Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

The trip back took seven hours. The young socialists — an installer for Verizon, a bartender who was formerly a soccer star at Brown, a first-year schoolteacher — compared cell phones, read Marx in abridgment (“It saves reading three volumes of Capital for two years”), unanimously praised Friends , and split, along strict gay/straight lines, over the merits of Xena, Warrior Princess . Few pleasures compare with that of riding on a bus after dark, hours behind schedule, with people you violently agree with. But finally, inevitably, you get dumped back in the city. Rain is freezing on the ground, snow covering the slush. You may still be one version of yourself, the version from the bus, the younger and redder version, as long as you’re waiting for the subway and riding home. But then you peel off the thermal layers, still damp, of the long day’s costume, and you see a wholly different kind of costume hanging in your closet; and in the shower you’re naked and alone.

[2001]

My despair about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists colony in upstate New York, to write the last two chapters of my second book. I had been leading a life of self-enforced solitude in New York City — long days of writing in a small white room, evening walks on streets where Hindi, Russian, Korean, and Colombian Spanish were spoken in equal measure. Even deep in my Queens neighborhood, however, ugly news had reached me through the twin portals of my TV set and my New York Times subscription. The country was preparing for war ecstatically, whipped on by William Safire (for whom Saddam Hussein was “this generation’s Hitler”) and George Bush (“Vital issues of principle are at stake”), whose approval rating stood at 89 percent. In the righteousness of the nation’s hatred of a man who until recently had been our close petropolitical ally, as in the near-total absence of public skepticism about the war, the United States seemed to me as terminally out of touch with reality as Austria had been in 1916, when it managed to celebrate the romantic “heroism” of mechanized slaughter in the trenches. I saw a country dreaming of infinite oil for its hour-long commutes, of glory in the massacre of faceless Iraqis, of eternal exemption from the rules of history. But in my own way I, too, was dreaming of escape, and when I realized that Yaddo was no haven — the Times came there daily, and the talk at every meal was of Patriot missiles and yellow ribbons — I began to think that the most reasonable thing for a citizen to do might be to enter a monastery and pray for humanity.

Such was my state when I discovered, in the modest Yaddo library, Paula Fox’s classic short novel Desperate Characters . “She was going to get away with everything!” is the hope that seizes Sophie Bentwood, a woman who possibly has rabies, in Desperate Characters , Sophie is a literate, childless Brooklynite, unhappily married to a conservative lawyer named Otto. She used to translate French novels; now she’s too depressed to do more than intermittently read them. Against Otto’s advice, she has given milk to a homeless cat, and the cat has repaid the kindness by biting her hand. Sophie immediately feels “vitally wounded”—she’s been bitten for “no reason,” just as Josef K. is arrested for “no reason” in Kafka’s The Trial —but when the swelling in her hand subsides, she becomes giddy with the hope of being spared rabies shots.

The “everything” Sophie wants to get away with, however, is more than her liberal self-indulgence with the cat. She wants to get away with reading Goncourt novels and eating omelettes aux fines herbes on a street where derelicts lie sprawled in their own vomit and in a country that’s fighting a dirty war in Vietnam. She wants to be spared the pain of confronting a future beyond her life with Otto. She wants to keep dreaming. But the novel’s logic won’t let her. She’s compelled, instead, to this equation of the personal and the social;

“ God, if I am rabid I am equal to what is outside ,” she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she’d discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence.

Desperate Characters , which was first published in 1970, ends with an act of prophetic violence. Breaking under the strain of his collapsing marriage, Otto Bentwood grabs a bottle of ink from Sophie’s escritoire and smashes it against their bedroom wall. The ink in which his law books and Sophie’s translations have been printed now forms an unreadable blot — a symbolic precursor of the blood that, a generation later, more literal-minded books and movies will freely splash. But the black lines on the wall aren’t simply a mark of doom. They point as well toward an extraordinary relief, the end to a fevered isolation. By daring to equate a crumbling marriage with a crumbling social order, Fox goes to the heart of an ambiguity that even now I experience almost daily: does the distress I feel derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or is it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from this ambiguity and had seen light on its far side — that a book like Desperate Characters had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in a novel pulled almost at random from a bookshelf — felt akin to an instance of religious grace. I don’t think there’s a more pure gratitude than the one I felt toward a stranger who twenty years earlier had cared enough about herself and about her art to produce such a perfectly realized book.

Yet even while I was feeling saved as a reader by Desperate Characters I was succumbing, as a novelist, to despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social. The reader who happens on Desperate Characters in a library today will be as struck by the foreignness of the Bentwoods’ world as by its familiarity. A quarter century has only broadened and confirmed the sense of cultural crisis that Fox was registering. But what now feels like the locus of that crisis — the banal ascendancy of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse — is nowhere to be seen in the novel. Communication, for the Bentwoods, meant books, a telephone, and letters. Portents didn’t stream uninterruptedly through a cable converter or a modem; they were glimpsed only dimly, on the margins of existence. An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still imaginable as a symbol in 1970.

In a winter when every house in the nation was haunted by the ghostly telepresences of Peter Arnett in Baghdad and Tom Brokaw in Saudi Arabia — a winter when the inhabitants of those houses seemed less like individuals than a collective algorithm for the conversion of media jingoism into an 89 percent approval rating — I was tempted to think that if a contemporary Otto Bentwood were breaking down, he would kick in the screen of his bedroom TV. But this would have missed the point. Otto Bentwood, if he existed in the Nineties, would not break down, because the world would no longer even bear on him. As an unashamed elitist, an avatar of the printed word, and a genuinely solitary man, he belongs to a species so endangered as to be all but irrelevant in an age of electronic democracy. For centuries, ink in the form of printed novels has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives. What Sophie and Otto were glimpsing, in the vatic black mess on their bedroom wall, was the disintegration of the very notion of a literary character. Small wonder they were desperate. It was still the Sixties, and they had no idea what had hit them.