How to be Alone

Jonathan Franzen's ‘The Corrections’ was the best-loved and most written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as 'The Harper's Essay,' Franzen's controversial 1996 look at the fate of the novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in ‘How to be Alone’, alongside the personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of ‘The Corrections’. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persist…