How to Be Alone

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.

If nothing else the title is enough to make this book engaging. In our popularity oriented, herd minded society there is an almost compulsive urge to at least pick up this book.But this book goes far beyond its title; comprising an incredibly engaging set of essays touching on many different aspects of self, especially in relation to our ever more complex and noisy society, as well as delving into the state of literature today. Often seemingly gilded with melancholy, Franzen's heartfelt seeking of truth and understanding resonates within those who read it. From the story of his father's slow death through Alzheimer's in "My Father's Brain" to the self-discovery brought on by his love of literary culture, and the rediscovering the source of that love in "The Reader in Exile" the reader is reminded of hard lessons learned.Aloneness has a stigma in our society as something to be feared and avoided. While this book does not seek to celebrate isolationism it does show it as something not to be feared. Reading itself is the very act of indulgent alones and Franzen exposes the beauty there, as well as our own desire for the individuality that comes with aloneness.

Right now I'm reading for the second time How to Be Alone, a collection of essays that touch upon various aspects of the Self - notably the alienated Self - within modern American society. It's a topic of which I'll never tire. But here's the twist - Franzen's diverse treatments are not united so much by a historical or sociological sensibility as they are by an intimacy between writer and reader. The act of reading is the meditation Franzen wants us to make (regardless of subject) and he achieves that well. This is a book about the ability to be alone - really, truly alone, to the point where we are able to suffer and learn in our pain and loneliness rather than giving up the ghost and popping SSRIs along with the rest of the nation. One will have to actually sit down, shut up, and plunge into the unknown in order to read, sharing the ups and downs of the writer. As Franzen notes, the reader has to bring something TO a book, rather than unequivocally expecting, always, something FROM a book without offering anything. This book asks us to give a little bit, for which we get a lot."Why Bother" is an essay arguing that our current cultural milieu of speed, shallowness, hedonism, and information-without-wisdom doesn't even allow us to see that we are losing our relationship to solitude. The exploration of the concept of public versus private in which the essay engages basically turns conventional wisdom on its head: Franzen insists that our heavily interconnected, mediated society hardly threatens privacy at all, but is rather an extension of the private into every node of human interaction that threatens the public sphere. "Lost in the Mail" is a fascinating insider's view of the Chicago Post Office during all-too-turbulent times, showcasing the bureaucratic workings and inevitable corruption within this mysterious and quasi-religious institution. Despite inefficiencies and frustration, Franzen argues, there is an Andersonian national imaginary behind the idea of the Post Office, and it is this that makes the story interesting. The bottom line is this: whatever Franzen is writing about, he brings a clarity and realism that few others can deliver. William T. Vollmann comes to mind as a writer who, like Franzen, brings an unremitting and ethical devotion to his art.Franzen expresses a strong disdain, or at least unfamiliarity, with history and the social sciences; in fact, he claims to have gone through school without taking even basic history courses. In spite of this, his voice deeply resonates with thinkers like Habermas, Bhaktin, Derrida, you name it. He has probably read all of them, but he mercifully spares us the name-dropping, making for a highly accessible book. Ultimately, How to Be Alone is an experience beyond its content - one that reminds us that literature is there for a purpose, and however diffuse our reading public has become, literature as a practice of exploration and communication is more important than ever. I than

Well, I don't fully understand all of the criticism that is thrown Franzen's way. I really engaged with this book and found the essays interesting, well-written and thought-provoking. All-in-all, Franzen's insights into reading culture, writing, memory and American society were right on the money for me. I think those who don't like this book would be more at home with Newsweek and Time magazine and find USA Today sufficient for their daily news.Criticism of Franzen as "elitist" is over-stated. If you, like I, are one of those "isolates" who starts reading early in life, you will likely find sympathy with Franzen's perspective as I did. I think "elitist" is a word thrown at those who read and think like Franzen by those who don't. I don't believe the book is elitist so much as representative of a different class of readers in American society who are a little more isolated from American consumer culture and generally find the consumer-driven, media-saturated, conformist version of America unsettling to say the least.

It is amusing and instructional when someone so far removed from the social sciences as this author obviously is makes the intriguing connection between the deadening aspects of the social surround and its effect on individual consciousness. What Franzen bemoans here is really the entire intellectual sweep of the materialistic culture we are embedded in, yet the individual characteristics he uses in the several essays included here in order to illustrate each of his well-taken points are better described as symptoms of the hollowness and lack of intellectual depth and meaning of most of our social artifacts and habits than as simply being problems in and of themselves. He hits the problem dead on when discussing the pandemic use of technology in the form of television, pop culture, and endless games and gadgetry in an attempt to stave off boredom and "entertain' ourselves. What we really are doing is what Aldous Huxley warned of so presciently in "Brave New World"; submerging ourselves in petty diversions and banal preoccupations, deadening ourselves to our environments and to the social world that would other act to engage us in some fashion. Likewise, his discussion of how widespread use of "serotonin reuptake inhibitors" such as Prozac feeds into a general lack of awareness is quite thought-provoking. If pain, even mental anguish such as depression, can be thought of as a warning from the body that something is wrong, then the whole cultural approach now in vogue to anesthetize the pain is the functional equivalent of a denial of the pain, a quite deliberate attempt to paper it over and therefore disregard the important message it is sending to the individual that something is very wrong. By treating depression as a simple medical problem that can be medicated away as easily as athlete's foot, any hope of using the pain as a starting point for the very necessary discovery process through which one might learn what was wrong and what needed to be done to correct it is gone. In essence, doctors now simply `treat' depression by medicating the symptoms out of existence, without any regard for the very serious questions such physical and emotional manifestations of pain and discomfort may mean for the overall health and well being of the patient. Under such circumstances, the doctors are no different from a guy selling shiny new sports cars to middle aged guys like me, who want a boost out of life and are willing to pay to get it. Oops! Time to take my Zoloft and feel better.Each of the essays make the reader think, and that is the single highest compliment anyone can make about anyone's writing. I may not agree with what Franzen has to say in each case, but I enjoyed his open attitude and his keen sense that something is amiss in a nation so addicted to Oprah and easy answers that he has to stand back and say "Enough!" His criticisms of the current academic fashion of political correctness are especially interesting, as they show the absurd ways