Monday, May 6, 2013

Revisiting Jonathan Franzen's How To Be Alone

I have an uneasy relationship with Jonathan Franzen's work. I read How To Be Alone years ago, probably before I'd read any of his fiction. I knew he was the guy who snubbed Oprah (I have an uneasy relationship with all things Oprah, too, so this wasn't exactly a deal breaker), and that he was from my hometown. Mostly I just wanted a explanation for the Oprah snub that wasn't Jonathan Franzen is afraid of lady cooties.

Since then, I've read both The Corrections and Freedom, and I enjoyed both. I fall squarely within his target audience, so that doesn't surprise me (though I do feel as though there's a pretty good chance he wouldn't want me as part of his audience), but I still feel like a huge traitor to feminism for it. Feminists don't like Franzen much. While it's true that men are less likely to read books if they've been touched with "girl stain," his female characters never seem to have much in the way of agency.  I can't exactly fault him for his reluctance to be embraced by an Oprah-sanctioned audience, but it's endemic to a certain cache of white, male writers. (This didn't win him many new fans either.)  Maybe I just stopped expecting much from them.

Not all of the now decade-old essays in How To Be Alone have aged well. Some feel as dated as mourning  the death of the rotary phone (Franzen talks about his own rotary phone), but I like seeing this side of him, and it's still my favorite essay collections.

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