Library Notes

by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

Jonathan Franzen sounded the alarm in 1996 in a Harper’s magazine article “Perchance to Dream,” sharing his anger and despair over the future of the American novel.  In 2002, he included a revised version in the collection “How to be Alone,” and called it “Why Bother: the Harper’s Essay.”  Franzen finds fault with the banal ascendancy of television, America’s value-free culture, and the breakdown of communitarianism, where interaction is optional.  Technology has changed both the demand for fiction and the social context in which fiction is written.  As a writer of social novels, Franzen is discouraged.   So how did Franzen emerge from this depression and get back on track as a writer?  Ironically it was through science, and specifically with the help of the contemporary social scientist Shirley Brice Heath, a Stanford professor who was studying the audience for serious fiction in America.    

In working through his “time of trouble,” Franzen and Heath take an interesting look at writers and readers:  the importance of reading to writers and how individuals develop as readers.  It seems there is a relationship between how we learn to read, how we are able to immerse ourselves in or enjoy novels, and the solitary acts of writing and reading.

Heath’s research demolished the myth of the general audience.  As she told Franzen, for a person to sustain an interest in literature, two things must be in place.  First, the habit of reading “works of substance” must have been “heavily modeled” when the individual was very young.  And second, to become a lifelong dedicated reader, a child needs to find a person with whom they can share their interest.  And there is yet a second kind of reader, the “social-isolate,” whose parents were not really readers ( Franzen’s case).  This is a reader who is not anti-social but feels very different from everyone around them and has a sense of having an imaginary world.  At some point, he or she has a “gnawing need” to be alone to read and reconnect with that world.  According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety.

For Franzen, this was good news, exhilarating and confirming:  “Simply to be recognized for who I was, simply not to be misunderstood:  these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.”

It’s an interesting case of redemption.  Franzen feels he belongs to the world again.  In his acceptance speech at the 2001 National Book Awards, he thanked Oprah Winfrey for her “enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of “The Corrections.”