How to Be Alone

The blurb for this book pretty much says it all. I actually think that the essay form suits Franzen much better than the novel. Here, he can just tell us what he thinks without the need to invent characters and situations and write a whole novel as a vehicle for his ideas. As for the ideas themselves, love 'em or hate 'em, they are wonderfully written and sharply argued. The meditation on the role of the writer was intriguing; the insight into Oprah's book club was priceless; everything to do with his parents was deeply moving and just beautiful. Clever stuff. Top marks.

Almost five stars, except the essays are kind of scattered and not recent. the writing is amazing though!!!! I loooove Franzen's writing. His stuff is just... life. I am amazed that he has such a high-brow reputation because his work is so readable, so page-turning. Maybe I relate to him, cause I'm a mild iconoclast and he is maybe a more than mild iconoclast. But he is very American and he is insightful and brilliant.

Let me confess one crucial thing: "How to be alone" was the first book of Jonathan Franzen I have read. The reason to start my acquaintance with Jonathan was a TV-story with and about him which I thought interesting and amusing. When I checked out the books on Amazon I fell for "How to be alone" because I had a look inside and read a few pages of the first story called "My fathers brain". After having read the whole book I must say that first story was the only one I found justifying the purchase of this book. All the other stories were second rate compared to the first one which in my opinion was excellent. Jonathan FRanzen is able to describe his fathers illness Alzheimer in a proper, personal, intimate and sometimes amusing way which gives Alzheimer a human face and shows how to cope with it when a near and dear relative is struck with it. What I liked most in the story was the way Jonathan Franzen succeeds in describing neuroscientific knowledge in an easy and understandable way like when he explained in one sentence the problem with Alzheimer: "the decline of an Alzheimer patient mirrors in reverse the neurological development of a child". Obviously the hippocampus developes latest in the human brain and therefore declines first. And since it is the hippocampus which processes short-term memories into long-term this explains the problem of loss of memory in Alzheimer patients. Easy to understand and offering a good explanation why so many elderly people suffer this quite spectacular disease: not only Jonathan Franzens father but mine too.

I liked some of it. I was expecting more from him to be honest. Perhaps my expectation were too high. I like his ideas for the most part - he writes very honestly. Perhaps he's not up there in the Pynchon's, Wallace's or DeLillo's - but comes close.

How to Be Alone is an excellent, accessible introduction to Jonathan Franzen, with a well-curated collection of essays on topics ranging from the Chicago Post Office to the state of modern literature. I don't read a lot of non-fiction for pleasure, but this may end up being my intro to a wider world of essayists. I actually bought the book because I'm writing a thesis on Infinite Jest and Franzen was a friend and close contemporary, but many of the themes and subjects have dovetailed quite nicely with the concerns of IJ. Addiction and solipsism live here, along with writerly self-consciousness and a keen mind devoted to understanding both itself and its relationship to the world around it.