The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
Jonathan Franzen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 208 pages. $22.

Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is a beautifully written small book, surely a disappointment to those wishing to revisit the expansiveness of The Corrections, but undeniably winning for readers willing to be buoyed along by fluid, never-preening prose and the small insights, sadly often unusable, one gains about one's past. Its six interlinked essays, two previously published in the New Yorker, are threaded through with references to the author's mother—strict and emotional in his childhood, graceful and stoic in the slow arc of her dying—and one can't help but think of The Afterlife, Donald Antrim's recently published, equally pristine survey of more troubled family relations. Franzen's crosscuts, such as those between family reminiscence and discussion of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz in "Two Ponies," are effortless, a collage that allows in just enough of the world beyond his family without popping its seams. Even as his boyish awkwardness, usually around girls, turns into fecklessness, usually around women, and the repercussions of his eccentricities pile up, one can't help but savor Franzen's mellifluous voice and acknowledge that this is more than mere stopgap before his next novel.