156 Reviews

monumental sort, if its task is to replace the bonds of kinship with a

sense of civic duty. Marquand should be admired for his attempt to
educate our better selves; yet we have to wonder how malleable
human nature is, especially as regards kinship and what he says of the
naturalness of competition.
Despite his use of statistics to bolster his often anecdotal evidence,
Marquand exaggerates the amount of trust before and after the
changes he describes. Pre-liberal societies were not as trusting as
Marquand wants us to believe, just as modern society is not as devoid
of trust as Marquand fears. The market might not foster trust, but it
does allow citizens to participate as consumers. Blair's populism
notwithstanding, Marquand might also be guilty of elitism, in that he
is not giving enough credit to individuals and the choices they make
when it comes to voting and what they do with their buying power.
Producers are not the only ones with 'exit' as a strategy.
Marquand's book would suffer greatly were he not conscious of the
difficulty of his task. He knows that his approach is somewhat broad
and hardly definitive. Marquand's main goal is to provide a historical
sketch of the key problem of our time: the eclipse of the public by the
private. Although Marquand's position is firmly rooted in the litera-
ture, he has also done much to advance the dialogue on the issue. The
academy would do well do produce more scholarship of this sort.

Steven Michels is an assistant professor of political science at Sacred

Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. In addition to his research
on Nietzsche and political theory, he has also published on higher
education policy.
Email: MichelsS@sacredheart.ed

How to be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. London & New York: Picador,

2004. ISBN: 0312422164.
Reviewed by Derek Hook

If modernism was characterized by the pursuit of personal signifi-

cance, if its anchoring vision was that of the idiosyncratic insight of
the thoroughly individualized aesthete, then its underside was an
unprecedented anxiety concerning the crowd, a nervousness towards
the threat that the masses posed to singular insight. The modern city
brings both of these themes together: the teaming force of an anony-
Reviews 157

mous community, which at the same time lends a sense of identity,

sharpening the distinctness of the self, whilst threatening to dissolve
it altogether. These are the co-ordinates in which Jonathan Franzen's
recent collection of essays on writing, aesthetics, politics, and indeed,
personal experience, should be placed: at the conjunction of public
and private, mass reception and artistic creation, total institution and
singular purpose. One might recast this set of divisions as the 'sub-
ject-to-culture' relation, or, perhaps more heroically, within the rubric
of 'the struggle to be alone', which, as it turns out, is a far more pub-
lic project than we may have at first presumed.
First though, is the humour of this intersection, and a sense of its
particular poignancy. Franzen offers an excruciating depiction of a
series of media incursions into his life after his novel The Corrections
won the National Book Award. Particularly noteworthy are his reflec-
tions on the pathosand one suspects, the embarrassmentof the
situation in which a camera crew is given the task of trying to fix the
painfully self-conscious author into a series of framing shots of his
native St Louis. The attempt to gather a series of visuals for a televi-
sion introduction to the author's fiction quickly becomes an exercise
in insignificance, a burrowing out of meaning. In the same vein a
curious inversion of individuality into artifactuality results when the
author encounters a favoured personal possession (a particularly old
model of telephone) as museum-piece (labelled 'obsolete', so as to
add insult to injury).
Two particularly frustrating encounters with state institutions
post offices, prisonsare added to the mix. Franzen's dismayed dis-
covery is that the passage through each yields an almost inevitable
dissolution of individuality, whether through the massive inefficiency
of a postal system that thwarts the efforts of communication, or the
ultra-technologized facilities of a new growth-industry of privatized
('control-unit') prisons which corrode personality. The city is a recur-
ring motif in reflections of this sort. Franzen's thoughts on New York
are apt in this respect. He juxtaposes its various social intrusions
glimpsed scenes of sexual intimacy one would prefer not to have seen,
the incessant babble of strangers' cell-phone talkwith the almost
sublime buoyancy of the after-hours street sounds that waft, comfort-
ingly, up to his apartment. Against recent calls for a rights of privacy,
Franzen points out that one is never meaningfully alone, except with
reference to a social state, and as such one should meaningfully
defend the public domain if the significance of'aloneness' is to retain
any real value.
158 Reviews

The warmth created by Franzen's autobiographical entry into the

topics he discussesa warmth which at times exudes the positive
glow of intersubjectivity between writer and readeralso dulls the
critical edge of the writing. Franzen is never able to surmount the
localized truth claims of writing one's opinioneven if this is
achieved with considerable verve, wit and no small amount of
research. One might surmise from this that Franzen has succeeded too
well in 'being alone', that the noise of culture and public life has not
yet intruded enough into the domain of his personal significance.
That would be an incorrect conclusion to draw.

Derek Hook is a lecturer in social psychology at the London School

of Economics and Political Science. He is the editor oi Critical Psy-
chology (University of Cape Town Press, 2004). His current research
interests focus on the intersection of Foucault, postcolonial theory
and psychoanalysis.
Email: D.W.Hook@lse.ac.uk

NOTE: Laurence Piper, the author of the review article, 'Return to

the Organic: Onions, Artichokes and "The Debate" on the Nation
and Modernity', Theoria, April 2004, wishes to clarify that the
metaphor used is drawn from Umut Ozkirimili, 'The Nation as an
Artichoke? A Critique of Ethnosymbolist Interpretations of
Nationalism', Nations and Nationalism, 9:3, 2003, pp.339-356.
Owing to an editing error, this reference was erroneously deleted.

Books received (2003):

A Theory of the State, by Yoram Barzel. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0521000645.
The Idea of the Republic, by Noberto Bobbio and Maurizio Virol i.
Cambridge: Polity, 2003. ISBN: 0745630979.
The Politics of Change: Globalisation, Ideology and Critique,
edited by Werner Bonefeld & Kosmas Psychopedis. Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000. ISBN: 0322760883.