{"id":163,"date":"2004-01-18T22:36:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-18T22:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=163"},"modified":"2004-01-18T22:36:00","modified_gmt":"2004-01-18T22:36:00","slug":"how-to-be-alone-by-jonathan-franzen-2002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2004\/01\/how-to-be-alone-by-jonathan-franzen-2002\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen,  2002."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I love essays by David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker, so Franzen seemed like a good bet (similar demographic, similar niche). I did read this collection all the way through and enjoyed some of it. But overall, I was disappointed. Franzen writes well but not with the awe-inspiring mastery of Wallace and Baker, nor with the clear-as-water unobtrusive skill of  the more common run of good essay writers. My main source of dissatisfaction, however, was Franzen&#8217;s grumpy, depressive personality. He just doesn&#8217;t seem to have much fun; he doesn&#8217;t like the world, and he doesn&#8217;t like himself. The most pathetic passage is where he reveals how he &#8220;doesn&#8217;t consider himself a smoker,&#8221; and yet finds &#8220;a small collection of cigarette butts&#8221; in a saucer at the end of every workday. Poor guy. I did sympathize with his depiction of exhaustion and foolishness causing the <i>Oprah<\/i> ruckus, and his embarassment at his younger self&#8217;s self-righteousness. But somehow I  feel a misasma of unhappy snobbery and self-regard mixed with self-loathing, and it&#8217;s uncomfortable to read. (He also says idiotic things about the Internet,  which is not unusual but is still annoying.) I still plan to read <i>The Corrections<\/i> someday, although the one scene I&#8217;ve heard the most about (the guy stuffing the salmon down his pants) does not fill me with anticipation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love essays by David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker, so Franzen seemed like a good bet (similar demographic, similar niche). I did read this collection all the way through and enjoyed some of it. But overall, I was disappointed. Franzen writes well but not with the awe-inspiring mastery of Wallace and Baker, nor with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}