August 19, 2006
Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone
Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone (FSG) 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.
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More info: Publisher's Weekly review; author page at the Complete Review; a report from a reading in the Columbia Spectator.
UPDATE, 8/21: Lev Grossman turns in a long(ish) profile of Franzen for Time.
UPDATE, 8/30: Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the book in the New York Times, isn't as willing to suspend her dislike of the subject matter as I was.
UPDATE, 8/31: Emily Gordon at Emdashes weighs in on Kakutani's review: "Does Michiko Kakutani have trouble with despair? Specifically, understanding what it might be like to be caught in it? Her self-congratulatory review . . . would seem to suggest that this is so, which would be an unfortunate deficiency in a critic of literature."
UPDATE, 9/5: James Marcus published a review in this weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, and links to it (with a brief preface) from his blog, House of Mirth.
UPDATE, 9/6: Today, a ringing endorsement from New York Observer books editor Adam Begley. The lede:
I’m not sure I can tell you the difference between a “personal history” and a memoir, but Jonathan Franzen’s contribution to the genre is so expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking, that I wish I could yank it off the shelf where it will inevitably sit with the autobiographical writing of other hip authors perhaps too young to be writing autobiography (Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, etc.), and toss it into the bleak anonymity of some loosely defined territory like “General Nonfiction.” The only problem is that the six essays in The Discomfort Zone, though they tackle topics as various as Charles Schulz, Franz Kafka and bird watching, are frankly autobiographical. Together they add up to an account, often artfully indirect, of Jonathan Franzen’s protracted coming-of-age—a period that overlaps, in part, with his development as a novelist. Though it never actually mentions either his first two novels or The Corrections (2001), The Discomfort Zone doubles as a map of the route Mr. Franzen traveled to get to the point where he could write his wonderful third novel. So this is, willy-nilly, a writer’s personal history.
UPDATE, 9/9: Here's Theo Schell-Lambert's review in the Village Voice.