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W O R D S | review
How to Be Alone: Essays by Paul McLeary After reaching a certain level of success, many writers make the mistake of turning out vanity pet projects: Think Martin Amis’ much-maligned take on Stalin, Koba the Dread; or Rick Moody’s rambling, ham-fisted attempt at a memoir, The Black Veil — both of which earned their authors a very public beating in the press earlier this year. Following the phenomenal success of The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen probably could have published a cookbook and it would have been guaranteed an audience. The sprawling novel about Midwestern family dysfunction was everywhere last year; in addition to winning the National Book Award and The New York Times Editors’ Choice Award for 2001, the hardcover version sold well over a million copies. Fortunately, Franzen’s follow-up, How to Be Alone, a collection of 13 essays written between 1994 and 2001, fares much better than the aforementioned examples, in part because the pieces were good enough to have been published in magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s in the first place. Even still, the collection is a hit-or-miss affair that never really comes to life despite some patches of excellent writing. In short, there’s just not a whole lot of there there. In many of the essays, the 43-year-old Franzen seems to long for that fabled time when people read serious literature out of habit and had the time to discuss the issues of the day without a television blaring in the background. He occasionally manages to pull you in with his wishful thinking. In "First City," an essay about his love for big cities, New York in particular, Franzen is almost reminiscent of a more sober Baudelaire, the 19th century French poet who wrote of the seedier districts of Paris, the First City of his day. Both men revel in the anonymity of a crowd and can exist perfectly alone in cities where it seems impossible to find solitude. In his book of prose poems, Paris Spleen, Baudelaire mused: “Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet.” It is how Franzen prowls Manhattan: “Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself,” he writes. In interviews and in his writing, Franzen comes off as a generally quiet and polite (if overly self-conscious) guy. This is surprising, considering that he has managed to kick up a fair bit of controversy and build something of a myth about his own life. It’s unclear, however, whether he simply lets his guard down in interviews, revealing an open nature, or if he is more acutely aware of marketing “his product” than he lets on. For starters, you’ve got the Oprah flap, which was one of the most overblown non-issues to hit American letters in recent years. In late 2001, Franzen publicly kvetched about The Corrections being chosen for Oprah’s book club, hinting at the same time that he didn’t think much of Oprah or her audience. Just before being ceremoniously "disinvited" from participating in the book club, he managed to overcome his misgivings enough to film a segment for the show. That experience ended up being the subject matter for the essay “Meet Me in St. Louis,” published in the New Yorker in December 2001. The television producers made him go back to the suburban St. Louis neighborhood of his youth to tape the segment, filming him around the city and making him feel like “a dumb but necessary object, a passive supplier of image,” and probably rightly so. Even before the Oprah controversy, Franzen’s image was wrapped up in the romantic story of his writing large chunks of The Corrections while blindfolded, and his writing prowess was linked to the now-infamous April 1996 Harper’s essay in which he lamented the death of the social novel. The inclusion of the Harper’s essay, retitled “Why Bother” in this compilation, is really something of an anticlimax, as he doesn’t say anything a serious reader or writer hasn’t voiced countless times before: The literate and the creative class is in decline, the corporations don’t understand literature, etc. The argument might have been new when Socrates lamented the loss of the spoken word in favor of the written a few thousand years ago, but if the modern version of it seemed dated in 1996, it reads as especially whiny and somewhat trite now. Franzen’s attempts at investigative reporting also leave something to be desired. "Lost in the Mail," a rambling article on the woes of the Chicago Post Office (and his first New Yorker piece in 1994), and “Control Units’ (1995), which offers a look inside the Federal Correctional Complex near Florence, Colo., lack direction and get bogged down in the mundane details of polished floors and the politics of low-level employees. First and foremost, however, this is a book about reading and writing. Franzen is obviously earnest in his belief in the redemptive power of great literature, so much so that his self-admitted aversion to technology puts him somewhat at odds with the mainstream, making him sound a bit curmudgeonly in the process. “I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld,” he sniffs in "The Reader in Exile" (1995), seemingly unaware of the fact that one can indeed do both. There are some instances where his professed technophobia rings hollow, however. The fact that he isn’t interested in owning a television (though he admits spending weeks trying to fix a faulty one before finally giving it away) or a VCR (though he receives one from a friend who tires of hearing Franzen talk about it), and talks at length about his rotary phone (though he has a touch-tone in his bedroom), makes you wonder how much of this anti-technology stuff is the posturing of the newly anointed Important Writer of our times. Franzen is indeed an important writer — and one who deserves to be read. Just so long as he’s writing fiction. Paul McLeary is a writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. Related Sites |
