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    How to Be Alone: Essays
    How to Be Alone: Essays
    How to Be Alone: Essays
    Audiobook8 hours

    How to Be Alone: Essays

    Written by Jonathan Franzen

    Narrated by Jonathan Franzen and Brian D'Arcy James

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections

    Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

    As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.

    Editor's Note

    Fascinating essays…

    Franzen brings his literary skills to nonfiction with this collection of essays analyzing everything from the decline of the novel in American culture to the philosophic implications of a disease like Alzheimer’s.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJan 29, 2013
    ISBN9781427235121
    How to Be Alone: Essays
    Author

    Jonathan Franzen

    Jonathan Franzen’s work includes four novels (The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, Freedom), two collections of essays (Farther Away, How To Be Alone), a memoir (The Discomfort Zone), and, most recently, The Kraus Project. He is recognised as one of the best American writers of our age and has won many awards. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

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    Reviews for How to Be Alone

    3.5/5

    34 ratings19 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I'm very sympathetic to his concerns w/r/t fiction, so that part of the book was actually interesting and quite neat. And his Alzheimer's essay is astonishingly good. But that said, the book is saddled with many just-OK essays. I just couldn't get excited about it past the first few chapters.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I haven't read any of Franzen's work before this book. I found most of the essays to be meandering news summaries ("Lost in the Mail" "Control Units") or book reports ("First City" "Mr Difficult"). Hard to understand the draw. However, to be transparent, the limpness of the content meant l did a bunch of quick page turning. I did like the partitioning of letter writers into "refiners, resonators, and rebutters."

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The longest essay in this collection is “Why Bother?” Originally titled “Perchance to Dream”, the author has subtitled it “The Harper’s Essay”. In the introduction to this collection (“A Word About This Book”), the author goes on at great length about the impact of this article, how it was misunderstood, and how, when he reread and discovered it was painfully strident and contained tenuous logic that even he couldn’t follow, he “exercised my authorial license and cut the essay by a quarter and revised it throughout.”I do not fault an author for looking back on past efforts and bringing them up to their new personal snuff. But using this admission – in particular the isolation of a single essay – to lead off a collection does not portend good things. In his essay titled “Scavenging”, eleven pages in, the author starts a new section “So ends the fragment of essay that I’ve scavenged in assembling this one.” And so it goes.Herein is a collection of essays that seem to have something to say, but the author winds, starts, stops, pontificates, preaches, sidebars, sidetracks, and meanders at such length that even interesting topics suffer. Example #1: The potential for a fascinating essay exists in “Lost in the Mail”, a study of things going wrong with the Chicago mail system. There are great stories here about the people trying to get the right things done. There are disturbing instances of abuses and “things that go wrong.” Yet, the essay has no appreciable point. Is this about the people, is it about the city, is it about the problems themselves? The author meanders rather than trying to get to any one point. Example #2: “Controlling Units” is about maximum security prisons in Colorado. Again, there is good information and interesting stories in this essay. But the author becomes too present, preaching and telling rather than letting his writing explain it for us.There are just too many essays here that come close, but fall short. And then there are the essays that just don’t have anything going for them. Overall assessment? Franzen has titled this Book How to Be Alone. The answer? Write essays like these.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      It's rare I find myself agreeing with the New york Times, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, but their descriptions of Jonathan Franzen as a "pompous prick, an "ego-blinded snob", and a "spoiled,whiny little brat" are spot on.

      While the language is just as complex and florid as in his novels, these essays reveal far to much about the man behind the typewriter, and none of it is flattering.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The essays are a bit hit or miss. Some I devoured, others had me constantly putting the book down to see what was happening on the Internet. My advice, don't buy the book but if someone has a copy borrow it for a few nights and randomly pick a couple of essays to see if it's worth the investment
    • 5/5
      I think I've fallen in Love with Jonathan Franzen after reading this book.
    • 3/5
      About "Why Bother?": Like sitting at a cafe listening to a depressed cynic whose intelligence and style keep you there, despite the sinking feeling in your heart and knowing that this guy should step outside of himself now and then.
    • 3/5
      This book of essays was quite entertaining. I found the essays about subjects other than the state of literature to be the most entertaining. Some of the essays are from the 90s and reflect the sensibilities and uncertainty of how technology and the internet will develop and affect our lives. I did get bored with the essays on the state of literature. The first one was decent but the other two felt sort of rehashed. Perhaps this is the case because of their age of the essays and the fact I have read other more recent and similar essays.

      When Franzen is "on" he is definitely "on". The essay on Alzheimer's and his fathers decline was endearing and heartbreaking, the essays on the colorado prisons and the mail problems in chicago were both enlightening and highly entertaining.

      This was enjoyable to read straight through but I also feel that it would be a good book to read off and on depending on your mood.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written collection of essays using a variety of starting points (his father's Alzheimers disease, maximum security prisons) to explore the distinction between public and private space. In this respect the work reminds me of Richard Sennett's urban(ist) essays which I also enjoyed. His observations on the role of novelist in contemporary society are unflinching and illuminating.
    • 1/5
      In all fairness, this book wasn't what I had expected it to be. But it was still very hard to get through because it was pretentious and boring and lacking in any real human insight that I would find relevant. I can see why this author's previous work made it onto Oprah's book list; that's right where he deserves to be.
    • 5/5
      Really, really excellent. I liked it better than The Corrections. His essay connecting the state of The Novel and his personal depression was particularly great.
    • 4/5
      Franzen, author of the massively popular The Corrections, sets out his stall on subjects of writing, politics, and personal freedom. This collection of previously published magazine pieces is a mixed bag, but on the whole a satisfying read. The standout article on his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease is touching and personal, and acutely shows his strengths as a writer.
    • 3/5
      I really do love Franzen's writing, but this collection didn't wow me. Many of the essays here aren't so much essays as articles; they read more like journalistic explorations of entities (prisons, post office corruption) rather than personal explorations of thoughts or concepts. He has some really interesting points, though many of them get bogged down in academia.

      My larger concern, though, is how dated many of these essays seem to be. The most recent in the collection was 2002--not a fault of the collection, which came out shortly after that--but it's surprising that these don't hold up over time. Reading this in 2008 makes some of his late-'90s references sound anachronistic, though I'm sure they were just fine at the time.

      I feel a mild disappointment, but it's not the fault of the book. Had I read it five, six years ago, I may have enjoyed it more.

      Sidenote: what's Franzen been doing since The Corrections, besides showing up on The Simpsons? Doesn't he know I want to see another novel from him?
    • 4/5
      Until recently, I'd pointedly avoided Jonathan Franzen. I know "The Corrections" sold about a gazillion copies, but I'd pegged him, perhaps unfairly, as a purveyor of "New Yorker" fiction. By "New Yorker" fiction I mean stories about quietly anguished lives of well-off suburban white people where brand names are used in place of genuine characterization and the "spiritual wasteland" of the exurbs is the work's real main character. Oh, God, that's stuff's death on the page. Still, I inherited a copy of "How to Be Alone" and liked Franzen's "Harper's Essay." When I finally got around to delving deeper into this collection, I was very pleasantly surprised. Franzen's got a sharp, economical journalistic eye, a spare, fluid style, and perhaps best of all, a genuine love of literature and writing that fairly leaps at his reader. He's serious about what he does and good at getting at the very heart of things. Reading "How to Be Alone" feels like taking a leisurely walk around the author's mind, and that's perhaps the best compliment I can give an essay collection. Of course, Franzen is always going to be known as The Author Who Turned Down Oprah Winfrey, and we, as readers, can't really get away from that. Is Franzen the the high-culture snob that so many people made him out to be in the wake of that mini-scandal? I don't think so. He's got the inevitable elitism of someone who's dedicated his life to art, and he's careful, perhaps even too careful, about how his art is presented to the marketplace. Still, one man's elitism is another man's discernment and Franzen, I think, falls on the right side of the line. There's something of a gentle crankiness about him, and readers who do not agree with his basic premises, namely that technological capitalism is an infernal machine, that reading is important, and that technology can often alienate its users, may have trouble spending time with him. What he's not, however, traditional high-culture type. He seems to feel very much at home in an imagined "community of readers" that extends far beyond the academy. He pleads, at various points throughout this book, for literature that's both emotionally accessible and artistically uncompromising. He seems to worry more about the emotional content of the writing he likes than the ideologies it describes. In the way he privileges stories over stylistic excess , he comes darn close to being a literary populist. I'm happy to say that the rumors of Mr. Franzen's unbearable elitism have been greatly exaggerated and that I can recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      I've had this book of essays and articles on my shelf for some time, and picked it up when a book funk was looming. Franzen presents 15 essays of varying length and on a wide variety of topics, some very personal, some more the type you might encounter in a magazine like the one in the Sunday New York Times or the New Yorker.The personal ones are often quite affecting, in particular the first, "My Father's Brain", which concerns the difficulty he and his family had dealing with his father's mental deterioration, especially in light of his parents' difficult marriage, and the last, where he is forced to 'go home again' years later for a televised interview and finds it torture."Imperial Bedroom" is Franzen's take on the conventional cry that our privacy is evaporating. Almost perversely, he notes that most of us live in ever MORE private spaces - large suburban houses where no one has to share a room or bathroom, or condominium apartments where you might not know your neighbors, quite unlike what he calls the near-panopticon of small town life a century ago. Conversely, we are unable to keep other people's private lives out of our public space. "A genuine public space is a place where every citizen is welcome to be present and where the purely private is excluded or restricted." Anyone who can't help overhearing a personal, sometimes very personal, cellphone conversation on the street, but or train can relate."Why Bother" is the most well-known of these works, retitled from an infamous Harper's essay. In it, Franzen details his slide into depression while trying to write his third book, while he and his wife were separating and the country was preparing for war in 1991, and in the years that followed. His despair at the reading habits (or lack thereof) of Americans , the solitary nature of his profession, and the idea that fiction should deal with 'mystery', "how human beings avoid or confront the meaning of existence" and 'manners', "the nuts and bolts of how human beings behave" was being somehow scuttled, produced a perfectly understandable (to me) inability to write his third novel. But beyond blaming all the ills of our age for the ills of our age, he talks about who reads and who writes. He cites Shirley Brice Heath, a linguistic anthropologist and English Professor, to discover that the people who read 'works of substance' are either people whose (usually upper class) parents did the same, and long for others who share their passion, or people who were, from an early age, social isolates, who use books to build their longed-for imaginary community.Well, I guess that sounds like a lot of us. Franzen goes on at some length about how he was able to absorb this, how he realized that he didn't have to save the world with his writing, how he got support from Don DeLillo - and how he finished his third novel, The Corrections, which I found difficult and ultimately totally human. It's a really interesting essay.What else? Essays on the beleaguered Chicago Post Office, the amoral tobacco industry, the architecture that creates city life, the development of ultra-maximum security prisons, the deliberate difficulties of William Gaddis's writings, sex, and the essay that gives the book its title, wherein he argues that television and other popular entertainment have left us without the ability to be alone that reading teaches us to master.All of which is to say that I devoured this book of essays, it cured my book funk, I marked up all sorts of passages (which I never do), and I hope someone else loves it too.
    • 2/5
      I cannot think of a more perfect book for my 100th review.Reading is a solitary activity, as anyone reading this is likely to understand. Never am I more aware of this than when I try to talk to friends and family about what I'm reading. I think that is why so many of us have joined this site- we're seeking some connection with others through our isolation. By knowing that we're not alone by ourselves offers some semblance of comfort.I like Franzen very much in this collection. He comes across far better than he did in The Corrections. Well, maybe. The truth is, I was probably too hard on The Corrections. There was so much hype surrounding it that it was one of those books I refused to love before I started it. I can only imagine how much I would have appreciated it if I had read this collection of essays first. If I had, I'd know how Franzen was abandoned by Oprah for exhibiting some very human flaws. I'd know how seriously he took his fiction before writing that book and what writing it actually meant to him. In Franzen, I've found a fellow traveler who was quite unfairly tossed into the limelight.In one essay, Franzen talks about literary fiction. This essay was quite close to my heart. I work in a library and I am surrounded by people who love to read. However, I still feel quite alone around them for the simple reason that I don't consider what they read to be worth reading. This was the very thing that got Franzen labeled as an elitist and pretentious little bastard, but I really get it. I don't see the point in reading things that entertain without any other value. I could be wrong, but I genuinely feel that reading a James Patterson/Nora Roberts/Janet Evanovich/Stephen King/John Grisham novel is really no better than sitting on your couch watching Family Guy at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Franzen understands this and explores the idea much more eloquently than I have. And for this I am grateful. Just to know that someone else feels the same distaste that I experience makes me feel like there's at least someone out there, that this universe isn't completely devoid of those I might want to consider my own kind.What I think really put this book above others of the same variety is the astounding organization. In my experience, books of essays are rather haphazardly constructed. They may be a collection of great pieces, but they really have no business being put side-by-side like thugs in a line up. But the title of Franzen's book serves as the central theme of every single piece. He explores this idea from many different angles and, in the end, succeeds in showing us how isolated we really are. It's kind of refreshing and devastating at the same time.
    • 5/5
      The great novelist is also a great essayist. Here are some of the most interesting, stimulating, well-written essays ever, on Alzheimer's, the post office, sex, why he didn't become an Oprah author…
    • 3/5
      Rating: 3* of fiveThe Book Description: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.My Review: "Why Bother?" or, more familiarly "The Harper's Essay," is the most famous piece in the collection, and probably the most read. I think it's a nice meditation on the nature of reading and writing, and the changes these two things have been through, but it's not (to me) earth-shatteringly amazing. I've been thinking many of the same thoughts for a long time, being both a modeled and a social-isolate reader (the essay gives definitions for these terms, and you should read the text anyway. Wikipedia links to a PDF of it).That doesn't mean the essay is less valuable, merely makes the point that I, and presumably others like me, don't feel its novelty. For others to whom the ideas are new, this could gong them like a bell. I wonder if those folks are among Franzen's readers, though. I still think Tetris is a cool video game, so how likely am I to be seeking out BioShock X or whatever? My sense of novelty, then, isn't about texts or their creators and/or the act of their creation, it's about the successors to the book and the ethos they create.But the essay is, like the entire collection, a little bit less than fully coherent. Franzen doesn't so much organize his points around his thoughts as his thoughts around his points. The bits about his marital breakdown, the portions mentioning his teaching job, the revision-points about the Oprah kerfuffle after The Corrections got him into such trouble...all placed here and there, all called upon to do multiple duty and yet never seeming to be the mainstay of any one argument. Why then invoke them at all? I didn't feel the added weight of support in many of Franzen's passing mentions and glancing blows."My Father's Brain," on the other hand, was a fine and personal piece of wrestling, and a very involving and moving look at the nature of a time and a space in an adult man's life: The end of a parent's life is fraught for us all, and the ending of the life before the parent's actual death is the hardest thing to process.Alzheimer's and other dementias are deeply frightening to me, and I suspect to most of us. Franzen reports from the front lines that it's a lot less terrifying than one might imagine, and even more heartrending. This essay is responsible for all three stars I've given the collection all by itself. I like the author a great deal more than I did after reading The Corrections, which I found repetitive rather than recursive, and ~100pp of Freedom, which for some reason I can't quite understand made me angry. The son who wrote "My Father's Brain" is a guy I want to have a beer with, talk about the pessimism-inducing world we fifty-plus social isolates live in, and see if we can't hash out some reason not to despair.The other essays are well-written pieces about things I wasn't interested in, and ended up not meaning anything to me on a visceral level. Just, well, yeah okay that's nice, but what the devil should I care?It's very much a library-borrow, and really not something I'll urge you to get out there and procure no matter the source. As usual for me as regards this writer, I don't leave this read eagerly awaiting the next one by him.
    • 3/5
      Set of melancholic essays about the nature of American society in the early 2000s. Some are relevant, but some are out of date and seem to be written for Luddites, who fear any technology.