The first essay, “My Father’s Brain,” explores Alzheimer’s disease, and draws on Franzen’s memories his late father, who had the disease. What about Franzen The Man? I partly hoped these essays might give me a glimpse or two at the guy behind the fiction. So, yeah, not a total fan of Essayist Franzen. Reading prose like this, I go into editor/teaching assistant mode and want to write “Simpler language?” or 'What are you trying to say?' in the margins. Nothing aggravates this estrangement more than a juggernaut of hipness such as television has created and the digital revolution’s marketers are exploiting. These lines are redolent with depression and the sense of estrangement from humanity that depression fosters.

That a distrust or an outright hatred of what we now call “literature” has always been a mark of social visionaries, whether Plato or Stalin or today’s freemarket technocrats, can lead us to think that literature has a function, beyond entertainment, as a form of social opposition. Here are two random passages from his uneven 2002 collection, How To Be Alone (take a deeeeep breath, folks): Do I really need to read Essayist Franzen? Especially when his prose is often fussy, whiny and awkward?

And I can’t wait to read his new book, out this fall.īut that’s Novelist Franzen. The Corrections and Freedom are two of my favourite novels written in the past couple of decades. How To Be Alone – a.k.a., How To Make Some Quick Cash Between Novelsįull disclosure: I love Jonathan Franzen, novelist. Reprinted here for the first time is Franzen's controversial l996 investigation of the fate of the American novel in what became known as 'the Harper's essay,' as well as his award-winning narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, and a rueful account of his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

While the essays in this collection range in subject matter from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each one wrestles with the essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civil life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a collection of essays that reveal him to be one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen