How To Be Alone
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Jonathan Franzen, the National Book Award–winning author of The Corrections, come fourteen provocative and entertaining answers to the question of how to be alone in a noisy and distracting mass culture. Although Franzen’s subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with essential themes of his writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, the dubious claims of technology and psychology, the tragic shape of the individual life. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease and a rueful account of Franzen’s brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.
This is a book that will further cement Franzen’s reputation as one of the sharpest, toughest, and liveliest writers at work today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling and National Book Award winning novelist Franzen (The Corrections) urges readers to say no to drugs, but not the pharmaceutical kind; his opiates are those "technology offers in the form of TV, pop culture, and endless gadgetry," soporifics that "are addictive and in the long run only make society's problems worse." Franzen's just as hard on intellectual conformity on academe's canonization of third-rate but politically correct novels, for example. As a serious artist, he knows that the deck is stacked against him; after all, a great novel is a kind of antiproduct, one that is "inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable." The problem, he says, is that instead of being allowed to enjoy our solitary uniqueness we are all being turned into one gigantic corporate-created entity, a point Franzen makes tellingly when he says that while a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian might appear totally different, the truth is that both "watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance... both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman." These canny, well-researched essays (which have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and elsewhere) range over a variety of subjects, from the antiquated and bizarrely inefficient Chicago postal system to the bizarrely efficient new privatized federal prisons, but they are united by a single passionate insistence that, in a cookie-cutter world, people who want simply to be themselves should have the right to do so.
