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The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
by Jonathan Franzen
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"Franzen's new book, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History...offers the same kind of whipsaw reading experience [as The Corrections]. It's hilarious and it's painful. It's sharply insightful and it's also frustratingly obtuse....[F]or those who admire the razor-sharp jabs Franzen makes at himself and anyone else standing too close, The Discomfort Zone is both a delicious read and a clever showcase for Franzen's talents." Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review) "From the assertive averageness of his practical, Midwestern family to his love of the sad-funny comics of Charles Schultz to his knowledge of the German language, this book reads like a map of the sensibility that made The Corrections so entertaining and important. Even in his minor scenes and ordinary descriptions, Franzen employs a cartoonish flair that catches the reader's eye and signifies that it all really is about something greater than himself." Anna Godbersen, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopses & Reviews Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society.
The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.
These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family. Review: "National Book Award — winner Franzen's first foray into memoir begins and ends with his mother's death in Franzen's adulthood. In between, he takes a sarcastic, humorous and intimate look at the painful awkwardness of adolescence. As a young observer rather than a participant, Franzen offers a fresh take on the sometimes tumultuous, sometimes uneventful America of the 1960s and '70s. A not very popular, bookish kid, Franzen ( The Corrections) and his high school buddies, in one of the book's most memorable episodes, attempt to loop a tire, ring-toss — style, over their school's 40-foot flag pole as part of a series of flailing pranks. Franzen watches his older brother storm out of the house toward a wayward hippe life, while he ultimately follows along his father's straight-and-narrow path. Franzen traces back to his teenage years the roots of his enduring trouble with women, his pursuit of a precarious career as a writer and his recent life-affirming obsession with bird-watching. While Franzen's family was unmarked by significant tragedy, the common yet painful contradictions of growing up are at the heart of this wonderful book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker): 'You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do.' (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "There's an expression weary writing instructors use in hopes of wringing the self-indulgence out of their egocentric students: 'Just because it happened to you doesn't make it interesting.' In 'The Discomfort Zone,' a collection of six autobiographical essays, Jonathan Franzen, author of the award-winning 2001 novel 'The Corrections,' stands that admonition on its head. He takes experiences from his ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) life that, to be frank, aren't all that exciting, feeds them through the mixing board of his prodigious insight, and produces some beautiful music. Most of the time, anyway. These essays focus on the events that Franzen recognizes as the ones that transformed him into the artist he is today. As the youngest, by a wide margin, of three boys who came of age in a middle-class St. Louis suburb, Franzen might have been 'cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned,' as he puts it, but there's drama just growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. No matter how cosseted a person was, it was impossible to avoid the shrapnel from the multiple cultural explosions of the time. In 'Two Ponies,' he pinpoints when family life started going south for the Franzens of Webster Groves, Mo. As a 10-year-old in 1970, he confesses he was unaware of 'an epidemic' sweeping the country — late adolescents 'not just clashing with their parents but rejecting and annihilating everything about them.' The epidemic hit home when Jonathan's father, a man Franzen says had spent 50 years doing exactly what his own father had wanted him to do, battled with Jonathan's brother Tom. Dad wanted Tom to be an architect; Tom preferred making plotless art films. Tom reacted by taking off. In that 'unsettled season,' Franzen sought solace in a 'private, intense relationship with Snoopy' and the rest of the 'Peanuts' gang. The grown-up Franzen can see why his preteen mini-me would identify so obsessively, and the reason is no less heartbreaking for its ordinariness: Nobody grows up, or apart, in a comic strip. 'I wanted everyone in my family to get along and nothing to change; but suddenly, after Tom ran away, it was as if the five of us looked around, asked why we should be spending time together, and failed to come up with many good answers.' 'Then Joy Breaks Through' and 'Centrally Located' are less successful recreations of pivotal experiences in Franzen's life. In the former, Franzen joins a passionate church youth group called Fellowship. The latter essay recounts the pranks Franzen and his high school pals pulled off, or tried to. Both essays seem like journeys without destinations, vividly rendered and spot-on about the cringing embarrassments of adolescence, but meandering. 'The Foreign Language' suffers from the same indulgences, but makes for dishy reading because it describes Franzen's first sexual exploit — at Swarthmore College — and, slow down the presses, it's with his own version of Charlie Brown's Little Red-Haired Girl. Identification with the funny pages' perennial loser is no coincidence. Franzen comes clean about an adolescent nerd problem. He finds a pornographic magazine called Rogue, and actually reads the stories; he forges a note to get himself out of school so he can go home and watch the launch of Skylab. His self-portrait isn't exactly run-with-the-bulls: 'giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on.' The best essays of 'The Discomfort Zone' are the first, 'House for Sale,' in which Franzen sells off the family home after his mom dies, and the last, 'My Bird Problem,' in which he smothers his grief over the death of both his mother and his marriage by crisscrossing the continent in search of feathery additions to his life list — the catalog birdwatchers keep of the birds they've seen. A common thread running through the essays is the peeling away of childish illusion to reveal a second reality — the very definition of growing up, and a discomfort zone if there ever was one. Discovering the beauty and ubiquity of birds, for instance, after a lifetime of looking at them but not seeing them, made Franzen feel as if he'd always 'been mistaken about something important.' Franzen may be known as The Man Who Said No To Oprah; he's written about that pop-culture melodrama elsewhere, thankfully. Here, we get the small, unexpectedly fraught moments that accumulate into a life. They're interesting merely because they happened to Franzen, who has the enviable ability to make them so. Bob Ivry is a frequent reviewer for The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Bob Ivry, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Franzen is extremely funny, winning, and not incidentally an astute social commentator. As in his previous work, the style here is energetic and engaged; many ideas are woven together, not often quickly or easily; this is not for lazy readers." Library Journal Review: "Only rarely does [Franzen] talk specifically about his emergence as a writer, but it's all there, right in front of you. Quirky, funny, poignant, self-deprecating and ultimately wise." Kirkus Reviews Review: "This gratifyingly unpredictable and finely crafted collection ends with a tour de force...a thoughtful, wry, and edgy musing on marital bliss and misery, global warming, the wonder of birds, and our halfhearted effort to protect the environment." Booklist Review: "[F]unny, masterfully composed, self-deprecating — if sometimes too foppish — ruminations on [Franzen's] life so far....For those eagerly awaiting his Corrections follow-up, this will help get you through the night. (Grade: B+)" Entertainment WeeklyReview: "Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Review: "The weak chapters have their share of delights; the strong chapters are impossibly articulate and true. And like the born novelist that he is, Franzen keeps operating under the sign of ambivalence." Los Angeles Times Review: "I loved The Corrections, but this memoir has less of the blazingly great writing and more of the depressingly familiar Franzen trademarks." Minneapolis Star TribuneReview: "An alternately funny and oppressive memoir that paints a portrait of a man practically paralyzed with self-consciousness....This is humorous material, but the buildup can be grinding." Philadelphia Inquirer Review: "[B]rief, beautifully crafted....Franzen's technique is often as invisible and intricate as a cobweb. As you turn pages...you realize you've been moving along a silken pathway designed by a very bright spider." Cleveland Plain Dealer Synopsis: Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, this work narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family. Synopsis: This book delivers the intimate memoir of Franzens growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an excruciating and strangely happy adolescence, and into his adult life with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
About the Author Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction; the novels The Twenty-Seventh City and S trong Motion; and a collection of essays, How to Be Alone, all published by FSG. He lives in New York City.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780374299194
- Subtitle:
- A Personal History
- Author:
- Franzen, Jonathan
- Publisher:
- Farrar Straus Giroux
- Subject:
- 20th century
- Subject:
- Authors, American
- Subject:
- Personal Memoirs
- Subject:
- BIO026000
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- September 5, 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 195
- Dimensions:
- 834x588x81 76
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