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How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen

Paperback | Pages: 306 pages

Rating: 3.59 | 10661 Users | 873 Reviews

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Title	:	How to Be Alone
Author	:	Jonathan Franzen
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 306 pages
Published	:	October 1st 2003 by Picador (first published October 1st 2002)
Categories	:	Writing. Essays. Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Short Stories

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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

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. 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.

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Original Title:	How to Be Alone: Essays
ISBN:	0312422164 (ISBN13: 9780312422165)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Epithetical Books How to Be Alone

Ratings: 3.59 From 10661 Users | 873 Reviews

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Franzen hits the target when literature is being discussed. The career-making accidental cri de coeur Why Bother? and The Reader in Exile and the Gaddis love-in-cum-demolition Mr. Difficult are all sublime pieces, if a little uncertain. The more reflective, personal essays show Franzens likeable man-on-the-street intellectualism, especially the Alzheimers piece My Fathers Brain and the hilarious Oprah-era insight Meet Me in St. Louis. He is less successful when broadsheet feature writing. Lost

This review has been revised and can now be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud! I wish the title was more prophetic.

There are thirteen essays making up this collection and though the theme is consistent - solitude, isolation, independence - the range is still broad and comprises topics as varied as writing, dementia, the prison system, city development etc. To me they all hold up very well with the exception of Lost in the Mail (about the postal system in Chicago; an excruciatingly dull subject and expose although I understand it's really about the breakdown of public society) and Erika Imports (too short to



Update: 13 November 2008 Franzen surprised me by saving the best for last. His second from the last essay, "Meet Me in St. Louis" turned out to be the best by far. It's the most personal and also brings the book back to where it started, his childhood home and mine, St. Louis. The first essay, "My Father's Brain" is about his father's slow drift into Alzheimers and the author's own reluctance to accept where his father's going. It is poignant in its understatedness. In "Meet Me in St. Louis"

Perchance to BotherThis isnt so much a review of the collection of essays called "How to Be Alone", but some responses to one of the essays, "Why Bother?" (also known as "The Harpers Essay" or "Perchance to Dream").Ive probably read the essay in one form or another half-a-dozen times since it was first published in 1996. I have to admit that each time the experience has become less satisfactory.The essay is 42 pages long. Franzen cut about 25% of the Harpers Essay and changed its name.Still, the

A lot of people bitch about Jonathan Franzen, and probably with good reason. Especially in a nation in which mainstream aesthetic values have become conflated with democracy (facepalm), he's viewed as an out-of-touch elitist, an academic leftist, who-- unlike other academic leftists-- actually winds up on bestseller lists, and thus forces his opinions into the national conversation. In fact, he's one of the few American writers today who actually seems willing to challenge the status quo, and