How to be Alone. Jonathan Franzen

Fox’s book had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

      Yet even while I was being saved as a reader by Desperate Characters I was succumbing, as a novelist, to despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social. The reader who happens on Desperate Characters today will be as struck by the foreignness of the Bentwoods’ world as by its familiarity. A quarter-century has only broadened and confirmed the sense of cultural crisis that Fox was registering. But what now feels like the locus of that crisis—the banal ascendancy of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse—is nowhere to be seen in the novel. Communication for the Bentwoods meant books, a telephone, and letters. Portents didn’t stream uninterruptedly through a cable converter or a modem; they were only dimly glimpsed, on the margins of existence. An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

      In a winter when every house in the nation was haunted by the ghostly telepresences of Peter Arnett in Baghdad and Tom Brokaw in Saudi Arabia—a winter when the inhabitants of those houses seemed less like individuals than a collective algorithm for the conversion of media jingoism into an eighty-nine-percent approval rating—I was tempted to think that if a contemporary Otto Bentwood were breaking down, he would kick in the screen of his bedroom TV. But this would have missed the point. Otto Bentwood, if he existed in the nineties, would not break down, because the world would no longer even bear on him. As an unashamed elitist, an avatar of the printed word, and a genuinely solitary man, he belongs to a species so endangered as to be all but irrelevant in an age of electronic democracy. For centuries, ink in the form of printed novels has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives. What Sophie and Otto were glimpsing, in the vatic black mess on their bedroom wall, was the disintegration of the very notion of a literary character. Small wonder they were desperate. It was still the sixties, and they had no idea what had hit them.

      

      There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously.

      —from Desperate Characters

      WHEN I GOT OUT OF COLLEGE, in 1981, I hadn’t heard the news about the social novel’s death. I didn’t know that Philip Roth had long ago performed the autopsy, describing “American reality” as a thing that “stupefies … sickens … infuriates, and finally … is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents …” I was in love with literature and with a woman to whom I’d been attracted in part because she was a brilliant reader. I had lots of models for the kind of uncompromising novel I wanted to write. I even had a model for an uncompromising novel that had found a big audience: Catch-22. Joseph Heller had figured out a way of outdoing the actuality, employing the illogic of modern warfare as a metaphor for the more general denaturing of American reality. His book had seeped into the national imagination so thoroughly that my Webster’s Ninth Collegiate gave no fewer than five shades of meaning for the title. That no challenging novel since Catch-22 had affected the culture anywhere near as deeply, just as no issue since the Vietnam War had galvanized so many alienated young Americans, was easily overlooked. In college my head had been turned by Marxism, and I believed that “monopoly capitalism” (as we called it) abounded with “negative moments” (as we called them) that a novelist could trick Americans into confronting if only he could package his subversive bombs in a sufficiently seductive narrative.

      I began my first book as a twenty-two-year-old dreaming of changing the world. I finished it six years older. The one tiny world-historical hope I still clung to was to appear on KMOX Radio, “the Voice of St. Louis,” whose long, thoughtful author interviews I’d grown up listening to in my mother’s kitchen. My novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was about the innocence of a Midwestern city—about the poignancy of St. Louis’s municipal ambitions in an age of apathy and distraction—and I looked forward to forty-five minutes with one of KMOX’s afternoon talk-show hosts, whom I imagined teasing out of me the themes that I’d left latent in the book itself. To the angry callers demanding to know why I hated St. Louis I would explain, in the brave voice of someone who had lost his innocence, that what looked to them like hate was in fact tough love. In the listening audience would be my family: my mother, who considered fiction-writing a socially irresponsible career, and my father, who hoped that one day he would pick up Time magazine and find me reviewed in it.

      It wasn’t until The Twenty-Seventh City was published, in 1988, that I discovered how innocent I still was. The media’s obsessive interest in my youthfulness surprised me. So did the money. Boosted by the optimism of publishers who imagined that an essentially dark, contrarian entertainment might somehow sell a zillion copies, I made enough to fund the writing of my next book. But the biggest surprise—the true measure of how little I’d heeded my own warning in The Twenty-Seventh City—was the failure of my culturally engaged novel to engage with the culture. I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead was sixty reviews in a vacuum.

      My appearance on KMOX was indicative. The announcer was a journeyman with a whiskey sunburn and a heartrending comb-over who clearly hadn’t read past chapter two. Beneath his boom mike he brushed at the novel’s pages as though he hoped to absorb the plot transdermally. He asked me the questions that everybody asked me: How did it feel to get such good reviews? (It felt great, I said.) Was the novel autobiographical? (It was not, I said.) How did it feel to be a local kid returning to St. Louis on a fancy book tour? It felt obscurely disappointing. But I didn’t say this. I’d already realized that the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren’t simply fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to a culture.

      EXACTLY HOW MUCH LESS novels now matter to the American mainstream than they did when Catch-22 was published is impossible to judge. But the ambitious young fiction writer can’t help noting that, in a recent USA Today survey of twenty-four hours in the life of American culture, there were twenty-one references to television, eight to film, seven to popular music, four to radio, and one to fiction (The Bridges of Madison County). Or that magazines like The Saturday Review, which in Joseph Heller’s heyday still vetted novels by the bushel, have entirely disappeared. Or that the Times Book Review nowadays runs as few as two full fiction reviews a week (fifty years ago, the fiction-to-nonfiction ratio was one to one).

      The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen King. These are honorable writers; but no one doubts it was the size of their contracts that won them covers. The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority, and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it.

      The literary America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I’d grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city’s remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women’s communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males. MFA programs offered housing and workfare to the underemployed; a few crackpot city-loving artists continued to hole up in old warehouses; and visiting readers could still pay weekend visits to certain well-policed cultural monuments—the temple of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike, the Faulkner House, the Wharton Museum, and Mark Twain Park.

      By the early nineties I was as depressed as the inner city of fiction. My second novel, Strong Motion, was a long, complicated story about a Midwestern family in a world of moral upheaval, and this time, instead of sending my bombs in a Jiffy-Pak mailer of irony and understatement, as I had with The Twenty-Seventh