How to be alone - Essays

Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2002

288 páginas

9h 36m

ISBN-10: 0374173273

I feel really bad for calling it that (and sort of silly for even writing this blog post in the first place) but that’s really the most acute way I’d describe it. Despite the controversy surrounding his Harper’s articles, they don’t pack the same ideological punch anymore. If his concerns about mass/televised media seemed overwrought at the time, the media has expanded and worsened to substantiate his fears.

His best essay in the collection, about his father’s worsening condition near death, happens to be the first one. Maybe my expectations were malformed as a result. Or maybe it’s that Franzen’s strains of thought have won out, placing me under the same cultural/ideological set of assumptions as him. I just couldn’t shake the feeling - all throughout the book - that the sun of that first essay had set; that the light outside had dimmed with nightfall; and that the once-window had become a mirror, reflecting insubstantial images of indoors, leaving me only to gaze upon myself.