Overall, I must admit that these essays left me with a sense of disappointment. They struck me as being a bit too egotistical and niggling.

As a white, male, middle-aged, middle class, mid-westerner, I initially felt an affinity with Franzen. I could relate to where he was coming from, as everything he described seemed familiar. However, as he continued, he began to whine about literature and ignorance, going on and on about blah, blah, blah. It started to sound as if he had completely broken away from his cultural roots.

I was almost able to overlook his complaints because he did make some valid points and his writing was well constructed. But then he took it too far. In a later dated essay, he casually attacked William Gaddis and one of my favorite novels, JR, simply because it was "difficult." One could say the same about Infinite Jest and Joyce's Ulysses, but that shouldn't be a reason not to like them.

No, Franzen was criticizing JR because of its theme, which he found hackneyed and overused, namely the criticism of money culture. And that's when I started to wonder if he had even read the whole thing. Because JR is a truly brilliant, glimmering, sad, and wonderful work. There are countless scenes that shed light on the childish motives of Americans who get caught up in the pursuit of financial success. I can't do justice to the novel or even adequately explain it. Others on this site have managed to provide excellent reviews of JR. I encourage you to read those reviews.

Gaddis, back in 1975, showed how the pursuit of money was corrupting highbrow culture in America and would ultimately undermine the economic foundation of the post-war American polity. Franzen thinks this is boring. But perhaps it is precisely this boredom among those who should have cared that has allowed America to decline.

Franzen's "How To Be Alone" is a collection of essays that offers insights into the world of a novelist.

About halfway through, the reader realizes this might be as close as Franzen gets to writing a novel the reader wants. The narrator, Jonathan F., a novelist with two published works, struggles with the question of what kind of novelist he should be.

He defines two types of modern novels: the "Status" novel, where the best works are art and the average reader who rejects them is a philistine, and the "Contract" novel, where the writer provides words for the reader to create a pleasurable experience. Jonathan F. is torn between the two, drawn to the self-image of a Status novelist but admitting he's a Contract person at heart.

Four essays suggest possible novel subject matter. Three are about societal institutions like the US Postal Service, prisons, and big tobacco, which seem suited for Status treatment. However, Jonathan F. ultimately goes with the story of his father's battle with Alzheimer's, a Contract-friendly narrative.

But Jonathan F. has a bigger problem: he wonders if there's any point in being a novelist in a post-literate world. He looks back on his childhood when authors like Baldwin and Cheever were known even to non-readers through magazine covers. Now, an author's public awareness depends more on the size of their contracts than the relevance of their vision.

Throughout the book, Jonathan F. is confronted by the ubiquity of TV. He seems hostile to the medium, yet his third novel is selected by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. The whole fiasco of his public ambivalence and subsequent dis-invitation from the show is covered in a rushed manner.

The last essay, about a bus trip to protest Bush's inauguration, eschews the first person and uses a second person singular. It's as if Jonathan F., spared from TV celebrity, merges back into the crowd.

Overall, "How To Be Alone" offers a fascinating look at the mind of a novelist and the challenges he faces in a changing world.

First things first:

This book is not simply about the state of being alone. Instead, it is a diverse collection of essays that cover a wide range of topics. Among these, the concept of being alone and the ways to deal with it is just one aspect.

I didn't have an overwhelming love for this book. There were certain parts that were just okay, perhaps lacking a bit of sparkle or depth. However, in some other sections, it managed to ascend to a truly wonderful level. The author's insights and perspectives in those particular parts were truly captivating and thought-provoking.

Overall, while the book may not have been a complete home run for me, it did have its shining moments that made it worth the read. It offers a unique exploration of various themes, with the topic of being alone being presented in an interesting and engaging way.

Whether or not you will love this book depends on your personal interests and preferences. But if you are looking for a collection of essays that will make you think and perhaps offer some new perspectives on different aspects of life, it is definitely worth giving a try.

No offense to Jonathan Franzen—whose novels I’ve not yet read—but I was truly astonished by the profound enjoyment I derived from this collection of his essays.

The surprise lies in the fact that many of these essays were penned more than twenty years ago and deal with subjects that were completely foreign to me. For instance, who could have imagined that an essay about the Chicago Post Office (“Lost in the Mail,” 1994) or the (hitherto unknown to me) American novelist William Gaddis (“Mr. Difficult,” 2002) would prove to be so captivating?

As a former smoker, I found the essay on cigarettes (“Sifting the Ashes,” 1996) to be wonderfully evocative of nostalgia. Franzen astutely observes that “Time stops for the duration of a cigarette. When you’re smoking, you’re acutely present to yourself; you step outside the unconscious forward rush of life.”

Another essay, “Control Units” (1995), which focuses on the “Federal Correctional Complex” in Florence, Colorado, now appears almost prophetic in this era of mass incarceration.

There is also the delightful “Meet Me in St. Louis” (2001), a painfully hilarious account of Franzen’s attempts to assist in providing “B-roll filler footage to intercut with ‘A-roll’ footage of me speaking” about The Corrections with Oprah Winfrey on her televised Book Club.

“The Reader in Exile” (1995) is a lengthy refutation of Sven Birkets’s assumption, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, “that books must somehow ‘serve’ us.” Franzen concludes with the aphoristic observation that gives the collection its title: “But the first lesson that reading teaches is how to be alone.” Indeed, one cannot help but feel that this is precisely on point.

Perhaps the most renowned—and undoubtedly the most moving—essay included here is “My Father’s Brain” (2001). Franzen does not dispute “the most common trope of Alzheimer’s: that its particular sadness and horror stem from the sufferer’s loss of his or her ‘self’ long before the body dies.” However, as he observes his father’s decline, he is “struck, above all, by the apparent persistence of his will.” Returning from a Thanksgiving dinner at home to the secure dementia unit where he must now reside, his father states, clearly and firmly, “Better not to leave than to have to come back.” Franzen comprehends that “he was requesting that he be spared the pain of being dragged back toward consciousness and memory”; and that the subsequent crash “amounted to a relinquishment of that will, a letting-go, an embrace of madness in the face of unbearable emotion.” It is a novelist’s perspective, or, put differently, a story Franzen tells about his father—but then, how else are we to make sense of what occurs to us and to those we cherish?