Words Wednesday: Jonathan Franzen

Happy Words Wednesday! Today we’ve got a great Jonathan Franzen quote.

Jonathan Franzen quote from How To Be Alone

Today’s Words Wednesday features a Jonathan Franzen quote from his essay collection entitled, fittingly, How To Be Alone.

How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

Published in 2002, How To Be Alone is a collection of fourteen essays ranging in topic from the role of the novel in contemporary culture to the painful loneliness of Alzheimer’s. Many of the essays had been originally published in magazines such as Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker.

One of the essays, “My Father’s Brain,” was nominated for a 2002 National Magazine Award and was the basis for the character of Earl Lambert in his earlier novel, The Corrections. (We’ve also featured one of our favorite quotes from The Corrections in an earlier Words Wednesday.)

In a description that one has to wonder whether Franzen himself would embrace or reject, Tim Adams of The Guardian says this about the essay collection: “In many ways, How to be Alone is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, for grown-ups.” Harris also calls Franzen “the chief mourner of the public space,” which is indeed the role that Franzen takes throughout most of this essay collection: mourning the effect of television on society, the end of the novel as serious cultural object, the end privacy in both a personal and political sense.

Though Franzen is known for being a bit curmudgeonly*, Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times Book Review, calls How To Be Alone a work of “considerable wit and minimal curmudgeonliness” and one that “emphasizes [Franzen’s] elegance, acumen and daring as an essayist.”

*If you haven’t read about the Winfrey-Franzen debacle that’s still being talked about over a decade later, check out Slate’s extra-detailed analysis on what happened when Oprah chose The Corrections for her book club. Hint: it didn’t end well.