Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

The current flourishing of novels by women and cultural minorities shows the chauvinism of judging the vitality of American letters by the fortunes of the traditional social novel. Indeed, it can be argued that the country’s literary culture is healthier for having disconnected from mainstream culture; that a universal “American” culture was little more than an instrument for the perpetuation of a white, male, heterosexual elite, and that its decline is the just desert of an exhausted tradition. (Joseph Heller’s depiction of women in Catch-22 , for example, is so embarrassing that I hesitated to recommend the book to my students.) It’s possible that the American experience has become so sprawling and diffracted that no single “social novel,” a la Dickens or Stendhal, can ever hope to mirror it; perhaps ten novels from ten different cultural perspectives are required now.

Unfortunately, there’s also evidence that young writers today feel imprisoned by their ethnic or gender identities — discouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture in which television has conditioned us to accept only the literal testimony of the Self. And the problem is aggravated when fiction writers take refuge in university creative-writing programs. Any given issue of the typical small literary magazine, edited by MFA candidates aware that the MFA candidates submitting manuscripts need to publish in order to obtain or hold on to teaching jobs, reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: “My Interesting Childhood,” “My Interesting Life in a College Town,” and “My Interesting Year Abroad.” Fiction writers in the Academy do serve the important function of teaching literature for its own sake, and some of them also produce strong work while teaching, but as a reader I miss the days when more novelists lived and worked in big cities. I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience. Even though social reportage is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental by-product — Shirley Heath’s observations confirm that serious readers aren’t reading for instruction — I still like a novel that’s alive and multivalent like a city.

THE VALUE of Heath’s work, and the reason I’m citing her so liberally, is that she has bothered to study empirically what nobody else has, and that she has brought to bear on the problem of reading a vocabulary that is neutral enough to survive in our value-free cultural environment. Readers aren’t “better” or “healthier” or, conversely, “sicker” than nonreaders. We just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community.

For Heath, a defining feature of “substantive works of fiction” is unpredictability . She arrived at this definition after discovering that most of the hundreds of serious readers she interviewed have had to deal, one way or another, with personal unpredictability. Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. So do people whose lives haven’t followed the course they were expected to: merchant-caste Koreans who don’t become merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, openly gay men from conservative families, and women whose lives have turned out to be radically different from their mothers’. This last group is particularly large. There are, today, millions of American women whose lives do not resemble the lives they might have projected from their mothers’, and all of them, in Heath’s model, are potentially susceptible to substantive fiction.

In her interviews, Heath uncovered a “wide unanimity” among serious readers that literature “‘makes me a better person.’” She hastened to assure me that, rather than straightening them out in a self-help way, “reading serious literature impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life.” Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive —my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath adds, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.”

With near-unanimity, Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as, she said, “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not.”

“And religions themselves are substantive works of fiction,” I said.

She nodded. “This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren’t there, there isn’t closure. The language of literary works gives forth something different with each reading. But unpredictability doesn’t mean total relativism. Instead it highlights the persistence with which writers keep coming back to fundamental problems. Your family versus your country, your wife versus your girlfriend.”

“Being alive versus having to die,” I said.

“Exactly,” Heath said. “Of course, there is a certain predictability to literature’s unpredictability. It’s the one thing that all substantive works have in common. And that predictability is what readers tell me they hang on to — a sense of having company in this great human enterprise.”

“A friend of mine keeps telling me that reading and writing are ultimately about loneliness. I’m starting to come around.”

“It’s about not being alone, yes,” Heath said, “but it’s also about not hearing that there’s no way out — no point to existence. The point is in the continuity, in the persistence of the great conflicts.”

Flying back from Palo Alto in an enforced transition zone crewed by the employee-owners of TWA, I declined the headphones for The Brady Bunch Movie and a special one-hour segment of E! , but I found myself watching anyway. Without sound, the segment of E! became an exposé of the hydraulics of insincere smiles. It brought me an epiphany of inauthenticity, made me hunger for the unforced emotion of a literature that isn’t trying to sell me anything. I had open on my lap Janet Frame’s novel of a mental hospital, Faces in the Water : uningratiating but strangely pertinent sentences on which my eyes would not stick until, after two and a half hours, the silent screen in front of me finally went blank.

Poor Noeline, who was waiting for Dr. Howell to propose to her although the only words he had ever spoken to her were How are you? Do you know where you are? Do you know why you are here? — phrases which ordinarily would be hard to interpret as evidence of affection. But when you are sick you find yourself in a new field of perception where you make a harvest of interpretations which then provides you with your daily bread, your only food. So that when Dr. Howell finally married the occupational therapist, Noeline was taken to the disturbed ward.