How to Be Alone

How to Be Alone: Essays is a collection of 14 essays by novelist Jonathan Franzen. The essays range widely in subject matter but share an underlying concern with what Franzen calls "the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone" (6).

In a brief introductory essay, "A Word About This Book," Franzen explains that his third novel, The Corrections, was published one week before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. In the interviews that followed, journalists repeatedly mischaracterized a long essay he had published in Harper's magazine in 1996 as a promise to write a big social novel that would rejuvenate American literature. Franzen insists the essay actually documented his abandonment of that ambition. When he revisits the original text, he finds its opening sections embarrassingly strident and cuts it by a quarter. He frames the entire collection as a record of his personal movement away from angry, frightened isolation toward an acceptance of being a reader and a writer.

"My Father's Brain" interweaves a memoir of his father Earl Franzen's decline from Alzheimer's disease with meditations on memory, selfhood, and the nature of the brain. Franzen opens with a memory from February 1996: His mother sent him a Valentine's package containing candy, a greeting card, and a neuropathologist's report on his father's brain autopsy, which confirmed Alzheimer's through the presence of senile plaques and tangles. He discusses contemporary neuroscience's model of memory as a temporary constellation of neural activity rather than a fixed record and reflects on how each retelling of a memory reinforces and slightly alters it.

Franzen reconstructs his father's decline largely through his mother's letters, which document Earl's early symptoms, long attributed to hearing loss, depression, or medication side effects. As the disease progressed, Earl experienced a complete psychotic break during a hospital stay and never returned home. In one rare moment of clarity, he told his wife and son that he had always loved her, a declaration his mother later could not remember. Franzen reflects on his reluctance to apply the clinical label "Alzheimer's" to his father, seeing the label as a way of reducing Earl's individuality to a set of organic symptoms. He discusses the disease's history and the paradoxical relief some patients experience as responsibilities dissolve. Earl died in April 1995 after he stopped eating. Franzen describes his father's last breaths as resembling slow, deep nods in the affirmative and argues that Earl's trajectory was shaped not by smooth decline but by will and character.

In "Imperial Bedroom," Franzen argues that the real crisis in American life is not the erosion of privacy but the collapse of public space. He contends that Americans have far more privacy than they did in 1890, when small-town life meant near-total surveillance. What is truly threatened, he argues, is the public sphere: Television has imported bedroom intimacy into nominally public discourse, eroding the distinction between private and public.

"Why Bother?," the revised version of the controversial Harper's essay, traces Franzen's crisis of faith in the social relevance of the literary novel. He begins in the winter of 1991 at Yaddo, an artists' colony in upstate New York, where he discovered Paula Fox's 1970 novel Desperate Characters and found in it a model for connecting personal and social crises. He recounts his youthful ambition to write socially engaged fiction modeled on Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the disillusionment that followed the publication of his first two novels. He argues that television and consumer culture have rendered the social novel obsolete as a vehicle for reportage.

The essay's turning point comes through Shirley Brice Heath, a linguistic anthropologist at Stanford whose research on readers identifies two types: those whose reading habit was modeled by parents, and "social isolates" who felt different from everyone around them and found community in the authors of books. Heath told Franzen he was such a social isolate, and he experienced this recognition as a revelation about why he writes. Her research also shows that serious readers share a near-unanimous belief that literature forces them to confront life's unpredictability. Franzen describes his shift from "depressive realism," in which darkness justified paralysis, to "tragic realism," in which darkness sustains rather than immobilizes. He concludes that what novelists preserve is not social reportage but a community of readers and writers united by the conviction that nothing in the world seems simple.

"Lost in the Mail" reports on the systemic crisis of the Chicago post office in 1994. Franzen profiles Gayle Campbell, a Vietnam veteran and career postal worker of African, Irish, and Native American ancestry who documented massive failures in mail delivery. He traces the crisis to Postmaster General Marvin Runyon's 1992 reorganization, which drained Chicago of nearly 10 percent of its senior workforce. Campbell's reports were suppressed by management, so she leaked them to the Chicago Sun-Times, precipitating scandals that led to the removal of top postal executives. Franzen frames the post office as the last institution embodying universal democratic service, its neglect mirroring the larger abandonment of American cities.

"Erika Imports" is a brief personal essay about a teenage job packing boxes for an elderly German émigré couple. Franzen concludes that in 25 years he has never found a work situation that is not somehow about family, loyalty, sex, or guilt. "Sifting the Ashes" examines the tobacco industry and Franzen's own conflicted relationship with smoking. He evaluates arguments for the industry's moral culpability and finds each partially valid but insufficient, suggesting the industry is being scapegoated for broader societal failures.

"The Reader in Exile" reviews three books about reading in an electronic age and endorses the idea of the "oppositional reader" who reads as resistance against mass culture. "First City" explores why American cities, particularly New York, continue to attract residents despite forces pushing toward suburbanization, arguing that urban strangeness and diversity provide both privacy and self-knowledge. "Scavenging" reflects on obsolescence and the fiction writer's relationship to discarded things, reframing obsolescence not as darkness but as beauty.

"Control Units" reports on the federal supermax prison ADX Florence in Colorado. Franzen interviews political prisoners, including Mutulu Shakur, a member of the Republic of New Afrika movement, and Ray Luc Levasseur, a French Canadian radical convicted of bombings. He argues that the prison system enacts a cynical cycle in which poor youth are warehoused in rural communities, emerge embittered and unemployable, and commit further crimes that fuel public demand for harsher punishment.

"Mr. Difficult" uses the fiction of William Gaddis to examine two competing models of how novels relate to audiences. The "Status" model holds that a novel's value exists independent of readers' enjoyment, and difficulty signals excellence. The "Contract" model holds that a novel represents a compact between writer and reader, and difficulty signals trouble. Franzen recounts reading Gaddis's 956-page debut, The Recognitions, and finding at its center a moving story about the loss and recovery of personal integrity. He then describes his failed attempt to finish Gaddis's second novel, JR. He notes that Gaddis's own reading tastes were conservative and argues that serving readers a book you yourself would not want to read is the ultimate breach of Contract.

"Books in Bed" surveys popular sex-advice books, critiquing their reduction of sex to technique and consumer spending. Franzen argues that the modern regime of total sexual disclosure creates the incompetence it claims to cure and praises Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity for a moment of narrative restraint that proves fidelity to the reader.

"Meet Me in St. Louis" narrates a day of filming supplemental background footage for Oprah Winfrey's Book Club in the St. Louis neighborhood where Franzen grew up. He repeatedly refuses to let the crew film at his family's old house and, after hours of staging, erupts with "This is so fundamentally bogus!" (298). At a bookstore reading that evening, old friends and neighbors gather warmly, and the new owner of his family's house presents him with a brass door knocker bearing his family's name. Franzen reflects that his resistance stems not from the house's emptiness but from the painful recent memories it holds, particularly a small dish of canned peas he found in the refrigerator during his mother's last hospitalization, evidence of her final, solitary attempt to eat. He foreshadows the public controversy that followed, with Winfrey disinviting him from her show and the nationwide backlash that ensued.

The collection closes with "Inauguration Day, January 2001," narrated in the second person, about riding a school bus from Harlem to Washington, D.C., to protest the inauguration of George W. Bush. Franzen captures the warm solidarity of riding with young socialists and the disorienting moment of glimpsing well-dressed inauguration guests behind patriotic bunting. The essay ends with the narrator arriving home, peeling off the day's damp costume, and standing naked and alone in the shower.