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The piece on his father's Alzheimer's disease alone is worth the four stars.
(B) 75% | More than SatisfactoryNotes: A scrapbook patchwork of previously published prose, lucid though largely forgettable, and expectedly hit and miss.
I've always been a big fan of Jonathan Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City , and was excited by The Corrections when it first came out. I even liked Freedom, or at least I did while reading it, but found that it disappeared from my brain immediately thereafter, a signal I've grown to trust that says to me that whether the book is at fault or my brain is, the book-brain relationship is in any event a bit of a washout and it may soon be getting time to break up with the half of the rela...
So Jonathan Franzen doesn't know I exist and couldn't possibly have written this just to show up as confirmation during a week when I needed exactly this sort of confirmation, right? So it just felt that way.Also it could be the title attracted me because cultivating the sort of isolation required for reading and writing does mean being a little dangerously far from the herd and I am ambivalent about it, just as I have an odd little relationship with goodreads because it's a way of not being alo...
A girlfriend took this with her after we broke up (along with many, many other books of mine). So I guess she did a far better job of teaching me how to be alone than Mr. Franzen ever could.
How To Be Alone – a.k.a., How To Make Some Quick Cash Between NovelsFull disclosure: I love Jonathan Franzen, novelist. The Corrections and Freedom are two of my favourite novels written in the past couple of decades. And I can’t wait to read his new book, out this fall.But that’s Novelist Franzen. Do I really need to read Essayist Franzen? Especially when his prose is often fussy, whiny and awkward?Here are two random passages from his uneven 2002 collection, How To Be Alone (take a deeeeep br...
Subtitled, YOU KIDS AND YOUR VAN HALEN RECORDS. GET OFF MY LAWN! (by Jonathan Franzen.)
A lot of people bitch about Jonathan Franzen, and probably with good reason. Especially in a nation in which mainstream aesthetic values have become conflated with democracy (facepalm), he's viewed as an out-of-touch elitist, an academic leftist, who-- unlike other academic leftists-- actually winds up on bestseller lists, and thus forces his opinions into the national conversation. In fact, he's one of the few American writers today who actually seems willing to challenge the status quo, and fu...
I am sorry to say that this particular collection of essays turned out to be utterly boring. The only two of them, that are interesting are Why Bother? (a marvelous musings of Franzen over the importance of the novel and the reading as a whole as well as about the lesser interest towards literature in the modern world) and Meet Me at Saint Louis (you will learn the story of Franzen and Oprah`s dispute, how he was invited to be part of her book club with The Corrections and then uninvited because...
No offense to Jonathan Franzen—whose novels I’ve not yet read—but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this collection of his essays. Surprised because many of them were written more than twenty years ago and are about subjects that I’m completely unfamiliar with. Who’d have thought than an essay about the Chicago Post Office (“Lost in the Mail,” 1994), for example, or the (hitherto unknown to me) American novelist William Gaddis (“Mr. Difficult,” 2002) would be so interesting?As an ex-smoker I...
The answer is books!
It's rare I find myself agreeing with the New york Times, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, but their descriptions of Jonathan Franzen as a "pompous prick, an "ego-blinded snob", and a "spoiled,whiny little brat" are spot on.While the language is just as complex and florid as in his novels, these essays reveal far to much about the man behind the typewriter, and none of it is flattering.
