How Jonathan Franzen must relish these words: "I'd be delighted if the audience for serious fiction increased by an order of magnitude, so that I could spare $129 for a CD player.
But who really thinks that people are suddenly going to start reading more literary novels?"
In retrospect, it is loaded with innocent portent, written by him in 1994 at a time when he would regularly scavenge through dumpsters in the search for discarded furniture or whatever else the well-off had decided to cast-off. He was earning a four-figure salary and this sentiment was expressed as part of an angst-ridden polemic on the one topic that he wearily admits dominated his thinking far more than was healthy at the time: the place of the novel and of the novelist in a mass-media world that has run out of patience with literature. Or more to the point: the place of Jonathan Franzen in this world.
Of course, not only did people show that they were willing to buy literary novels in higher numbers than he had given them credit for, but it was a Jonathan Franzen book they bought. The Corrections, a work that is highly literary but equally accessible, turned out to be the book in which he put his money where his theories were and wrote a social novel that also engaged on a human level.
By the time he wrote it, he had acknowledged that one can't view the world through a series of literary critical theories. Nor can you sit in your room all day convincing yourself that the gentle thrum of the world outside is actually the relentless march of philistines, getting ever closer to your door. You can try - and Franzen tried very hard - but it'll only get you nowhere slowly.
So, sometime around 1996, he began to re-engage with the world. He began writing magazine essays. He took a job teaching a class in creative literature. And he stopped trying to be what he refers to as a "writer-with-a-capital-W". He couldn't have anticipated that it would result in him becoming a voice-with-a-capital-V.
How To Be Alone covers 1996-2001, the period during which he was writing The Corrections, and his growing self-awareness stretches to the editing here. This collection includes what has been termed 'The Harpers Essay', a plea for the resurrection of the social novel that was subsequently used as a handy reference point for every journalist and interviewer he met after the publication of The Corrections. Here, it is given the rather sulky title 'Why Bother?', and its opening third has been substantially re-written to save the reader from a "state of theoretical high dudgeon that made me cringe a little now".
Franzen may have altered his approach somewhat, but the recurring theme in this collection is that of writers and writing. He is also pre-occupied with the notions of privacy and solitude. How to be alone in the city. How to be alone in the sticks. How to be alone with a book in your hand.
When faced with having The Corrections selected as an Oprah Winfrey Book Club choice, he famously chose the private over the public and refused to co-operate. It is a little disappointing that he deals with this chapter of his life, in a typically deft, but ultimately opaque manner. It is fine that he didn't want to hitch a ride on what he saw as a road show of schmaltz, but Oprah's club brought high literature to a low brow audience, and if Franzen can be so eloquent on the state of literature it would be good if he was equally so on this challenge to his pessimism.
It is the opening essay, 'My Father's Brain', which is the collection's most accomplished. Charting the course of his father's demise due to Alzheimer's Disease, it is erudite, touching and witty. More than any other here it showcases his outstanding story-telling ability. Other essays on matters such as the state of the Chicago Postal Service, tobacco companies and the prison system seem a little more prosaic in comparison, but when he hits full flow, Franzen's almost casual brilliance with language can leave you giddy with the thrill.
Before, in the pre-Corrections days, one of Franzen's students watched his teacher light up at the sight of a dumpster and looked on with bafflement and disgust as his teacher rifled through it for goodies. "This is what my life will be like if I write fiction?" he asked.
Not always.
How To Be Alone. By Jonathan Franzen. 4th Estate, 278pp. £16.99
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
