by JULIET WATERS

In the mid ’90s, I read an essay in Harper’s that I hated. Both a bitter eulogy and a self-pitying suicide note, the author mourned the death of the big, engaged, socially important novel. No one was writing them anymore, he argued—and so what, since nobody really reads anymore. The essay announced his decision to be like everyone else and retire from the effort. It irked me so much I forgot the author’s name. But I did think back to it after reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections last year, one of the biggest, most engaging, most socially important bestsellers of recent times. I wondered about that whiney Harper’s writer and what he had say for himself now.

Reading How to Be Alone, Franzen’s first collection of essays, I was surprised to discover that he was, in fact, “that whiney Harper’s writer.” Had I completely misinterpreted that essay? No. According to the introduction, just before the publication of The Corrections, a clever publicist decided to spin the Harper’s article as his “promise” to write that big social novel. In interviews, Franzen was asked, over and over again, whether The Corrections fulfilled the “promise” of “The Harper’s Essay.” Ever the incurable curmudgeon, he explained, over and over again, that he had actually promised the opposite. Public whining seemed to be the only way to work himself out of a writer’s block.

This is Jonathan Franzen, a writer who irritates almost as much as he inspires. He had Oprah’s admiration for about a month, until she dumped him from her book club, though I never believed she was all that insulted by his “conflictedness.” I speculated that the producers realized that he was not a good TV author. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” his essay about his Oprah experience, confirms this. The relationship between Franzen and Oprah producers became strained when he refused to be filmed going back to his Midwest family home. He hadn’t been there since it had been sold after his father’s slow death from Alzheimer’s, and the prospect of going back was too painful for him. The most he would let them do was film him driving 35 miles an hour along a highway, feigning a desire to re-examine his roots. Not quite a loose cannon, Franzen seems more a tight cannon, likely to implode at any moment and become withdrawn, wooden and defensive. The worst kind of TV personality.

But when Franzen comes alive, few readers can doubt that he’s one of the most important contemporary writers. His defence of writing and reading (the Harper’s essay has been rewritten and amended here), is a must read for anyone who questions the value of reading substantial literature. In a mass culture that is endlessly distracting and exploitative of our fear of solitude, he argues, literature teaches us how to be alone.

This doesn’t mean he stops being unpleasant when he writes. One wants to laugh at the “outrageous mother” anecdotes in his memoir of his parents’ struggle with his father’s deterioration; but one cringes for the actual mother being so publicly mocked. Though he fought against being exposed on television, he’s not above exposing her. “Inauguration Day, January 2001,” a poor-little-rich-author essay about activism seems self-indulgent. “First City” is insightful only about a New York that existed before September 11.

Still, the new and much-improved Harper’s essay, now titled “Why Bother?” will sweep any serious reader away as easily as his fiction. And “Imperial Bedroom,” his essay on privacy in an age of mass media is a classic.

Anyone who read The Corrections when it came out can never forget the remarkable coincidence of its release in the first week of September 2001. One longs for an essay about that instead of Oprah. Ironically her book club imploded soon after she counter-dissed Franzen. She claimed she’s finding it harder and harder to find good books. Maybe she needs to read this one. :

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen,
Harper Flamingo, hc, 279pp, $32.95