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/opt/local/apache/htdocs/INDY/alpha/scripts/indy_input.php.bak on line 436 Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /opt/local/apache/htdocs/INDY/alpha/scripts/indy_input.php.bak on line 460 Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /opt/local/apache/htdocs/INDY/alpha/scripts/indy_input.php.bak on line 460 Indy Books How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen . . . by Jessica Grose Picador,  288 pages, $14 The cover of Jonathan Franzen’s book of essays, How to be Alone, shows a rosy-cheeked blond with a professorial pixie cut and tortoise shell glasses reading in the middle of a crowded book store. Professorial pixie is sharply in focus, wearing black and absorbed in quiet concentration, while the books and people and lights around her are blurred and streaked across the muted background. However hokey the cover looks on first glance, it does accurately capture the paradox at the center of the essays in Franzen’s tome: the need to be alone coupled with the desire to have company in one’s loneliness. The essay entitled “Why Bother” is the crux of the contradiction between being alone and reaching out for understanding in your solitude. Franzen name-drops societal hot buttons like Zoloft and O.J. and stitches together high and low cultural references in slick Frankenstein sentences like, “today’s Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.” While he makes the essay glossy with all of this cultural commentary, the main issue of the piece is the relationship between writer and reader in modern society. “Now the distance between author and reader is shrinking,” Franzen writes. “Instead of Olympian figures speaking to the masses below, we have matching diasporas. Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.” But even with shiny gems of sentences like these, the language and the content of Franzen’s essays are as fuzzy as the constant thrum of airport televisions that he laments on more than one occasion. “Why Bother” is riddled with seemingly unrelated rants on depression and consumer society and the depression caused by consumer society. While these rants play into the major theme of the essay, Franzen ends up contradicting—and sometimes discrediting—himself more often than proving his point. He holds up Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 as one of the last examples of grand social fiction. Then a few pages later, in a section com-plaining about the fragmentation of American culture, Franzen says “Joseph Heller’s depiction of women in Catch-22, for example, is so embarrassing that I hesitated to recommend the book to my students.” The reason why I have quibbles with seemingly small details like the Catch-22 contradiction is because of Franzen’s tone throughout each essay. He posits himself as the social and cultural authority on any issue that comes within his wide-sweeping radar. Franzen constantly idealizes the past, particularly in his descriptions of his native St. Louis, “a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways.” He then makes gargantuan and cheesy comparisons like, “By the early nineties I was as depressed as the inner city of fiction.” Franzen is also irritatingly self-absorbed. The reader is supposed to feel sorry for Franzen after the massive success of his first novel because of the alienation he feels as a result of his youthful triumph. Instead, you want to smack him around a little when he says things like, “The media’s obsessive interest in my youthfulness surprised me. So did the money. Boosted by the optimism of publishers who imagined that an essentially dark, contrarian entertainment might somehow sell a zillion copies, I made enough to fund the writing of my next book.” Because of the exhausting and cocky nature of his more polemical essays, the highlights of How to be Alone are the essays on smaller topics: the touching account of his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s called “My Father’s Brain;” a kicky little piece on how-to sex guides called “Books in Bed.” Pieces like these allow me to keep my faith in Franzen as part of the future of American literature, and not just another egoistic flash in the pan who will wash up on the rocky shores of the New Yorker ten years from now with a tired tirade on the good old days, when Clinton was in office and cell phones were for drug dealers.

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