It’s unfortunate that Jonathan Franzen is such a curmudgeon, because he’s also a terrific writer. His new collection of essays, “How To Be Alone,” foregrounds his talent for pointed observations and grumbled asides-in one essay he calls the media coverage of the first Gulf War “a thousand-hour infomercial for high technology”-that capture, and help to temper the often inscrutable spectacle of American media, politics, and culture.
But Franzen also too often makes the reader a captive of his obsessions. About half of the essays in “How To Be Alone” seem to have been conceived, researched, and written in the confines of Franzen’s musty apartment, composed from what Franzen calls his “place of anger and despair.” As Franzen himself admits in the book’s introduction, he used to think that our “American political economy was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions, exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder the planet in the process.” And as much as he jokes about this period of clinical depression and apocalyptic pessimism, it’s still on tiring display in a good chunk of the book.
Essays like “Scavenging,” in which he waxes nostalgic about rotary telephones and books, and launches on tiresome tirades against CD-ROMs and videos, or “The Reader In Exile,” an occasionally enlightening, but mostly tedious attack on digital technology, are pessimistic in the extreme, and simply rehash critiques of mass media that we’ve already heard a dozen times over.
But along with his hang-ups and phobias, Franzen is also a passionate and insightful critic of consumerism, the dissolution of personal responsibility, and social injustice. The essays of “How To Be Alone” that find him out in the thick of American absurdity, immersing himself in it before lacerating it, remind us why we need social commentators.
In “Control Units,” for example, he travels to central Colorado to visit an odd cluster of high-security prisons and the withering, depressed towns nearby that mistakenly put their economic hopes on their economic coattails. From the tailor, whose loss of a contract for prison uniforms pushes him towards bankruptcy, to the small-time investors whose all-out fundraising effort to buy up the land for the prison site ends in a last-minute change of mind by the buyers, Franzen sketches a poignant image of people left in the cold by the big, impersonal machinery of the state and the national bureaucracies.
In “Lost In The Mail,” which like several of the essays in “Alone” was originally published in The New Yorker, Franzen takes another look at bureaucracies, this time chronicling the astonishing incompetence and corruption that led to the mid-90s collapse of the Chicago postal system. As part of his research for the article, Franzen shadowed a delivery man, hung out with postal workers after-hours (“They revel in dog lore,” he writes, “I’m advised that if I’m ever set upon by a pack of strays I should Mace the one that barks first.”), and interviewed dozens of administrators, irate citizens, and journalists. The piece isn’t full of broader social messages, but Franzen’s meticulous details reek of authenticity, and his writing brings to life a whole fascinating constellation of industrial and bureaucratic mechanisms that normally remain hidden to us.
In fact many of Franzen’s essays seem aimed at demystifying the odd relationship between the individual and the crowd created by an increasingly privatized, paranoid, asocial age. In “Imperial Bedroom” he argues that instead of the “loss of privacy” prophesied as inevitable with the proliferation of digital information databases, privacy has in fact reached new heights:

‘The right to be left alone’? Far from disappearing, it’s exploding. It’s the essence of modern American architecture, landscape, transportation, communication, and mainstream political philosophy. The real reason that Americans are apathetic about privacy is so big as to be almost invis ible: we’re flat-out drowning in privacy.

This ascendancy of privacy, he argues, also means the death of the joys of the public space, the place where one can see and be seen, and “announce to the world (not the little world of friends and family but the big world, the real world), that you have a new suit, or that you’re in love, or that you suddenly realize you stand a full inch taller when you don’t hunch your shoulders.”
The real historical oddity of the collection, though, is the 1996 essay “Why Bother,” which was originally published in Harper’s in slightly different form under the title “Perchance To Dream.” In the piece, which is really the centerpiece of the book, Franzen describes the process of conceiving and unsuccessfully trying to write his third novel, which he envisioned as a “big, uncompromising” work modeled after Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22″. As he explains in the essay, he eventually came to the realization that the novel was no longer capable of addressing the “big issues” of the day, as was once done by writers like Henry James and Herman Melville. Until he understood the impossibility of his project, Franzen writes, he found himself in the throes of depression, a social recluse, and seriously considering abandoning his career as a writer.
Of course, his third novel turned out to be a huge success, if not the grand social novel of which he once dreamed. “The Corrections,” which appeared some five years after “Why Bother” was published in Harper’s Magazine, won Franzen overwhelming critical acclaim, and eventually the National Book Award. It even led to a highly publicized spat with Oprah that put his name on yet more headlines; after “The Corrections” was chosen as an “Oprah’s Book Club” selection, Franzen made comments to the effect that the Oprah stamp was more of a stigma than an honor (she eventually retracted her selection).
And in the end, Franzen proved himself wrong on another count: even if he hasn’t written his “Catch-22″ yet, “How To Be Alone” is a bit like training for the “big, uncompromising” novel he is sure to one day write. Although Franzen would be loath to admit it, “How To Be Alone” bears some striking resemblances to Tom Wolfe’s 1968 collection “The Pump House Gang,” another exercise in social critique and investigative reporting that prefigured great social novels to come (“Bonfire Of The Vanities,” “A Man In Full”). If he picks up a bit of Wolfe’s intrepid, journalistic spirit, and loses a bit of his queasy writer’s conflicts, Franzen will be on his way to writing his own “Moby Dick.”

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