Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

This much, at least, was visible to Philip Roth in 1961. Noting that “for a writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country — as represented by Life or by what he experiences when he steps out the front door — must seem a serious occupational impediment,” he rather plaintively asked: “what will his subject be? His landscape?” In the intervening years, however, the screw has taken another turn. Our obsolescence now goes further than television’s usurpation of the role as news-bringer, and deeper than its displacement of the imagined with the literal. Flannery O’Connor, writing around the time that Roth made his remarks, insisted that the “business of fiction” is “to embody mystery through manners.” Like the poetics that Poe derived from his “Raven,” O’Connor’s formulation particularly flatters her own work, but there’s little question that “mystery” (how human beings avoid or confront the meaning of existence) and “manners” (the nuts and bolts of how human beings behave) have always been primary concerns of fiction writers. What’s frightening for a novelist today is how the technological consumerism that rules our world specifically aims to render both of these concerns moot.

O’Connor’s response to the problem Roth articulated, to the sense that there is tittle in the national mediascape that novelists can feel they own , was to insist that the best American fiction has always been regional. This was somewhat awkward, since her hero was the cosmopolitan Henry James. But what she meant was that fiction feeds on specificity, and that the manners of a particular region have always provided especially fertile ground for its practitioners. Superficially, at least, regionalism is still thriving. In fact it’s fashionable on college campuses nowadays to say that there is no America anymore, only Americas; that the only things a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian have in common are the English language and the federal income tax. The likelihood, however, is that both the New Yorker and the Georgian watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance, both have jobs that are threatened by the migration of employment overseas, both go to discount superstores to purchase Pocahontas tie-in products for their children, both are being pummeled into cynicism by commercial advertising, both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman. The world of the present is a world in which the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, the drama of regional specificity succumbing to a commercial generality. The American writer today faces a totalitarianism analogous to the one with which two generations of Eastern bloc writers had to contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine. .

Equally discouraging is the fate of “manners” in the word’s more common sense. Rudeness, irresponsibility, duplicity, and stupidity are hallmarks of real human interaction: the stuff of conversation, the stuff of sleepless nights. But in the world of consumer advertising and consumer purchasing, no evil is moral. The evils consist of high prices, inconvenience, lack of choice, lack of privacy, heartburn, hair loss, slippery roads. This is no surprise, since the only problems worth advertising solutions for are problems treatable through the spending of money. But money cannot solve the problem of bad manners — the chatterer in the darkened movie theater, the patronizing sister-in-law, the selfish sex partner — except by offering refuge in an atomized privacy. And such privacy is exactly what the American Century has tended toward. First there was mass suburbanization, then the perfection of at-home entertainment, and finally the creation of virtual communities whose most striking feature is that interaction within them is entirely optional — terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user.

That all these trends are infantilizing has been widely noted. Less often remarked is the way in which they are changing both our expectations of entertainment (the book must bring something to us, rather than our bringing something to the book) and the very content of that entertainment. What story is there to tell, Sven Birkerts asks in The Gutenberg Elegies , about the average American whose day consists of sleeping, working at a computer screen, watching TV, and talking on the phone? The problem for the novelist is not just that the average man or woman spends so little time F2F with his or her fellows; there is, after all, a rich tradition of epistolary novels, and Robinson Crusoe’s condition approximates the solitude of today’s suburban bachelor. The real problem is that the average man or woman’s entire life is increasingly structured to avoid precisely the kinds of conflicts on which fiction, preoccupied with manners, has always thrived.

Here, indeed, we are up against what truly seems like the obsolescence of serious art in general. Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even our commercialized religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us the center of our own universe of choices and gratifications? Fiction’s response to the sting of poor manners, for example, is to render them comic. The reader laughs with the writer, feels less alone with the sting. This is a delicate transaction, and it takes some work. How can it compete with a system that spares you the sting in the first place?

In the long run, the breakdown of communitarianism is likely to have all sorts of nasty consequences. In the short run, however, in this century of amazing prosperity and health, the breakdown displaces the ancient methods of dealing with the Ache. As for the sense of loneliness and pointlessness and loss that social atomization may produce — stuff that can be lumped under O’Connor’s general heading of mystery — it’s already enough to label it a disease. A disease has causes: abnormal brain chemistry, childhood sexual abuse, welfare queens, the patriarchy, social dysfunction. It also has cures: Zoloft, recovered-memory therapy, the Contract with America, multiculturalism, virtual reality. [4] There is cyber-philosopher Brenda Laurel, speaking to the Times : “In the V.R. field, there’s kind of a naive belief that we’re able to do. . what Tim Leary calls screen each other’s mind, well suddenly get a whole lot better at understanding each other. I know this sounds squishy, but I really believe it.” A partial cure or, better yet, an endless succession of partial cures, but failing that, even just the consolation of knowing you have a disease — anything is better than mystery. Science attacked religious mystery a long time ago. But it was not until applied science, in the form of technology, changed both the demand for fiction and the social context in which fiction is written that we novelists fully felt its effects.

Even now, even when I carefully locate my despair in the past tense, it’s difficult M for me to confess to all these doubts. In publishing circles, confessions of doubt are commonly referred to as “whining”—the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic and self-serving in writers who don’t sell, ungracious in writers who do. For people as protective of their privacy and as fiercely competitive as writers are, mute suffering would seem to be the safest course. However sick with foreboding you feel inside, it’s best to radiate confidence and to hope that it’s infectious. When a writer says publicly that the novel is doomed, it’s a sure bet his new book isn’t going welt; in terms of his reputation, it’s like bleeding in shark-infested waters.