimhood.” You sigh, and realise that maybe this is the clever white man’s way of coping. He buries himself in books to come to terms with what is happening to his father’s biology. He brings out his theme of being alone as the disease destroys the brain and it becomes more and more difficult for his father to distinguish private thoughts and actions from those spoken out loud and performed in front of nurses and family. It is a profound meditation on the notion of individuality.

The essay that the entire collection is formed around is the famous 1996 ‘Perchance to Dream’ article from Harper’s magazine, here reprinted with the more telling title ‘Why Bother?’. It is the story of the motives and creative journey behind The Corrections, a story that takes us from depression and writer’s block, to the genesis of a bestseller. It stands out from all the other essays in the collection as being from the heart, written in fury and put together with passion.

It is the early nineties, and Franzen is depressed. The first gulf war is on TV and his marriage has broken down. He’s trying to start a third novel, but finds he cannot fit everything he wants to say about the collapse of modern society into the seemingly narrow scope of a social novel. Roth’s autopsy of the social novel, the ubiquity of TV and the electronic fragmentation of society, SUVs and suburbanization are all playing on his mind. “The dollar is the yardstick of cultural authority,” he laments. “Rangers and Land Cruisers and Voyagers that were the true spoils of a war waged to keep American gasoline cheaper than dirt, a war that had been played like a thousand-hour infomercial for high technology, a consumer’s war dispensed through commercial television.” Sentences like these throughout the essay are raw and powerful, and highlight the bloated, meaningless culture that Franzen wants to satirize in the novel that would become The Corrections. But his concerns move onto the status of the novel in contemporary society, and its inadequacy for analysis and holding up a mirror to the flaws of mass culture when the culture itself thrives on the cult of the new and has so little time to read. The time it takes to craft a social novel, especially with the broad cyclorama Franzen wishes to paint behind his characters, takes so long, that the aspects of modernity he wants to mock will have moved on and made his work almost nostalgic. Luckily, this essay has perhaps become even more relevant as the absurdities of modernity grow. It can be read again and again, and because of its engaging power, always throws up something relevant and illuminating.

Another essay works from the opposite direction as ‘Why Bother’, in being an analysis of the popularity of The Corrections. It is a nice footnote to the novel, and deals with the ambitions, influences and creative processes that went into it. In the awkwardly titled ‘Mr Difficult’, Franzen deals with feedback he has had from readers of his bestseller, opening out into a discussion of high and low culture, and the meaning and status of fiction in a consumer society. Franzen seeks a balance between the novel as a work of art, and as populist entertainment, and dwells on rereadings of the notoriously difficult writer William Gaddis. That The Corrections is such a great novel, and so popular, is a testament to Franzen’s near-obsessive concern over these issues.

The rest of the collection of essays in How To Be Alone, however, profess to illuminate different ways of avoiding the noise and distraction of mass culture, but are mostly harmless and sometimes self-indulgent Sunday supplement pieces. They are often humourless, and sometimes strain in their earnestness. He takes on cigarette corporations and city planners, crass TV content and reclaimed consumer refuse. He takes us around a post office and a prison. But there is no real bite to these articles, as there is to the more personal meditations, and, in fact, his persistent use of the 1st person in his writing seems to keep the author’s primacy in focus far too much of the time.

Franzen is not quite the Montaigne of our time, as Harper’s claim in the blurb; however, as a critic of the absurdity of modern consumer culture, it is difficult to disagree with him. But what really marks this collection out is the extra detail and background he gives to The Corrections, surely one of the most important and culturally engaged novels of recent times.

FRANZEN, Jonathan (2004), How To Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial