[In the following review of How to Be Alone, Minor focuses on Franzen's rewriting of the essay “Perchance to Dream,” retitled “Why Bother?” in this collection.]

The inevitable centerpiece of this essay collection is the so-called “Harper's essay,” originally titled “Perchance to Dream” and appearing here with substantial revision as “Why Bother?” In the preface to How to Be Alone, Franzen claims that the essay was widely misinterpreted by reviewers as a “promise” that Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, “would be a big social novel that would engage with mainstream culture and rejuvenate American literature.” The reader gets the feeling that Franzen has become uncomfortable with his reputation for brash egotism and might be trying to rewrite history. The new version of the essay is significantly less confrontational than the original, and the tone is so much more restrained that it reads like a different essay altogether. The irony is that Franzen actually succeeded in writing a big social novel that engaged mainstream culture and rejuvenated American literature. The Corrections almost single-handedly derailed Oprah's Book Club, for better or worse, and created a mainstream dialogue about the nature of good literature. Serious novelists were reviewing the novel favorably on its literary merits, particularly its construction and characterizations, and readers of popular fiction who might ordinarily pick up a mass-market paperback made The Corrections a long-term staple on the bestseller lists. The other twelve essays in How to Be Alone are idiosyncratic ruminations on life in contemporary America. “My Father's Brain,” an account of Franzen's father and his struggle with Alzheimer's disease, is the most engaging of the personal essays that make up roughly half of the volume. “Control Units” and “Lost in the Mail” showcase Franzen's under-heralded skill as a reporter, and “Books in Bed” and “Why Bother?” are the work of a writer who knows how to be a reader. Assembled together, these essays form a picture of a master novelist emerging as a man of letters.