Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

A century ago, the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that today a new Pearl Jam release inspires. The big, obvious reason that the social novel has become so scarce is that modem technologies do a better job of social instruction. Television, radio, and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In C old Blood , has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly. Few serious novelists can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass of expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like E.R. and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity.

Instead of an age in which Dickens, Darwin, and Disraeli ail read one another’s work, therefore, we live in an age in which our presidents, if they read fiction at alt, read Louis L Amour or Walter Mosley, and vital social news comes to us mainly via pollsters. A recent USA Today survey of twenty-four hours in the life of American culture contained twenty-three references to television, six to film, six to popular music, three to radio, and one to fiction ( The Bridges of Madison County ). The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensibilities. Portnoy’s Complaint , which even my mother once heard enough about to disapprove of, was probably the last American novel that could have appeared on Bob Dole’s radar as a nightmare of depravity. When the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head, what seemed archaic to Americans was not his Muslim fanaticism but the simple fact that he’d become so exercised about a book .

In the season when I began “My Obsolescence” and then abandoned it in midsentence, I let myself become involved with Hollywood. I had naively supposed that a person with a gift for story structure might be able, by writing screenplays, to support his private fiction habit and simultaneously take the edge off his hunger for a large audience. My Hollywood agent, whom I’ll call Dicky, had told me that I could sell a treatment, not even a finished script, if the concept were sufficiently high. He was enthusiastic about the treatment I submitted six months later (I had the concept down to five words, one of which was “sex”), but unfortunately, he said, the market had changed, and I would need to produce a complete script. This I managed to do in fifteen days. I was feeling very smart, and Dicky was nearly apoplectic with enthusiasm. Just a few small changes, he said, and we were looking at a very hot property.

The next six months were the most hellish of my life. I now needed money, and despite a growing sense of throwing good work after bad (“Enthusiasm is free,” a friend warned me), I produced a second draft, a third draft, and a fourth-and-absolutely-final draft. Dicky’s enthusiasm was unabated when he reported to me that my fourth draft had finally shown him the light: we needed to keep the three main characters and the opening sequence, and then completely recast the remaining 115 pages. I said I didn’t think I was up to the job. He replied, “You’ve done wonderful work in developing the characters, so now let’s find another writer and offer him a fifty percent stake.”

When I got off the phone, I couldn’t stop laughing. I felt peculiarly restored to myself. The people who succeed in Hollywood are the ones who want it badly enough, and I not only didn’t want it badly enough, I didn’t want it at all. When I refused to let another writer take over, I ensured that I would never see a penny for my work; Dicky, understandably, dropped me like medical waste. But I couldn’t imagine not owning what I’d written. I would have no problem with seeing one of my novels butchered onscreen, provided I was paid, because the book itself would always belong to me. But to let another person “do creative” on an unfinished text of mine was unthinkable. Solitary work — the work of writing, the work of reading — is the essence of fiction, and what distinguishes the novel from more visual entertainments is the interior collaboration of writer and reader in building and peopling an imagined world. I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as if she were a good friend, because I poured my own feelings of fear and estrangement into my construction of her. If I knew her only through a video of Desperate Characters (Shirley MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the ineluctable surficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.

Knowing MacLaine a little better, however, is what the country seems to want. We live under a tyranny of the literal. The daily unfolding stories of Steve Forbes, Magic Johnson, Timothy McVeigh, and Hillary Clinton have an intense, iconic presence that relegates to a subordinate shadow-world our own untelevised lives. In order to justify their claim on our attention, the organs of mass culture and information are compelled to offer something “new” on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. The resulting ephemerality of every story or trend or fashion or issue is a form of planned obsolescence more impressive than a Detroit car’s problems after 60,000 miles, since it generally takes a driver four or five years to reach that limit and, after all, a car actually has some use.

Although good novelists don’t deliberately seek out trends, they do feel a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day, and they now confront a culture in which almost all of the issues are burned out almost all of the time. The writer who wants to tell a story about society that’s true not just in 1996 but in 1997 as well finds herself at a loss for solid cultural referents. I’m not advancing some hoary notion of literary “timelessness” here. But since art offers no objective standards by which to validate itself, it follows that the only practical standard — the only means of distinguishing yourself from the schlock that is your enemy — is whether anybody is willing to put effort into reading you ten years down the line. This test of time has become a test of the times, and it’s a test the times are failing. How can you achieve topical “relevance” without drawing on an up-to-the-minute vocabulary of icons and attitudes and thereby, far from challenging the hegemony of overnight obsolescence, confirming and furthering it?

Since even in the Nineties cultural commentators persist in blaming novelists for their retreat from public affairs, it’s worth saying one more time: Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture and landscape painting, television has killed the novel of social reportage. [3] Tom Wolfe’s manifesto for the “New Social Novel” (Harper’s, November 1989) was probably the high-water mark of sublime incomprehension. What was most striking about Wolfe’s essay — more than his uncannily perfect ignorance of the many excellent socially engaged novels published between 1960 and 1989, more, even, than his colossal self regard — was his failure to explain why his ideal New Social Novelist should not be writing scripts for Hollywood. Truly committed social novelists may still find cracks in the monolith to sink their pitons into. But they do so with the understanding that they can no longer depend on their material, as William Dean Howells and Upton Sinclair and Harriet Beecher Stowe did, but only on their own sensibilities, and with the expectation that no one will be reading them for news .