Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Indeed, it verges on the bizarre that the cornering of the retail book market by Barnes & Noble’s discount superstores should be cited, by various hopeful commentators, as a sign of literary health. Behind these superstores’ pleasing facade of plenitude are unknowledgeable sales staffs and a Kmart-like system in which stock for every store is ordered by a central office in the Midwest. When I tried to find Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of Antarctic exploration, The Worst Journey in the World , at four different Barnes & Noble behemoths in Manhattan, I was told that the book was “probably” not in stock and then sent to Science & Nature or World History. (“It might be under Africa,” one clerk told me.) I finally found the book at Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue, which, despite its relatively tiny stock, had a section dedicated to Adventure & Exploration. Less than a month later, Brentano’s went out of business.

The institution of writing and reading serious novels is like a grand old Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments: techno and legal thrillers, novels of sex and vampires, of murder and mysticism. The last fifty years have seen a lot of white male flight to the suburbs and to the coastal power centers of television, journalism, and film. What remain, mostly, are ethnic and cultural enclaves. Much of contemporary fiction’s vitality now resides in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, and women’s communities, which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male. The depressed literary inner city also remains home to solitary artists who are attracted to the diversity and grittiness that only a city can offer, and to a few still vital cultural monuments (the opera of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike, the museum of Edith Wharton) to which suburban readers continue to pay polite Sunday visits.

By 1993 I was as depressed as the inner city of fiction. I had begun to make unhelpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I’d read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live, and perceiving in the three-digit product not so much an intimation of mortality as a measure of the incompatibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life. All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped. When I asked a young acquaintance who had been an English major what she was reading, she replied: “You mean linear reading? Like when you read a book from start to finish?” The day after she said this, I began to write an essay called “My Obsolescence.”

There has never been much love lost between the world of art and the “value-neutral” ideology of the market economy. In the wake of the Cold War, this ideology has set about consolidating its gains, enlarging its markets, securing its profits, and demoralizing its few remaining critics. In 1993 I saw signs of the consolidation everywhere. I saw it in the swollen mini vans and broad-beamed trucks that had replaced the automobile as the suburban vehicle of choice — these Rangers and Land Cruisers and Voyagers that were the true spoils of a war waged in order to keep American gasoline cheaper than dirt, a war that had played like a 1,000 hour infomercial for high technology, a consumer’s war dispensed through commercial television. I saw leaf-blowers replacing rakes. I saw CNN and its many, many commercial sponsors holding hostage the travelers in airport lounges and the shoppers in supermarket checkout lines. I saw the 486 chip replacing the 386 and being replaced in turn by the Pentium so that, despite new economies of scale, the price of entry-level notebook computers never fell below $1,000. I saw Penn State lose the Blockbuster Bowl.

The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it’s an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable. It makes sense, then, that as the free market on which journalists have modeled their own “neutrality” comes increasingly to be seen as the only paradigm plausible in the public sphere, even as earnest a paper as the New York Times can no longer trust itself to report on books without reference to “objective” standards — in other words, to sales figures. As the associate publisher of the Orange County Register said to a Times reporter in 1994; “Why do we keep deceiving ourselves about what a newspaper really is? Why do we keep deceiving ourselves about the role of editor as marketer?”

It seemed clear to me that if anybody who mattered in business or government believed there was a future in books, we would not have been witnessing such a frenzy in Washington and on Wall Street to raise half a trillion dollars for an Infobahn whose proponents paid Up service to the devastation it would wreak on reading (“You have to get used to reading on a screen”) but could not conceal their indifference to the prospect. It was also clear to me why these ruling interests were indifferent: When you hold a book in your hand, nothing will happen unless you work to make it happen. When you hold a book, the power and the responsibility are entirely yours.

The irony is that even as I was sanctifying the reading of literature, I was becoming so depressed that I could do little after dinner but flop in front of the TV. Even without cable, I could always find something delicious: Phillies and Padres, Eagles and Bengals, M*A*S*H, Cheers, Homicide . Broadcast TV breaks pleasure into comforting little units — half-innings, twelve-minute acts — the way my father, when I was very young, would cut my French toast into tiny bites. But of course the more TV I watched the worse I felt about myself. If you’re a novelist and even you don’t feel like reading, how can you expect anybody else to read your books? I believed I ought to be reading, as I believed I ought to be writing a third novel. And not just any third novel. It had always been a prejudice of mine that putting a novel’s characters in a dynamic social setting enriched the story that was being told; that the glory of the genre consisted in its spanning of the expanse between private experience and public context. What more vital context could there be than television’s short-circuiting of that expanse?

Yet I was absolutely paralyzed with the third book. My second novel, Strong Motion, was a long, complicated story about a Midwestern family in a world of moral upheaval, and this time instead of sending my bombs in a Jiffy-Pak mailer of irony and understatement, as I had with The Twenty-Seventh City , I’d come out throwing rhetorical Molotov cocktails. But the result was the same: another report card with A’s and B’s from the reviewers who had replaced the teachers whose approval, when I was younger, I had both craved and taken no satisfaction from; decent sales; and the deafening silence of irrelevance. After Strong Morion was published, I took a year off to gather material. When I got back to writing fiction I thought my problem might be that I hadn’t gathered enough. But the problem manifested itself as just the opposite: an overload. I was torturing the story, stretching it to accommodate ever more of those things-in-the-world that impinge on the enterprise of fiction writing. The work of transparency and beauty and obliqueness that I wanted to write was getting bloated with issues. I’d already worked in contemporary pharmacology and TV and race and prison life and a dozen other vocabularies; how was I going to satirize Internet boosterism and the Dow Jones as well while leaving room for the complexities of character and locale? Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time-increments of cultural change: how to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture? These were unhappy days. I began to think that there was something wrong with the whole model of the novel as a form of “cultural engagement.”