Total Eclipse of the Heart

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During the worst of his falling out last year with Oprah Winfrey, it was hard to tell that Jonathan Franzen is one of the most nuanced minds at work in the dwindling republic of letters. It's easy to tell that from How to Be Alone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages), a collection of lucid, saturnine essays that have appeared in various magazines since 1994. Franzen is not the first serious writer to mourn the slow death of serious reading or to be worried about the decay of the moral imagination, each a continuing subtheme in a book that lights upon everything from the Chicago postal system to his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. But his estrangement is so persuasive that he makes alienation seem like the first sign of a healthy mind. Is it possible to be brilliantly put upon? That's what Franzen is.

Only one of the 13 pieces here addresses the Oprah incident, when Franzen voiced doubts about having The Corrections, his supremely successful third novel, selected for her book club. As most everyone knows, it was quickly unselected, and Franzen was cast in some places as the world's dumbest whiner. What was his problem? You get a glimpse of it in an essay describing the tortured afternoon last year when an Oprah film crew prodded him into a contrived visit to his childhood home. That ordeal by television caused him to break out in an itchy rash. But he suffers even more from remorse for attempting a bit of that performance — he refused to actually go in — at a place so full of painful memory.

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Franzen has very little quarrel with Oprah. His real problem, and one that he lays out with care all through the book, is with a world in which the interior life becomes ever more threadbare as the means to sustain it — especially the essential consolations of serious reading — wither away. In tones that are sober but never lugubrious, Franzen weighs the pressures upon the self in a culture that manages the neat trick of discouraging real solitude and genuine community, substituting for both the paradox of media-overloaded isolation. "The first lesson reading teaches," he writes, "is how to be alone."

Alone yes, but as he also shows, always with another consciousness. What good fiction fosters is not self-absorbed isolation but isolation as the first step toward engaging the mind of the writer or his characters. So the keystone of this book is "Why Bother?", a revised and retitled version of a now famous essay that Franzen published six years ago in Harper's magazine. He tries to define a purpose for himself as a novelist in a society in which "the rising waters of electronic culture have made each reader and each writer an island." He finds in fiction the hope of signaling across the archipelago.

If Franzen's book were just an exercise in elegant melancholy, a requiem for reading, it would be handsome but unhelpful. It's not in his ambivalent nature to provide anything so clear-cut as answers (he's beautifully beset), but he frames the questions fully and with feeling. Do good books matter anymore? This one does.