Jonathan Franzen: How to be Alone

By JANE WESTAWAY*

Sceptics may be assured that this collection of essays from the writer who made his name as much from his rumoured shunning of the Oprah seal of literary approval as from his bestselling novel, The Corrections, is much more than the usual potboiler designed to tide us over to the next big novel.

How to be Alone's 13 essays have been published before and they combine into an impressive book. But it is not merely a well-written miscellany. Although the title carries whiny connotations of self-help, Franzen's underlying concern is with "the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture", beneath which runs a more personal ambivalence: how to do so while also avoiding the crippling isolation that characterises depression.

Franzen cares about the right kind of "being alone" because he cares about fiction, and because reading or writing fiction needs solitude. His manifesto, published six years ago as "Perchance to Dream", is reprinted, pungently retitled "Why Bother?"

He claims American writers face a cultural totalitarianism analogous to the political totalitarianism Eastern bloc writers once contended with.

In the everyday world, rudeness, irresponsibility, duplicity and stupidity are the hallmarks of human interaction. But in the marketplace, the only problems are those treatable by spending money - heartburn, hair loss and slippery roads.

The real problem for fiction is not that books have been supplanted by screens, but that daily life is increasingly structured to avoid the kinds of conflicts on which fiction thrives. Human existence is defined by the ache of not being. If that ache is habitually anaesthetised by technology and commerce - the World Wide Web and Zoloft - what happens to our traditional soothers, religion and art?

The first essay, My Father's Brain, opens with Franzen unwrapping a Valentine's parcel from his mother containing "one pinkly romantic greeting card", two of his favourite candy bars, a red filigree heart on a loop of thread, and a neuropathologist's report on his father's brain autopsy. It goes on to consider his mother's lack of tact, his father's tragic decline from Alzheimer's, their marriage, his youthful irritation with the "invention" of a disease label for what he believed to be an ordinary human experience, and the nature of memory.

His iconoclastic view of the tobacco vilification industry - Big Tobacco as the new Evil Empire - comes from the new Outsider, the outcast smoker.

The penultimate piece deconstructs with Joan Didion-like precision his troubled efforts to comply with the Oprah producers in filming a (fake) return to his native St Louis, efforts that were not great enough - he was soon after un-approved.

Even the essay most closely resembling a classic magazine feature - his rundown on the (run down) Chicago postal service - is gripping: the horrors of undelivered mail are far off enough not to scare us, yet close enough to shock and titillate. And all shot through with the writer's obsession: how to be alone but stay in touch.

Fourth Estate

$49.95

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.

* Jonathan Franzen will be a guest at the 2003 Auckland Writers & Readers Festival