The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History | Jonathan Franzen

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History | Jonathan Franzen | A quirky, too short personal history

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The Discomfort Zon...

	The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen?s tale of growing up, squirming in his own über-sensitive skin, from a ?small and fundamentally ridiculous person,? into an adult with strong inconvenient passions. Whether he?s writing about 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, or the web of connections between bird watching, his all-consuming marriage, and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always feelingly engaged with the world we live in now. The Discomfort Zone is a wise, funny, and gorgeously written self-portrait by one of America?s finest writers.

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Discomfort and Revelation

These autobiographical essays teeter between personal revelation and keeping the reader at arm's length and the discussion at an intellectual level. Franzen describes in unforgiving detail how he chose the wrong realtor to sell his mother's house. We see him fall for the flirtatious sales pitch of the woman in tight jeans but not the reaction of his brothers once the error is discovered. He describes his attraction to his future wife because she is a precise, brilliant reader, but he seems incapable of explaining why that's not enough to make the marriage work. The failure of the marriage and reaction of his brothers remain just off stage. Franzen as an adult isn't far removed from the child who told his mother that he didn't hear the fight between his brother and father the night before -- everyone is safer if we carry on as if nothing happened.

The result is carefully crafted tension between Franzen's reticence to talk about intense messy feelings (except perhaps by allusion to Kafka) and meticulous cataloguing of everything incidental to those feelings. Trapped between the contradictory desires to be known and to remain distant, Franzen is at his thoughtful, ambivalent best.

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A quirky, too short personal history

Jonathen Franzen's personal history is more a short collection of slightly disorganized life happenings than what one would usually expect in a memoir. He begins with the story of the sale of his mother's house after her death, located in "just right" Webster Groves, Missouri, where he grew up. His goal to obtain the highest possible price doesn't work out entirely as planned. Chapter Two, My Ponies, concerns Snoopy, with whom he felt a certain "kinship," and Peanuts comic strip creator Charles Schultz. Joy Breaks Through follows the antics of his teen youth group members, of which he shares some great words of wisdom (p 113): "Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom," and "You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do." More on his teens follows in Centrally Located, especially the details of some high school pranks (complete with sketches). Learning German abroad is main subject of The Foreign Language. My Bird Problem contains a bit on romance and marriage, his changing awareness of and concern about the environment, and, likely the favorite part for birders, funny anecdotes about bird sightings at the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge as well as his experiences as a bird watcher on Hat Island. Good as is, but fans will likely be left wanting more. Similarly satisfying: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.

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A Mixture of Great, Okay and Yawn

Mr. Franzen clearly is a gifted writer. His ruminations about his parents, friends, interests and silly pranks were highly entertaining and his psychoanalytical observations were thought-provoking. This helped tremendously in convincing me to wade through a few small sections of the book which I found about as compelling as watching paint dry. I could have done without most of the chapter about his learning German. But, heh, it's his life. Who am I to tell him what to highlight from his past? The memoir gives you a good idea of what makes Mr. Franzen tick. An intelligent, honest and somewhat enjoyable read.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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