Alone With a Good Book, You
Are Never Alone
by JANET MASLIN
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
HOW TO BE ALONE – Essays, by Jonathan Franzen - 278
pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24
Thoughts about solitude are
meant to be the common thread running through Jonathan Franzen's new collection
of ruminative magazine articles. But the welcome paradox in ''How to Be Alone''
is that the reader need not feel isolated at all. The author makes himself a
colorful presence throughout these essays, complete with his slew of improbably
attractive quirks. Thus Mr. Franzen acknowledges being someone who turns
straight to an Encyclopedia of New York City listing on sewers, ''a topic of
perennial fascination.''
While surveying a prison in
Colorado, he finds himself ''thinking that this would be an excellent place to
read and write.'' While making a study of popular sex books, he acknowledges:
''What I feel when I hear that the mainstream actually buys this stuff is the
same garden-variety alienation I feel on learning that Hootie and the Blowfish
sold 13 million copies of their first record, or that the American male's dream
date is Cindy Crawford.'' As for his own dream date: ''For me, today, there is
nothing sexier than a reader.''
Well, maybe just one thing:
Mr. Franzen frequently celebrates the realization that being alone with a good
book is the very opposite of an isolating experience. With considerable wit and
minimal curmudgeonliness, he also laments the scarcity of such experiences in a
culture that is co-opted and consumed by nonliterary temptations. He admits to
being enough of a purist to think longingly of times when ''a new book by
Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a
late-December film release inspires today.''
Mr. Franzen, the
much-dissected author of ''The Corrections,'' is one of the rare literary
novelists to have stirred up that kind of furor himself lately. And in several
of the previously published essays collected here (from periodicals including
Details, Graywolf Forum, Harper's and The New Yorker), he directly addresses
the impact of his overnight celebrity.
In the succinct ''Meet Me
in St. Louis,'' published last year, he describes what it feels like to ''try
not to claw myself where I itch,'' while a television camera crew insists on
photographing him at the house where he grew up. He describes inserting and
then extracting feet from his mouth after having been anointed by Oprah
Winfrey's book club. It was ''because I'm a person who instantly acquires a
Texas accent in Texas,'' he says, that he was able to infuriate Ms. Winfrey's
admirers and detractors alike, and to ''achieve unexpected sympathy for Dan
Quayle.''
''How to Be Alone''
successfully clarifies anything about Mr. Franzen that may have been
misunderstood at that time. This collection emphasizes his elegance, acumen and
daring as an essayist, with an intellectually engaging self-awareness as
formidable as Joan Didion's. He's funny, too. Mr. Franzen writes about how mail
carriers ''revel in dog lore,'' how ''simply picking up a novel after dinner
represents a kind of cultural 'Je refuse!' '' and how watching a television
entertainment channel with the sound off can be ''an exposé of the hydraulics
of insincere smiles.'' Citing the syntax of ''The Joy of Writing Sex,'' which
advises, ''You need not be explicit, but you must be specific,'' he adds, ''And
if it doesn't fit, you must acquit.''
''How to Be Alone'' is a
captivating but uneven collection. Some of its entries have clearly aged better
than others. (One piece finds art tenuous to the American imagination ''because
ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.'')
The more recent entries,
less showy about their brilliance, tend to flow more smoothly. Some topics (the
loss of his father, the fate of the novel) are more compelling than others (the
workings of the Chicago post office). And some pieces have the rambling,
convoluted structure of long-winded book reviews, attaching elaborate arguments
to noticeably modest pegs. But Mr. Franzen serves the solitary reader as fine
company throughout it all.
The best and most moving
parts of ''How to Be Alone'' are those that explore the darkest depths of
isolation. ''My Father's Brain,'' published last year, is a tough, haunting
account of how Alzheimer's disease changed the author's father, and how
observing his parent's growing aloneness gave him a new understanding of his
own. In his much-maligned 1996 diatribe about the fate of fiction, now titled
''Why Bother?,'' Mr. Franzen writes amusingly but wrenchingly about the
progressive depression that nearly persuaded him to abandon his work.
Contributing to this discouragement, no doubt, was submitting to the kind of
radio interview in which:
''The announcer was a
journeyman with a whiskey sunburn and a heart-rending comb-over who clearly
hadn't read past Chapter 2. Beneath his boom mike he brushed at the novel's
pages as though he hoped to absorb the plot transdermally.''
In two particularly
eloquent and rousing entries, Mr. Franzen moves from a literary vision of
aloneness to a more political kind. ''Imperial Bedroom'' artfully describes
privacy as ''the Cheshire cat of values: not much substance, but a very winning
smile.'' And it argues persuasively that public places grow increasingly
isolating as television assaults the privacy of home. ''You rarely hear a
person on the subway talking loudly about, say, incontinence,'' he notes, ''but
on television it's been happening for years.''
In the four scant pages of
''Inauguration Day, January 2001,'' Mr. Franzen describes riding from Harlem to
Washington with a group of demonstrators from the International Socialist
Organization and marching to the Supreme Court building in the rain. On the way
home, he concludes: ''Few pleasures compare with that of riding on a bus after
dark, hours behind schedule, with people you violently agree with.'' This book
illustrates what he means.
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