SOURCE: Quinn, Paul. “Walden Revisited.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5195 (25 October 2002): 5.

In the following review of How to Be Alone, Quinn praises Franzen for balancing self-effacing humor with often-pessimistic subject matter.

Unlike most collections put together to ride the crest of a rising reputation, Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone impresses with the consistency of its concerns. In his introduction to the volume, Franzen describes his animating preoccupation with “the problems of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone”.

This makes him sound somewhat like a latter-day Henry David Thoreau, who, in 1845, was already deafened by the din of American commerce when he took himself off to the meditative tranquillity of Walden Pond. Franzen certainly owes something to this tradition of dissenting self-reliance; it can be felt especially in an essay like “Scavenging”, where, as part of a...