But beyond blaming all the ills of our age for the ills of our age, he talks about who reads and who writes. His despair at the reading habits (or lack thereof) of Americans, the solitary nature of his profession, and the idea that fiction should deal with 'mystery', 'how human beings avoid or confront the meaning of existence' and 'manners', 'the nuts and bolts of how human beings behave' was being somehow scuttled, produced a perfectly understandable (to me) inability to write his third novel. In it, Franzen details his slide into depression while trying to write his third book, while he and his wife were separating and the country was preparing for war in 1991, and in the years that followed. 'A genuine public space is a place where every citizen is welcome to be present and where the purely private is excluded or restricted.' Anyone who can't help overhearing a personal, sometimes very personal, cellphone conversation on the street, but or train can relate.'Why Bother' is the most well-known of these works, retitled from an infamous Harper's essay. Conversely, we are unable to keep other people's private lives out of our public space.

Almost perversely, he notes that most of us live in ever MORE private spaces - large suburban houses where no one has to share a room or bathroom, or condominium apartments where you might not know your neighbors, quite unlike what he calls the near-panopticon of small town life a century ago. Franzen presents 15 essays of varying length and on a wide variety of topics, some very personal, some more the type you might encounter in a magazine like the one in the Sunday New York Times or the New Yorker.The personal ones are often quite affecting, in particular the first, 'My Father's Brain', which concerns the difficulty he and his family had dealing with his father's mental deterioration, especially in light of his parents' difficult marriage, and the last, where he is forced to 'go home again' years later for a televised interview and finds it torture.'Imperial Bedroom' is Franzen's take on the conventional cry that our privacy is evaporating. I've had this book of essays and articles on my shelf for some time, and picked it up when a book funk was looming.

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen