JOURNALISM 4171
COVERING THE ARTS: BACKSTAGE AT THE JUNGLE THEATER
Spring Semester 2012

CLASSES

Monday 4-5:15 p.m. Murphy Hall, Room 15
Friday 4-5:15 p.m. Jungle Theater
2951 Lyndale Ave. S.
612/822-7063
OFFICE HOURS
Monday 3-4 p.m. Murphy Hall, Room 110
Friday 3-4 p.m. Jungle Theater
Or by appointment

INSTRUCTOR

DAN SULLIVAN was theater critic for the Los Angeles Times for 20 years. Previously he covered Off Broadway theater for the New York Times; before that, he was theater and music critic for the Minneapolis Tribune. He started as a general-assignment reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Currently he directs the National Critics Institute, a program for emerging theater/film reviewers at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Waterford, Conn.

OBJECTIVES

1. To supply hands-on experience in writing accurate and engaging arts/entertainment copy. 2. To provide a sustained inside look at how an important Twin Cities arts organization creates and markets its work.

PROCEDURE

On MONDAYS we’ll read and discuss our writing at Murphy Hall. Assignments could include a pop-music review; an advance article on a new Jungle Theater production; an interview with a local film maker; a commentary piece on a current arts controversy; a dramatized fairy tale; a costume description. Rewriting is always encouraged and sometimes required.

On FRIDAYS we’ll meet at the Jungle Theater. After catching up on what’s happened at the theater since our last visit, we’ll hear from various Jungle artists and staffers on their specialties. This year we’ll follow the course of two productions, Frederick Knott’s retro thriller “Dial M for Murder” (Feb 3-March 18) and Bruce Norris’s “The Vibrator Play” (April 6-May 13.)

We’ll also meet a variety of non-Jungle artists and arts journalists. Last year’s guests included film maker Jennifer Kramer; Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips; City Pages theater critic Ed Huyck; Minnpost music critic Michael Anthony; Minnesota Spokesman Recorder columnist Dwight Hobbes and Twin Cities Daily Planet arts editor Jay Gabler. These sessions are, in effect, press conferences, with questions required from everybody.

TEXTBOOK

None. Weekly handouts, provided by the instructor, will be your text and are required reading. You may also need to purchase tickets for certain arts events (Jungle Theater shows are free.) Total cost shouldn’t exceed $40.

WORK LOAD

1. Eight writing (or rewriting) assignments. 2. A clip file 3. A final project. 4. A final exam. Details below.

CLIP FILE

For the first half of the semester, you’ll put together a folio of clips and downloads from recent local or national arts/entertainment stories. Two examples will be required each week: a winner and a sinner. Examples should be no longer than two grafs and mounted on standard copy paper. Explain in five or six cogent lines why the example succeeds or fails. First assignment: an effective lead and a lame one. Due: Friday, Jan. 20. Final clip file due: Friday, March 9.

FINAL PROJECT

A 1,200-word interview with a Jungle Theater artist or staffer, or other guest. This can be a standard
interview, a Q and A, an “as told-to” piece or a form of your own invention. Final draft due Friday, April 27.

FINAL EXAM

Part multiple-choice, to show what you’ve learned over the semester; part essay, to show your progress as a writer.

GRADES

A-F. Forty per cent of your grade will be based on your written work; 30 per cent on your class participation; 20 per cent on the final exam and one or two quizzes; 10 per cent on the final project. Class participation includes your readiness to contribute to class discussions; your willingness to critique the work of your classmates and to be critiqued by them; your resourcefulness in providing thoughtful questions for our guests; your courtesy and professionalism.

GRADE VALUES

“A” on written work means that the piece could be published as is, not necessarily in Rolling Stone, but somewhere. “B” means that the piece needs tweaking. “C” means that it needs substantial revision. “D” means that it didn’t work at all. A more detailed rubric will be provided.

DEADLINES

are firm, as in real-world journalism. Late copy lowers your grade (one grade off per day late.) Continued late copy won’t be accepted.

PROOFREAD

aggressively. Assume you made one or two errors and root them out.

ATTENDANCE

is taken at every class and will be factored into the final grade. Woody Allen: “Eighty per cent of success is showing up.”

CAUTIONARY NOTES

1. ARRIVE ON TIME. On Friday you’ll need at least a half-hour to get from the university to the Jungle Theater. (45 minutes if you’re taking the bus.) Don’t schedule another class just before or just after J4171.

2. CONFIDENTIALITY. We are at the Jungle on an off-the-record basis. Material written for the class can’t be published or used online.

3. KEEP UP. Missing a class is like missing a rehearsal, possibly of a key scene. It also deprives us of an important member of our cast: you.

4. THINK FAST. Theater folk make their notes in pencil, not ink. If the Jungle suddenly needs to change its schedule, so will we. I’ll keep you posted via weekly emails.

5. STAY FOCUSED. No texting, Twittering, etc. in class. Take notes by hand. “Be here now.”

SOME IMPORTANT DATES

Friday March 9 – Clip files due
March 12-16 – Spring Break
Friday April 27 – Final project due
Friday May 4 – Final class
Week of May 7 – Final Exam

###

Last Sunday’s presentation of “Death of a Salesman” on CBS was an honorable attempt to bring a great American play to the millions of Americans who don’t go to the theater. What it proved was that with some plays there’s no choice but to see them in the theater. Uproot them from the stage and the power goes out of them.

The auspices for this TV “Salesman” were favorable. Arthur Miller’s script had been slightly cut to accommodate the three-hour running time of the broadcast (including commercials; more on that below). But it hadn’t been tampered with or apologized for.

It was a far cry from the nervous 1950s, when the Fredric March film of “Salesman” had been distributed with a trailer reassuring audiences of the enduring validity of the American dream. Today “Salesman” is as safe as “Our Town.” A perfect choice for CBS to prove its commitment to American culture, before getting to the down-and-dirty of its new season, a preview of which ended the evening.
The TV cast was solid, most of them drawn from the much-admired 1984 Broadway revival, featuring a star who was a genuine actor, Dustin Hoffman. You could see Hoffman’s love for the play and his ambition to create a Willy Loman who wouldn’t remind anybody of Lee J. Cobb-Willy as a dapper little man who goes to his death as gleefully as if he’d just put over the deal of his life.

Likewise, you could see director Volker Schlondorff’s ambition to find a new way of doing “Salesman” for the screen, using the camera’s ability to read individual faces without losing touch with “Salesman” as a theatrical rite, a problem with the March film. All in all, the CBS “Salesman” was as intelligent and as ethical a transplant as Miller himself could have wanted. Indeed, he was listed as a co-producer.

But the transplant didn’t take. Not if you’d seen Hoffman and John Malkovich (Biff) play “Salesman” on Broadway. Not if you’d seen a good company tackle it on any stage anywhere. (Including, I venture to say, China, where Miller staged it a couple of years back; see his book “Salesman in Beijing”). Here were some of the differences:

1-Distance. The stage envies the screen its close-ups, and the CBS cameras did pick up some revealing reactions-Kate Reid as Linda sneaking a worried look at Willy as she tries to jolly him up, for instance. But in general the close-ups, rather than bringing the viewer closer to the characters, kept reminding him that they were really actors.

Particularly Hoffman. On the stage, one could see that he was giving a more external performance than, say, Malkovich, without being any less moved by his conception of Willy. In a strange way, it even added to the poignancy of the performance, as if Hoffman was saluting a long-departed father.

On the screen, however, we were clearly watching an actor in his 40s made up to look like a man in his 60s, and we didn’t know what to do about the lie. It was a superb performance, seen at the wrong distance.

Should Hoffman have scaled it down? He did scale it down from what it had been on Broadway. But how far could he go? After all, this was Miller’s play that he was performing, not a movie based on “Death of a Salesman.” The urgency of the language, the nightmarish quality of Willy’s reveries, his very aspirations as a man, call for a big performance. A script this theatrical needs space around it, just as a massive sculpture does. Put it under glass and you reduce it to a souvenir from the museum gift shop.

2-Setting. Where does “Death of a Salesman” take place? Both in New York City and inside Willy’s head. Director Schlondorff and designer Tony Walton worked hard to dovetail fantasy and reality in about the proportions that they offered themselves to Willy, without the corniness of dream-dissolves. Suggestive as they tried to be, however, it all seemed to be happening on a sound stage.

The approach was too literal to catch the whirl of Willy’s imagination. Yet, in another sense, it wasn’t literal enough. You found yourself asking such primitive questions as: Why doesn’t Willy’s house have any ceiling, if he just put one up? How come all the floors in the play have black-and-white tiles? Why does Willy’s prosperous neighbor Charlie (Charles Durning) keep on living in such a run-down neighborhood? If we can see Willy behind the wheel of his Studebaker (nice touch), why can’t we see him drive off?

I’d never thought about Charlie while watching the play. Because in the theater it’s enough for the designer to give the feel of Willy’s neighborhood-most importantly, the shadows of those encroaching apartments. And a leafy light pattern gives you the neighborhood as Willy remembers it, when the kids were young. These effects don’t seem strained or fancy on the stage. No audience anywhere, including China, has had trouble tracking Willy’s journey between the real and the unreal. On the stage, we take metaphor for granted.

3-Poetry. Cocteau makes a famous distinction between poetry in the theater and poetry of the theater. The most overt poetry in “Death of a Salesman” comes during the final Requiem scene, and it always seems a little strained. But the play is full of the poetry of the theater. For instance: We first see Biff as a shadowy figure talking rather listlessly with his brother in their old bedroom over the kitchen. A minute later, it’s 1928 and Biff bursts into the downstairs yard in his football suit-the old Biff, who thought he could lick the world.

On TV, Malkovich simply appeared to Willy in his old football suit, looking fully 30 years old. A scene that had been written with an eye to a certain stage effect became just another moment.

That’s not to say that Miller couldn’t have written “Death of a Salesman” with an eye toward the poetry of film. (Remember his screenplay for “Playing for Time”?) But if he had, he’d have let the camera do much of the work that in the theater words have to do. We’d really see that car-lined street in front of Willy’s house. We’d really see those apartment houses. We’d really see him driving up in New England in red-maple weather. And the rhythm of the images would be as telling as anything that the dialogue had to say.

The TV “Salesman” had neither the rhythm of film nor of the theater. It was a composite-an unconvincing attempt to photograph a metaphor in studio. Suggestion: The next time someone turns his cameras lose on a play, let it be a play in performance.

As for those commercials, I counted about 50 of them: 50 attempts to sell us things in the middle of a story about the death of a salesman. Would you believe that one of the commercials was for Velveeta? (Willy: “How can they whip cheese?”) Further suggestion: The next time a network offers a play from the theater, let it group the commercials in one or two 15-minute “intermissions,” rather than further tampering with the playwright’s rhythm.

The lessons of history depend on when we read them. Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat in the 1964 presidential election (Lyndon Johnson took 44 states, Goldwater only six, all in the South) was seen at the time as proof that a hard-line conservative could never occupy the modern White House.

Sixteen years later, we had Ronald Reagan – who had made his breakthrough as a national political figure during that same ’64 campaign. (Reagan, GOP strategists noted, could warm up a crowd for Goldwater better than Goldwater could).

That’s not the only reason that author Rick Perlstein, an independent scholar who has written for the Nation and Slate, thinks we should take another look at the ’64 election. His book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” reminds us that it was no small thing for the GOP to take the Solid South from the Democrats for the first time since the Civil War.

And it was a huge thing that one-third of the nation had voted for a stand-up conservative like Goldwater rather than a New Dealer like LBJ or a me-too Republican like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

This proved – if the headlines from Berkeley, Calif., and Birmingham, Ala., didn’t – that the times were indeed a-changin’. No longer were we a nation basically in agreement about its core values – and ’64 was only the start of it. Still to come: the Watts riots, war protests and the “generation gap.”

Rather than a full stop, Perlstein argues, the Goldwater campaign was the first step in the nation’s long march to the right: a test shot from which conservatives learned how not to run a campaign (Goldwater’s was a shambles) and how not to present their message.

Losing it `my way’

Goldwater’s “we would rather die than lose our freedom” wasn’t essentially different from JFK’s “we shall pay any price” inaugural speech of 1961, but the word “die” made the voters think twice, as did his advocacy of “small, clean nuclear weapons” to show the Russians we meant business.

The Democrats’ best-remembered response was a TV spot showing a little girl plucking the petals off a daisy, followed by a nuclear countdown, followed by solemn words from LBJ on the need for nuclear restraint. Goldwater was too proud to answer the ad.

“I’m going to lose this election,” he told an adviser. “I’m probably going to lose it big. But I’m going to lose it my way.”

He was, proudly, an extremist – and for Perlstein absolutely in tune with the times. (“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in a Birmingham jail in 1962.)

“Before the Storm” makes fewer connections to the present than it might have. Its account of the makings of Goldwater’s candidacy is illuminating – he was in some sense invented by Clarence Manion, an ex-America Firster with an influential radio program – but Perlstein gets so caught up in political minutiae that pages go by without a reminder of why he’s telling us all this.

This is especially annoying when he goes into novelist mode. Who cares how Richard Nixon’s heels clicked on Nelson Rockefeller’s parquet floor the night they hammered out their famous, now totally forgotten, “Compact of Fifth Avenue?” Too often, “Before the Storm” seems conscientious spadework for the book that our author really wants to write: how, specifically, the conservatives came back from the grave in ’64. Now that would be a page-turner.

-Dan Sullivan teaches arts journalism at the University of Minnesota.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

- By: Rick Perlstein.

- Publisher: Hill and Wang, 639 pages, $25.

I used to think that Garrison Keillor was a guy I had worked with on the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Then Keillor came to a luncheon at the L.A. Times. I clapped him on the back. “Boy, have you come a long way.” He looked around, and it wasn’t the same person at all. If that wasn’t embarrassing.

Everybody makes mistakes, however. Keillor probably shouldn’t have quit his “Prairie Home Companion” show two years ago and gone off to live in Denmark. But then if he hadn’t left the show, he couldn’t have returned to it, as he did Saturday afternoon at the Universal Amphitheatre. Before a sold-out house too. As Martin Luther put it: “Sin strongly.”

It was billed as “Prairie Home Companion’s” third annual farewell show, an idea that Keillor may have gotten from Jack Benny. He plans to do one of them a year, as well as a new radio show. I think we can put up with that.

It’s not a show that makes demands on the nervous system. It is more valleys than peaks. Saturday’s show was an averagely good one, featuring music by the Hopeful Gospel Quartet and Butch Thompson; a guest shot by Mavis and Marvin Smiley; the latest episode of “Buster the Show Dog” (Buster has relocated in New York, like Keillor), and the latest news from Lake Wobegon, including the story behind the Ingeqvists’ breakup.

The show was being broadcast live, but the red ON THE AIR sign was the only way to know it. Somebody must have been running around backstage with a stopwatch, but from out front, one thing just sort of led to another. Intermission was a chance for the audience to stretch its legs and sing “Tell Me Why” (first the women, then the men), but from the dynamic point of view, this show is all intermission.

Very soothing too, after the jab-jab-jab of TV. Like Robert Wilson’s shows, “Prairie Home Companion” risks being boring, in the interest of stimulating the viewer’s alpha-waves. An excellent show for the nervous.

It takes another risk: folksiness. Keillor fell into it in his last song, in which it was noted that at Oak and Main, they know your name. Yes, but what are they saying behind your back? Let’s not take this worship of the small town too far.

The news from Lake Wobegon never does. Saturday’s report involved Pastor Ingeqvist’s wife, Judy, who had been called upon to do one more corporal work of charity than she could bear, especially after being cheated (and that was the only word for it) out of a trip to San Diego.

Something had to give. In this case, it was a church window. However, Keillor said, things seem to be OK between the Ingeqvists now, and in Lake Wobegon, people will settle for “seems.”

Keillor told it as a two-part story, weaving in the tale of a ’57 pink Oldsmobile whose seats folded down into a bed, and the saga of a smelly old dog who had become obsessed with catching fish. Again, it all came together with no apparent effort, which could not have been the case.

The show’s structure has always vaguely suggested that of a religious service, with Keillor’s monologue as the sermon and the music (jazz, country, gospel) as the hymns. What is being celebrated is the ordinariness and the unexpectedness of it all. This leaves room for silliness, as when Marvin and Mavis (really, Robin and Linda Williams) do their bluegrass version of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” unavailable in any store-not that any store would carry it.

Somewhere in the middle of the show comes the epistle, when Keillor passes on messages from one listener to the other. If you don’t know Dave in Duluth, who cares that Sheila in Phoenix is pulling for him on his bar exam? Yet this part of the service always puts me away. It has something to do with the size of the country and something to do with alpha waves.

Keillor had fun with the notion that Saturday’s show was being broadcast from sunny Southern California, with its cerulean skies and its casually elegant men and women, people who had finally succeeded in getting their lives together. When a small-town boy talks like that, watch your wallet. But it was good to have him back. We saw it coming, of course.

It may sound strange for a theater critic to say the following, but it’s time that somebody did: Life is not theater.

People are not actors.

Truth is not the same as a nice moment.

The business of America is not show business.

Two recent experiences bring these distinctions to mind. The first was reading a Calendar article in which a panel of acting coaches assessed the performance of 12 potential presidential candidates on TV.

The second was a couple of weeks of jury duty. Ten years ago, after a similar stint, I wrote a piece comparing the courtroom with a theater.

This year, the first thing the defense attorney asked me as a potential juror was: “When you look at the courtroom, doesn’t it remind you of a set?”

Granted, this was Hollywood Municipal Court. But everybody is into the idea of life-as-theater these days. In some ways, it’s a good thing. For instance, it keeps a person from being too impressed by the trappings of people in power. Behind the curtain, there’s usually an average-sized human being working the thunderbolt machine.

This would have been a healthy thing to keep in mind during one of Hitler’s torchlight rallies in the 1930s-theater out of the Wagnerian cookbook. Still, Hitler’s audience clearly didn’t want to look behind the curtain. The show was too much fun.

This is the problem when a culture gets hooked on idealized images, punchy underscoring and terrific stage management. It begins to prefer these things to the modest, mixed signals of ordinary public life. In fact, it begins to identify the glamorous simplification as the real truth. Not on intellectual grounds, but on aesthetic grounds. The other stuff just confuses the play. One wants a clear image of what’s wrong with the world. One wants a hero to clean it up.

What this hero figure actually thinks-whether he thinks-matters less than how we feel in his presence. How’s his charisma? How’s his body language? Does he have a nice smile? Do his eyes crinkle?

Rather than citizens electing a fellow-citizen to tend the store, we become casting directors looking to fill a star part. After the aforementioned NBC program, it was only logical for The Times’ Deborah Caulfield to ask the Hollywood image experts to rate the aspiring candidates. Wasn’t the show, in effect, an audition, like the one in “A Chorus Line,” with Tom Brokaw playing Zach? Just relax and tell us about yourself.

Well, yes, it was an audition, in a way. But it was also supposed to be an examination of the candidates’ views, which do relate to the way each would run the country. Assessing their statements, however, is less fun than schmoozing about their presentation. For one thing, you’d have to know the issues. So the acting teachers-like most of us-concentrated on style.

Who looked the most “presidential”? The panel dismissed this candidate as too flaky, this one as too boring, this one as too uptight. Suggestions were also made as to which theatrical roles might help bring each candidate up to pitch. One teacher thought that a particular candidate needed to play someone heroic, like Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

Probably he was thinking of Henry V. Henry IV is a heartsick, distracted man worrying about his dissolute son. Caulfield’s panel would probably have dismissed him as being not royal enough.

But what does “royal” mean? What’s “presidential”? The trouble with casting a leader is that you go for a stereotype. Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have impressed the acting coaches of his time as presidential. Too tall. Too gloomy. A bit of a flake.

Warren G. Harding, on the other hand, would have been perfect. Ronald Reagan also filled the bill, the first admitted actor to take the post. I once asked a well-known British player if he wasn’t impressed with Reagan’s hold on the American imagination. “Not particularly,” he said. “I know how it’s done.”

Reagan gave us a good show. But next time, this theater critic intends to vote for the candidate who makes the most sense over the one who makes the most agreeable presentation. If this person does well in office, he’ll eventually look very presidential. Who would have thought, in 1945, that they would ever do a one-man show on Harry Truman?

Jury duty was another reminder that life and show business should be kept on separate tracks. Yes, the courtroom can be thought of as a stage set. But it could equally be thought of as an altar, with the judge as priest.

The robe is to remind him that it’s a solemn business to send a man to jail. He is not on the bench to express himself, like an actor, but to express the law. Similarly the jurors, sitting there like a Greek chorus, have sworn to put aside their personal feelings and concentrate on whether or not the law has been broken. Where theater is about emotion, courtrooms are about thought.

Like a play, a trial involves conflict. First, the conflict that brought the defendant into court. What happened? The jury puts it together from the people who were there, and this process is much like that of an audience at a play. What are the characters in “Oedipus the King” but witnesses?

In court, however, we have two attorneys trying to channel the testimony in opposite directions. It’s fascinating to see a piece of testimony take on another coloration as the defense attorney adduces a fact that the prosecuting attorney had, for some reason, neglected in his line of questions.

Anybody who watches “People’s Court” knows this. What makes real-world trials undramatic is the amount of time that everything takes.

Hamlet’s complaint about “the law’s delay” still holds. If you ever go on jury duty, it’s possible that you’ll sit on a bench for two weeks without being called to do anything.

Or you might be called for a panel (about 30 members), and not be called for a jury (12, plus two alternates). Or you might be called for a jury, but “excused.” (Each lawyer can reject up to 10 potential jury members without explanation.) Or the entire jury might be excused because, for instance, the defendant has changed his plea.

Assuming the case goes to trial, there will be a good many time-outs as the lawyers huddle with their clients or everybody huddles with the judge.

Judged as theater, this is most unsatisfactory. But, again, it gives people time to think. During one break, I overheard a public defender persuade his client not to go to trial but to go to a counseling service, certainly a less drastic experience for him and his family.

More drama is averted on the average day in a courthouse than is played out. Considering that “drama” in real life usually involves suffering, this is a good thing.

The aim of a well-ordered society, in fact, is to keep tragedy on the stage, where it belongs. You have to wonder about the health of a culture that seems to crave a suppertime ration of junk catastrophe-car crashes, gangland killings and airline heists. “More violence in southeastern Los Angeles tonight!” the newscaster promises. But first, a word from your Toyota dealer.

Why do we listen to this stuff? Nobody knows, but it’s all very dramatic. When poor Hurricane Gloria pooped out in the Atlantic last year without taking thousands of lives, there was actually an air of disappointment in the reports. No footage there.

We get so dulled to this sort of thing that when a real-life tragedy happens down the block, it’s like “something on TV”-in other words, fiction. What I like about going to the theater is that you know it’s going to be fiction. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.

Though Franzen calls them “essays,” many of these pieces are reportage. He’s very good at it. In “Control Units,” written for Details magazine, he tells how a small Colorado town managed to land a fancy federal prison as its new chief industry, with unlooked-for results. Although Franzen’s focus first seems to be on the new look in American prison management (solitary confinement is back), you gradually realize that everybody in this story is in one box or another and that the situation might have played itself out in much the same way if the new industry had been, say, a helicopter plant. Franzen gets all the quotes right, disses nobody and takes the piece exactly where he wants it to go.

He’s equally good on the meltdown of the Chicago postoffice in the winter of 1994, a toxic blend of blend of inertia, bureaucracy, entitlement, racism (and anti-racism) and whatever other neurosis comes to mind. If the P.O. saw itself as a family, says Franzen, that was part of the problem. “All manner of codependency can flourish in the bosom of a family under stress.” Happily, somebody the family””significantly, a young woman– had the guts to blow a whistle.

Franzen turns to his own family in a New Yorker piece called “My Father’s Brain.” This tracks two processes: his father’s long battle with Alzheimer’s disease (an important link with “The Corrections”) and the weird manner in which Franzen’s own brain recorded his father’s battle, as full of gaps as a White House tape. Vigorous or ailing, the the mind has a will of its own.

All these pieces place both writer and reader on firm ground. That’s less true when Franzen actually does write an essay. He goes out on many a limb (as essayists should) and gives us a good many things to think about, such as the virtual eradication of the line between private and public behavior in the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Boxers or briefs, Mr.President? (Not one of his examples.)

Still, there are moments when this reader wanted to rattle his tree. The most celebrated piece in the collection is “Why Bother?,” a long meditation from 1996, before Franzen hit the charts with:”The Corrections.” Why bother to write serious novels, he asks himself, if one’s first two books have, yes, won respectful reviews and yes, made a little money; but have failed to turn on the reading public in the spectacular way that, say, Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22″ did back in the sixties? What does this say about the future of American novel? Where is our culture headed?

Franzen is spoofing himself here — the essay is meant to celebrate his decision to stop whining and rejoin the world — but the sense of entitlement is very strong and not engaging. Elsewhere I identified with his crotchets (against airport TV, in favor of rescuing good stuff from the trash) and his refusal to see himself as a smoker, despite the fact that he smokes. Also admirable are his decisions not to give his side of the Oprah controvery, not to update these pieces in the context of September 11, and not to impose a false unity on a book of picked-up pieces. He’s got more novels to write.

How To Be Alone
By: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 281 pages, $24

Dan Sullivan teaches journalism at the University of Minnesota and directs the O”‘Neill Theater Center’s Critics Institute.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oct. 6 , 2003