How to be Alone: Essays
Posted on September 28, 2004
The other day on a crowded train I started reading How to be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen. I can't remember how it was I came across this book, most likely from someone's recommended list during one of my frequent travels down the many Amazon tributaries.
I was afraid that the first essay about his father's battle with Alzheimer's titled My Father's Brain would set the tone for the rest of the book, because to me, a stranger to Franzen's other work, seemed way too private and personal. Then in the next essay Imperial Bedroom he takes air out of the popular belief that privacy is on the decline, or has he might put it, the illusion of privacy. The real gem so far is the essay titled Why Bother? or more commonly known as 'The Harper's Essay', his 1996 lament on the state of the novel, or maybe more specifically the social novel. I just stared reading it and have already doggy-eared a couple pages for later review. Here's a favourite quote (okay, it's more a quote of a quote),
Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary best-seller list are vapid, predicable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predicable, and badly written. Lane's essays usefully destroy the notion of a golden pre-television age when the American masses had their noses stuck in literary masterworks; he makes it clear that this country's popular tastes have become no worse in half a century. What has changed is the economics of book publishing. The number-one-best-seller of 1955 Marjorie Morningstar, sold a hundred and ninety thousand copies in bookstores. In 1994, in a country less than a twice as populous, John Grisham's The Chamber sold more than three million. Publishing is now a subsidiary of Hollywood and the blockbuster novel is a mass-marketable commodity, a portable substitute for TV.
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Sounds interesting! You've piqued my curiousity, Mark. If you'd like to give another Franzen book a go, try The Corrections--about a dysfunctional family trying to figure themselves out. I have a copy - perhaps we could do a swap when you're done?
::posted by: Lil at September 29, 2004 08:54 AM
Lil, defiantly take you up on that offer. The dysfunctional family as entertainment is great isn't it --- makes us feel so normal.
::posted by: mark at October 3, 2004 09:27 AM
