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It's been said that a genius is one who can hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time. Certainly this ability is characteristic of the best essayists and, in HOW TO BE ALONE, Jonathan Franzen proves himself a skilled practitioner of the form. Whether he's working with an idea like privacy, or a fact as concrete as a federal prison, Franzen considers his subjects from every angle, holding them up to the light of his wit and erudition until they sparkle.
Most of the essays are a sublime mix of the personal and the political. "Sifting the Ashes" examines America's guilty affair with smoking, not sparing his own nicotine habit. Franzen condemns the actions of the cigarette companies and the inaction of government without letting individual smokers off the hook of ultimate responsibility. On the marketing of cigarettes to teens: "The truth is that without firm parental guidance teenagers make all sorts of irrevocable decisions before they're old enough to appreciate the consequences --- they drop out of school, they get pregnant, they major in sociology.
"Scavenging" is part an ode to 'making do' with an old black rotary telephone, but it also pays homage to obsolescence as fodder for art. "Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it." He proves the point with his moving essay "My Father's Brain," a narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, as well as a synopsis of current scientific research into how we remember and why we forget.
Franzen, author of THE CORRECTIONS, may be best known to the general public for being that "ego-blinded snob" who dithered a little too publicly about the desirability of having that novel picked for the Oprah Winfrey book club. The theme of elitism runs strongly through many of the pieces in HOW TO BE ALONE, both as refuge from and rage against the crassness of modern life. Franzen has wrestled this angle in all its guises. He recognizes from his own experience the kinship between the estrangement of depression and the "aristocracy of alienation" that comprises the elitism of modern literature.
In his own view, Franzen has mellowed since many of these essays were written in the mid-'90s. In the foreword, he speaks of re-reading an essay he wrote in 1996 originally titled "Perchance to Dream." He was surprised by its stridency. "I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn't share his particular faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in the End Times." He did cut the essay by a quarter but included it in this collection, re-titled "Why Bother." He may have given up some of his stridency but not the faith.
Is it better to be "right" and alone, or subsumed in the comforting but shallow embrace of our insatiable mass culture? Judging by these essays, I think Mr. Franzen is still slightly conflicted and, as readers, we can rejoice. "With so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily" Franzen's pen will be busy and literature will be the beneficiary.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman-Nicol
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