Franzen's How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen wants to be Oprah Winfrey. A year after the dust-up regarding The Corrections' inclusion in and expulsion from her book club, Franzen can be found prattling in The New Yorker about how important it is "to sustain a sense of connectedness" and the unimpeachable value of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. In his introduction to How to Be Alone, his new collection of essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pages, $24), Franzen says he's documenting a movement away from anger and isolation toward a "celebration" of being a reader and writer. His rationale for writing fiction, as laid out in the essays and in The New Yorker, seems indistinguishable in places from a proposal for a new talk show. It'll be no surprise if he follows in the footsteps of LeVar Burton and ends up hosting some kind of adult version of Reading Rainbow, maybe for NPR.

Anyone who has doubts about the grandeur, if you want to call it that, of Franzen's ambitions should refer to the recent New Yorker online interview where he says that "if someone is thinking of investing fifteen or twenty hours in reading a book of mine?fifteen or twenty hours that could be spent at the movies, or online, or in an extreme-sports environment?the last thing I want to do is punish them with needless difficulty." One could argue that it makes more sense to write books for readers than for extreme-sports enthusiasts?one could inquire whether it's those same extreme-sports enthusiasts who are assumed, a few sentences later, to be familiar with the work of John Hawkes?but such questions and objections seem almost superfluous when countered with Franzen's enormous success. Can anyone doubt that he played his cards right a year ago? The Corrections didn't need Oprah's endorsement to become a bestseller and win the National Book Award, and Franzen didn't need her favor to become a featured speaker at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, about two weeks before Chris Johns spoke on "Man and Beast in Southern Africa."

How to Be Alone is an attempt to cash in on the notoriety. It's also, perhaps, a bone to tide readers over until the movie version of The Corrections is a done deal. As someone who would probably pay $10 to see Denise, Gary, Alfred, Enid and Chip's madcap misadventures on the big screen, I'm presumably part of the target audience. (There will be a movie: Franzen is already on record saying he wouldn't object to a film studio's logo appearing on his bookjackets.) Unfortunately the endearing/annoying characters/caricatures that made The Corrections a good book (though not a great one) are almost entirely absent from the new collection, which consists of revamped versions of pieces previously published in various magazines. How to Be Alone is Jonathan Franzen straight up, no mixer, no chaser. It's tough to swallow. Nearly 300 pages shorter than The Corrections, it's in many respects a more arduous reading experience?so much for Franzen's position on "the problem of hard-to-read books."

The problems with How to Be Alone begin in the first paragraph. Franzen has a need to universalize his own experiences. It's a common enough need, as he himself describes it in an essay on sexual advice books: "I want to be alone, but not too alone. I want to be the same but different." His shortcut to this goal, to the goal of connection, is often simply to address the reader as "you"; a not-so-unusual tactic, but a perilous one. Describing the period just after the World Trade Center attack, Franzen quotes The Great Gatsby (!) to the effect that what he wanted was "for the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever." If "you" are "me," however, you wanted the opposite?you thrilled to the world's reasserting itself in all its bustling normality, venality and triviality. You took solace in the rescue workers' and firemen's attempts to get laid, and in the subway riders engrossed in People's best- and worst-dressed issue rather than nervously scanning other passengers for potential signs of terrorism.

Franzen also has a knack for phrases that sound all right at first but fall apart on closer examination. For example, in his recent New Yorker article he compared his walking up 6th Ave. to buy William Gaddis' The Recognitions to someone setting out to score hard drugs "in a state of grim distraction." "Grim distraction" sounds okay?I'm just not sure it's the most apt description of someone seeking hard drugs. Impatience, sure. A certain urgency, jittery anticipation, maybe even some pleasurable excitement. Writing about a character in the 1970 novel Desperate Characters, Franzen says she appears "profoundly human" in light of her tribulations. In contrast to what, a poorly drawn character who fails to convince? A giraffe? To say that a character in anything other than a work of science fiction appears "profoundly human" is to say, precisely, nothing.

It's not that Franzen isn't capable of some nice, contrary insights. In an essay written in 1996 he dissents from the liberal line on Big Tobacco as Evil, arguing that people aren't coerced into smoking in any meaningful sense. A 1998 essay on privacy argues that Americans suffer from a surfeit of privacy, not a lack?that private space has expanded dramatically as truly public spaces have been gutted, with properly private behavior (such as presidential blowjobs) invading the ever-dwindling public sphere. Franzen can even be insightful on the most tendentious of his subjects, writers writing: "Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write."

But none of this makes up for stuff like the following, explaining why Franzen took up smoking in Germany in the early 1980s: "[A]t a time when a likely theater of war was my own living room, smoking became a symbol of my helpless civilian participation in the Cold War." Or this: "The American writer today faces a cultural totalitarianism analogous to the political totalitarianism with which two generations of Eastern bloc writers had to contend." I defy anyone not being paid for writing a review to read the entirety of an essay that begins: "My despair about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists' colony in upstate New York?" (This essay is actually, prophetically, entitled "Why Bother?")

Yes, indeed, one wants to write. But what to write about? (Other than the self, that is.) Give Franzen some characters, give him some information, and he's on the job. There are two pieces of straight reportage, as opposed to reviews or "personal" pieces, in How to Be Alone: one on the extreme disarray of mail delivery in Chicago in the early 90s ("Lost In the Mail"), the other on prisons in Colorado ("Control Units"). Both of these are significantly stronger than many of the others, which tend to become overly didactic, even hectoring, and alarmingly abstract. They're still flawed: The Chicago piece suffers from what eventually becomes a mind-numbing expanse of details, piled on at the expense of the narrative. The second is better, good all the way up until the last few paragraphs, when Franzen's college-lecturer/literary-theorist tendency returns and he didactically sums up the points his interview subjects, in their words and sharply observed gestures and actions, have already made for him.

There's something creepy about the "personal" tone to many of the essays that make up How to Be Alone. It feels false and affected; at times Franzen (or his persona) appears so conflicted that it's impossible to take anything he says without an entire bucketful of salt. An essay called "Scavenging," for example, starts out when the author, on a visit to the Mercer Museum in Pennsylvania, encounters his own kind of rotary telephone in a display case labeled "Obsolete Technology." Yet only two paragraphs later we learn that the rotary is kept on display in the living room, while within the privacy of his bedroom Franzen indulges in a touch-tone for voicemail, train schedules and other necessities. He also doesn't have a CD player, but constantly tapes his friends' CDs. The conflict between private and public selves; the repressive energy required to keep each self in place; the costs (and rewards) of doing so?these are familiar themes for anyone who has read The Corrections. But unlike Alfred or Denise Lambert, we need to believe Jonathan Franzen the essayist, not just believe in him.

Despite his cozy tone, Franzen remains opaque. His tone is revealing even when he reveals next to nothing?in the essay on sex writing, for example, the reader learns that Franzen doesn't have a thing for elaborate lingerie, that as a teenager he looked up dirty words in the dictionary and that he doesn't particularly like explicit sex scenes in serious literature?he feels that "the corporeal nomenclature is hopelessly contaminated through its previous use by writers whose aim is simply to turn the reader on." Which explains why the sex scenes in The Corrections tended to end in outré, humorous metaphors. In the opacity and disingenuousness of his confessionally styled writing, Franzen sounds like nothing so much as a guest on a talk show. He's telling an extended story about himself, one that's carefully tailored to be different?"Jonathan Franzen is a curmudgeonly Luddite Writer"?but the same?"who learned to stop worrying and live and write for the pleasure of it." His personal narrative is, essentially, one of a convert, from lover of difficulty to lover of pleasure, from depressed person to person held rapt by the world, whose doubts are resolved through struggle and crisis and renewed contact with the familiar worlds of objects and family.

Conversion narratives sell big in America. For all that Franzen 1.0 wrote about "the pain of consciousness, the pain of knowing" traditionally shouldered by "men and women with exceptionally sharp vision"?for all that his powers of observation are in fact quite sharp?the big picture remains incoherent. It's not even clear what (other than "technological capitalism") is quite so painful to begin with, given that most of the pieces end on a significantly more hopeful note than where they started.

One of Franzen's big messages, repeated over and over, is that life is messy?life doesn't get resolved. We just keep going?or not (though the latter possibility, suicide, is mostly implicit, not explicit, in this book). This is certainly true; Beckett said it ("I can't go on, I'll go on") but he didn't invent it; Oprah can say it as often as she wants and it'll still be true. The question is how it's said, with what kind of style, with what kind of tone. Remember how in The Corrections Chip Lambert realizes that his screenplay would be better as a comedy than a tragedy? Most of the essays in this book, dating as they do from the pre-conversion Franzen, are unflaggingly serious. They'd be more persuasive as well as more of a pleasure to read if the breezy, absurdist spirit that animated The Corrections were more in evidence. My advice to fans is wait for the movie.