Summary: The author of The Corrections reprints his 1996, "The Harper's Essay," offering additional writings that consider a central theme of the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the increasing persistence of loneliness in postmodern America. 30,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
Franzen won the National Book Award (and, prior to that, Booklist's Top of the List award) for his sharply comedic and deeply compassionate novel The Corrections [BKL Jl 01], but he also drew fire for his fumbled response to being chosen as an Oprah author. Here, in his first essay collection, the qualities of mind that make him a relentlessly questioning thinker, and piercing and candid writer, one willing to ponder the finer points regarding reading, publishing, and the packaging of authors raised by Oprah's Book Club, are revealed, and Franzen's standing as a significant, indeed, essential literary voice is resoundingly reaffirmed. Here is the now infamous Harper's essay about the state of the novel, conscionable skepticism regarding popular culture and the addictive technologies that disseminate it, concern with our obsession with privacy and concomitant degradation of the public sphere, inquiries into the prison system and urban life, insights into depression, and, underlying all, love for and faith in literature. Franzen also quietly illuminates the intense emotions and personal experiences, most movingly his father's succumbing to Alzheimer's, that went into the writing of The Corrections and his inability to transform himself from artist into commodity. ((Reviewed September 1, 2002)) Copyright 2002 Booklist Reviews
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