How to Be Alone: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen Narrated by Jonathan Franzen, Brian d'Arcy James

Overview

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 reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.

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 stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance—even a celebration—of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.

A Macmillan Audio production.

Editorial Reviews

For two reasons, Jonathan Franzen was the most-discussed author of 2001. The first, of course, was the publication of his novel The Corrections, which won critics' plaudits and the National Book Award. And the second, needless to say, was Oprah Winfrey. The controversies stemming from his very brief tenure as an Oprah author reverberate still. In this eclectic collection of essays, Franzen examines not only the book club brouhaha, but maximum-security prisons, the sex-advice industry, and the persistence of loneliness in postmodern America. How to Be Alone contains Franzen's two most famous essays: the moving piece he wrote about his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease and "the Harper essay," his incisive 1996 view of the precarious state of the American novel.

The New York Times Book Review

[Franzen] starts from the hypothesis, basic to any good novelist's inquiry, that even the simplest, most trivial activities…are riven with complexities, and then proceeds, with exemplary ethical seriousness, grouchy stubbornness and silken wit, to break those complexities down into their moral, psychological and historical components.

Eric Wargo

In this wise, entertaining collection of essays, the author of the 2001 National Book Award– winning The Corrections treats a wide variety of subjects—Alzheimer's, cigarettes, rotary phones—but he's never far from his central concern, the literary life. Reprinted here is his controversial 1996 Harper's essay on the state of the novel, as well as the story of his famous disinvitation from The Oprah Winfrey Show for seeming, as she put it, "conflicted." But his most poignant (and funny) account of writing's pitfalls and pathologies is "Scavenging," about his years as a struggling fiction writer and the objects that peopled his world: "I wonder, is it possible to imagine a grimmer vision of codependency than the hundreds of hours I logged with sharp strands of copper wire squeezed between my thumb and forefinger, helping my TV with its picture?" Of his reluctance to join the Prozac-satiated multitudes with their "undepressed smiles," he notes, "I seem to myself a person who shrilly hates health." Franzen could seem shrill were his insights on modern life not so keen nor his belief in books so passionate.

Publishers Weekly

"In publishing circles, confessions of self doubt are widely referred to as `whining'-the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic and self-serving in writers who don't sell, ungracious in writers who do." This quote, taken from his Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream," and later reworked for this collection as "Why Bother," was written before Franzen tasted huge success with his bestselling novel The Corrections. Fans of that work will be intrigued by the elements from Franzen's personal life that run parallel to those of the characters in The Corrections. However, Franzen's adroit cultural criticism, albeit a personal one, is the root of this collection of essays. Hearing such subjective work read by the author himself adds an air of authenticity. It also satisfies a curiosity as to what that voice actually sounds like. This audiobook's editors satisfy that curiosity, but also make the wise choice of not letting Franzen read the entire collection. While his reading is sincere, his delivery, unlike his text, is passionless and dry. Fortunately, the lion's share of the essays is read with much more moxie by James. He gives these intelligent, thoughtful and provocative pieces more dramatic punch than Franzen can. Simultaneous release with the FSG hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 2). (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In these essays, Franzen, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction, demonstrates how our materialistic culture has brought about the homogenization of society. He notes that although one might assume a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian are very different people, in reality, owing to the influence of the mass media and powerful corporations, "both watch David Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance, both play Lotto, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman." From a personal and scholarly point of view, Franzen discusses such topics as our obsession with technology, the state of the novel, modern prisons, the proliferation of sex-advice books, and a scandal in the Chicago postal system. Also included is a very moving account of his father's battle with Alzheimer's disease. Although many of the works are scholarly in tone, Brian d'Arcy James's lucid, well-paced narration makes this collection accessible and interesting. Very highly recommended to all libraries.-Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OH Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Of maximum-security prisons, Dumpster diving, and privacy in a technological age: a collection of essays diverse and entertaining by the author of last year's Big Novel, The Corrections. Before The Corrections, which led circuitously to "Oprah Winfrey's disinvitation of me from her Book Club," Franzen was perhaps best known to general readers as the author of an arch, funny, and contrarian essay recounting the reasons for his "despair of the American novel," published in Harper's and thus known among the cognoscenti simply as "the Harper's essay." Revised to be still more arch and no less contrarian, if somewhat less lit-critical, the essay (now called "Why Bother?") is reason enough to fiction lovers in this increasingly "infantilizing" culture to take Franzen's nonfiction out for a spin, though it won't please the academic readers it relentlessly twits in salutary slaps such as: "The therapeutic optimism now raging in English literature departments insists that novels be sorted into two boxes: Symptoms of Disease (canonical work from the Dark Ages before 1950) and Medicine for a Happier and Healthier World ("the work of women and of people from nonwhite or nonhetero cultures"). The other essays, most previously published in Details, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, deliver sufficient bang for the book, though none quite stands up to the centerpiece. Some of them, such as a perceptive study of the Post Office at work, manage to be quite timely even as they bear a few signs of age; others get a little weird, as when Franzen observes that smoking cigarettes serves, at least in his case, "to become familiar with apocalypse, to acquaint myself with the contours of its terrors, to make theworld's potential death less strange and so a little less threatening." None, however, is predictable, and all bear Franzen's trademark sensibility of smiling, even though scared silly, in the face of doom. Smart, solid, and well-paced: a pleasure for Franzen's many remaining admirers.

From the Publisher

The welcome paradox in How to be Alone is that the reader need not feel isolated at all. . ..This collection emphasizes [Franzen's] elegance, acumen and daring as an essayist, with an intellectually engaging self-awareness as formidable as Joan Didion's.” —The New York Times

“Why be alone? For the pleasure of reading books such as this.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Franzen critiques the alienating effects of postmodern America with just as much passion as he displays in his fiction. . .he cuts to the truth with razor-sharp precision. . . These essays offer a great reason to turn of the TV and spend the evening alone, lost in thought.” —Time Out New York

“How to be Alone reaffirms the novelist's prerogative to engage in social criticism. And Franzen's calm, passionate critical authority derives not from any special expertise in criminology, neurology or postal science, but rather from the fact that, as a novelist, he is principally concerned with the messy architecture of the self.” —The New York Times Book Review

“There is here the eloquence and sensitivity and profound personal engagement that is only possible with the printed word—and, even then, only when it has no fear of being literature. Put Franzen among the living heroes of it.” —The Buffalo News

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172039089
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	01/29/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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