Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Birkerts begins his defense of the novel by recounting how, while growing up in an immigrant household, he came to understand himself by reading Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, and Hermann Hesse. The authors as well as the alienated, romantic heroes of their books became models for emulation and comparison. Later, on the desolate emotional beach on which the wave of sixties idealism seems to have deposited so many people, Birkerts weathered years of depression by reading, by working in bookstores, and, finally, by becoming a reviewer. “Basically,” he says, “I was rescued by books.”

Books as catalysts of self-realization and books as sanctuary: the notions are paired because Birkerts believes that “inwardness, the more reflective component of self,” requires a “space” where a person can reflect on the meaning of things. Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state. Here is his description of his initial engagement with a novel: “I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.” And here is his neat reply to hypertext’s promise of liberation from the author: “This ‘domination by the author’ has been, at least until now, the point of reading and writing. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another.” Birkerts on reading fiction is like M. F. K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly-casting. He makes you want to go do it.

Counterposed to his idyll of the book-lined study, however, is a raging alarmism. In the decline of the novel, Birkerts sees more than a shift in our habits of entertainment. He sees a transformation of the very nature of humanity. His nightmare, to be sure, “is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference.” He grants that technology has made our perspectives more global and tolerant, our access to information easier, our self-definitions less confining. But, as he repeatedly stresses, “the more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.” Instead of Augie March, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead of Manassas battlefield, a historical theme park. Instead of organizing narratives, a map of the world as complex as the world itself. Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.

In a coda to The Gutenberg Elegies , Birkerts conjures up, out of the pages of Wired magazine, the Devil himself, “sleek and confident,” a “sorcerer of the binary order” who offers to replace the struggle of earthly existence with “a vivid, pleasant dream.” All he wants in return is mankind’s soul. Birkerts confesses to an envy for the Devil: “I wonder, as I did in high school when confronted with the smooth and athletic ones, the team captains and class presidents, whether I would not, deep down, trade in all this doubting and wondering and just be him.” Yet, tempted as he is by the sexiness of the Devil’s technology, a voice in his heart says, “Refuse it.”

Technology as the Devil incarnate, being digital as perdition: considering that contemporary authors like Toni Morrison have vastly larger audiences than Jane Austen had in her day, something other than sober analysis would seem to be motivating Birkerts’s hyperbole. The clue, I think, is in the glimpses he gives of his own life beneath the shallows of what it means to be human. He refers to his smoking, his quarts of beer, his morbid premonitions of disaster, his insomnia, his brooding. He names as the primary audience for his book his many friends who refuse to grant him the darkness of our cultural moment, who shrug off electronic developments as enhancements of the written word. “I sometimes wonder if my thoughtful friends and I are living in the same world. . Naturally I prefer to think that the problem lies with them.”

These lines are redolent with depression and the sense of estrangement from humanity that depression fosters. Nothing aggravates this estrangement more than a juggernaut of hipness such as television has created and the digital revolution’s marketers are exploiting. It’s no accident that Birkerts locates apocalypse in the arch-hip pages of Wired . He’s still the high-school loner, excluded from the in crowd and driven, therefore, to the alternative and more “genuine” satisfactions of reading. But what, we might ask him, is so wrong with being an efficient and prosperous information manager? Do the team captains and class presidents really not have souls?

Elitism is the Achilles’ heel of every serious defense of art, an invitation to the poisoned arrows of populist rhetoric. The elitism of modern literature is, undeniably, a peculiar one — an aristocracy of alienation, a fraternity of the doubting and wondering. Still, after voicing a suspicion that nonreaders view reading “as a kind of value judgment upon themselves, as an elitist and exclusionary act,” Birkerts is brave enough to confirm their worst fears: “Reading is a judgment. It brands as insufficient the understandings and priorities that govern ordinary life.” If he had stopped here, with the hard fact of literature’s selective appeal, The Gutenberg Elegies would be an unassailable, if unheeded, paean. But because books saved his life and he can’t abide the thought of a world without them, he falls under the spell of another, more popular defense of art. This is the grant-proposal defense, the defense that avoids elitism. Crudely put, it’s that while technology is merely palliative, art is therapeutic.

I admit to being swayable by this argument. It’s why I banished my Trinitron and gave myself back to books. But I try to keep this to myself. Unhappy families may be aesthetically superior to happy families, whose happiness is all alike, but “dysfunctional” families are not. It was easy to defend a novel about unhappiness; everybody knows unhappiness; it’s part of the human condition. A novel about emotional dysfunction, however, is reduced to a Manichaeanism of utility. Either it’s a sinister enabler, obstructing health by celebrating pathology, or it’s an object lesson, helping readers to understand and overcome their own dysfunction. Obsession with social health produces a similar vulgarity: if a novel isn’t part of a political solution, it must be part of the problem. The doctoral candidate who “exposes” Joseph Conrad as a colonialist is akin to the school board that exiles Holden Caulfield as a poor role model — akin as well, unfortunately, to Birkerts, whose urgency in defending reading devolves from the assumption that books must somehow “serve” us.

I love novels as much as Birkerts does, and I, too, have felt rescued by them. I’m moved by his pleading, as a lobbyist in the cause of literature, for the intellectual subsidy of his client. But novelists want their work to be enjoyed, not taken as medicine. Blaming the novel’s eclipse on infernal technologies and treasonous literary critics, as Birkerts does, will not undo the damage. Neither will the argument that reading enriches us. Ultimately, if novelists want their work to be read, the responsibility for making it attractive and imperative is solely their own.

THERE REMAINS, however, the bitter circumstance that, as Birkerts puts it, “the daily life of the average American has become Teflon for the novelist.” Once upon a time, characters inhabited charged fields of status and geography. Now, increasingly, the world is binary. You either have or you don’t have. You’re functional or you’re dysfunctional, you’re wired or you’re tired. Unhappy families, perhaps even more than happy ones, are all identically patched in to CNN, The Lion King , and America Online. It’s more than a matter of cultural references; it’s the very texture of their lives. And if a novel depends on the realization of complex characters against a background of a larger society, how do you write one when the background is indistinguishable from the foreground?