Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen

last updated 8 January 2015

Jonathan Franzen’s latest essay collection finds the novelist in a cranky mood, said Amelia Atlas in Salon.com. Farther Away assembles 22 nonfiction pieces Franzen has written since 1998, including grumpy rants about the narcissism encouraged by social media and the insidiousness of consumer technology. Few of those essays are memorable. Yet the title piece is a work that we’re still going to be reading decades from now. In “Farther Away,” first published in The New Yorker in 2011, Franzen “directs the current of anger that runs through his nonfiction at a subject actually worth it”—the 2008 suicide of his best friend, David Foster Wallace.

“I didn’t much like” that essay when I read it a year ago, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. What angered me was the way Franzen seemed to turn Wallace’s tragedy into a story about himself. Franzen wrote that Wallace’s suicide was “calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most,” and that the act took the person they knew away by turning him into “a very public legend.” But in the context of these other essays, which assail self-flattery in all forms, “Farther Away” looks like both a courageous confession and a justified indictment of his friend for bailing out on a shared quest to stand always for personal authenticity.

“Farther Away” is easily “one of the strangest, most powerful documents of mourning that I’ve ever read,” said Anthony Domestico in CSMonitor.com. Refusing to see Wallace as the sainted figure he’s become, Franzen also rebukes his friend for not accepting that he was worthy of the love of others. Love turns out to be the subject that links these essays together. At the heart of Franzen’s diatribes about social media and public declarations of “I love you” into cellphones is a sense that such interactions threaten intimate and authentic expressions of love. Beneath its curmudgeonly surface, Farther Away reveals “a kinder Franzen” than the one we’ve known, a “clear-eyed defender of sentiment.”