One of my biggest hopes (and ultimate disappointments) in editing Contexts has to do with contemporary fiction. When Chris and I took over the magazine, I was convinced that addressing literature would excite and engage the general, non-scholarly, public readership we hoped to reach. I believed then, as I still do, that novelists are among the best, most accurate and insightful, and most probing chroniclers of social life, and sociologists can learn from fiction, productively using its insights to revitalize ourselves, our work, our field, and our adoring (obviously I’m prone to flights of fictional fancy myself) public.

Obviously, that didn’t pan out. Contexts has run some literary reviews, but not many. The few we did have focused on populist works like the Harry Potter books or Twilight, but none took on the more deeply philosophical works we associate with capital-L Literature. And in spite of varied and repeated attempts, we never got anyone to do a feature on the topic. I’m still not sure why. It can’t be that sociologists don’t read fiction. Maybe we don’t have the confidence to go outside our familiar methods and areas of specialty. Maybe the fictive just troubles our empirical sensibilities.

(In my more pessimistic moods, I worry we lack the courage of our convictions: sociologists have lots of big claims and ideas about modern life, but we’re uncomfortable offering them up to inspection and critical dialog with those outside of our discipline, or even more so outside of the academy altogether. But this is probably fodder for another, more pessimistic day…)

It’s in mind of all this that I’d like to commend—and recommend—Johnathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude.” In it, the author of Freedom, one of the most celebrated books of the past year, reveals much of what is to be gained from a closer, deeper engagement with contemporary writers.

Ostensibly, this “reflection” is a travel diary. Franzen goes to an uninhabited island 500 miles off the coast of Chile to recover from his book tour, search for a rare bird, and, most fundamentally, to grapple with the 2009 suicide of his dear friend, the astounding, incomparable author David Foster Wallace. Among the few items Franzen brings are Wallace’s ashes and a paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe. Franzen’s re-reading and rendering of the novel (perhaps the only literary love his own father ever had) animates his essay, providing its narrative thread.

The trip, nicely detailed in Franzen’s skillful telling, first unfolds as a meditation on modern fiction. “So, what exactly is a novel and why did the genre appear when it did?” The answer, for Franzen, is to situate the novel (in a fundamentally sociological fashion) in the context of the modern world’s many changes: the rise of social mobility and specialized labor, the decline of religious belief and practice, the glorification of the individual, and the emergence of leisure.

It’s this last point, that modern people have so many resources and so much time on their hands, that Franzen follows. When we moderns gained free time, it opened up leisure’s terrifying cultural cousin: boredom. Like Wallace, Franzen seizes on the themes of boredom and distraction. Both can spur pathology: “The more you pursue distractions,” he writes ominously in the first few paragraphs (reflecting on the things he tried to do to get him through his book recent book tour), “the less effective any particular distraction is.” Novels, he believes, emerged as a certain kind of answer and antidote to modernity. They offer escape—“fields of play at once speculative or risk free”—but are also reflections on some kind of real world, even in the case of Crusoe’s otherworldly, allegorical setting. They offer “a writer’s experience onto a waking dream,” but they are also true in the sense of authenticity and relevance (or, perhaps even, verisimilitude—the word Franzen poignantly employs in the essay).

As time passes on Franzen’s island, his article grows into a meditation on cultural life today. He has much to offer in sense-making about entertainment saturation, the spectre of monoculture (which Wallace’s fictional worlds so richly depicted), radical individualism and reality TV, and everything from The Godfather to Charlie Sheen and blackberries (the fruit and the device). Ultimately, he comes to rest at the emotional core of his Crusoe adventure in the South Pacific: his coming-to-terms with the life, work, and self-inflicted death of his friend David Foster Wallace.

Franzen knew Wallace on an intimate, personal level. Operating on impulses both loving and enraged, he is unflinching. They shared, he says, interests in mutual themes, but clearly believes Wallace’s writing and decisions were tragically misguided. Pathological or beautiful, depending on your point of view, Wallace believed “fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.” But, then, couldn’t fiction quell a suicidal impulse? Franzen in fact claims that Wallace’s death can be understood as deriving from the unique (and perverse) experience of over-stimulation, reflection, and boredom. “If boredom is the soil in which the seeds of addiction sprout, and if the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as those of addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom.” Too much wasn’t enough.

Midday through Crusoe, the titular character, alone for fifteen years in which he ached for companionship, finds a footprint. The novelist and his hero both recognize this moment as an ironic unraveling. Franzen writes, “Nowhere was Defoe’s psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson’s response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is.”

Yes! This is, to me, so much of what sociology is about; a critique of individualism, obviously as well as a recognition of the centrality of the social, even with its particular perversions and injustices, in modern life. But I can’t say it so succinctly as the novelist can: “No matter how carefully we defend our selves [two words, not one!], all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall to us the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.” What a beautiful, sparing (or is it unsparing?) formulation.

Franzen continues, bringing us even further and more concretely into the contemporary moment: “Even Facebook… contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phrase ‘It’s complicated.’ This may be a euphemism for ‘on my way out,’ but it’s also a description of all of the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?”

As an editor, I generally try to guard against such rhetorical questions, especially as a motivating force or a sort of emoticon wink appended to a title, but here I kind of like it. The question here is a challenge, rhetorical in its way, but really a moral taunt to obligation, responsibility, connection, and just continuing to push on with life. Generally, sociologists don’t allow ourselves to be moralistic—at least, not overtly. Yet we are, of course, deeply moralistic, insistent, and normative, if only by virtue of our core interest in the social.

And that’s how I get from Franzen and Crusoe back to the importance of fiction for sociology. It’s kind of like Erik Olin Wright’s take on the study of real-life utopias. By considering, critically and carefully, actual utopian projects, we open up a set of possibilities so that we can be ready when historical opportunities to increase human flourishing arise. Wright calls it “a sociology of the possible.” For me, fiction, too, can help us grasp our present realities and open up alternative stories of who we are and who we’d like to be—and it often accomplishes the task more powerfully and imaginatively than our own literal empiricism typically allows. After all, it’s not called the sociological imagination for nothing.