The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Unless you are an employee of the New York Times, it has become uncool to admit to liking Jonathan Franzen.I don't know when Franzen's innate un-hipness became official. Was it when he announced his mixed feelings about his work being included in Oprah's book club? Was it when he wrote his essay on Edith Wharton--an article that would go on to become perhaps the most misunderstood piece of nonfiction in the last 10 years? Was it when he started bashing Kindles and Twitter? Was it, perhaps, when he wrote an essay included in this collection, in which he professes in detail his love of bird-watching? Maybe it was when his latest essay was published, on his admiration of Karl Kraus and his disdain for Amazon (and, let's face it, implying that Jeff Bezos is the anti-christ was just a tad harsh).More likely, though, it was a culmination of all these things, as well as a few misguided editorial rants (written by people who have clearly not read Franzen's work) which heavily suggested Franzen is responsible for misogyny in the publishing industry. If you're into word association, some of the most common adjectives that come up when I talk with friends about Franzen are, in no particular order: "asshole," "pretentious," "technophobe," and, in so many words, "that guys who knew David Foster Wallace."In spite of all this, I have always had, and continue to have, a deep admiration of Franzen's work, and furthermore, I think the qualities I like most about what he does are displayed perfectly in this short collection of essays (which has, in my opinion, been mislabeled as a memoir, or, in Franzen's words, "A Personal History). It is the brutal honesty Franzen possesses and the beautiful articulation of alienation, of self-consciousness (without, unlike most of his contemporaries, implementing self-consciousness into his prose), of ineptitude and anxiety and shame and, perhaps most of all, guilt. The fearlessness required of anecdotes like the ones in this book, where, for instance, a pre-pubescent Franzen exposes himself to a pair of twin girls who just moved into the house next door, the bravery innate in a sentence like: "I'd finally started to love my mother near the end of her life, when she was undergoing a year of chemotherapy and radiation and living by herself." There is a sternness and a mad pursuit of what his old friend DFW would call "the capital-T Truth" which exists in all of Franzen's work, fiction and nonfiction, that I identify and sympathize with. And the fact that he is so misunderstood, that critics condescendingly refer to him as a "neo-Luddite," that he is ridiculed for his disregard for words not printed on a sheet of paper, and that his deep, unrelenting passion and concern for the world he lives in and for the people in it with him make it easier for people to laugh him off as a "Downer"--these are things that only prove to endear him further to me. There are, of course, more technical concrete reasons to love Franzen's work. His uncanny knack to see the hypocrisies and contradictions upon which modern society is founded, his nearly flawless prose, and his ability to create characters that feel all-too real to us (regardless of whether or not we like them, which is a topic for another day)--these are all good reasons to explore the man's work, and to tune out the critics whom, I suspect, mostly haven't read it.
I am perplexed by the New York Times reviewers’ antipathy to this book. I have always found Franzen to be a captivating essayist, and Discomfort Zone is no exception. Most distressing to his critics, it seems, is Discomfort Zone’s abundant narcissism--but I found the essays to be a reflection on youthful egotism from a mature and contrite remove. To the Times reviewers, Franzen’s description of his family is sterile and unloving. His “disarming, sometimes misguided candor,” seems instead, to me, a genuine struggle to reconcile the myopic interiority of childhood (a common enough crime) and the smothering expectations and self-abnegation of his parents (again, common enough). Hilariously, the author resents his own liberal beliefs: he is bitter at his own convictions that he should moderate his material consumption and sacrifice to promote the welfare of others--sentiments I often intuit from the liberal community but never hear articulated. I found none of these confessions outsized or repugnant. If anything, I found Franzen’s view of himself and his family refreshingly healthy and honest: No family is free of resentment, and all resentment is rooted in a sense of entitlement.The essays are not contiguous. Each is an autonomous work; three of the five have appeared in the New Yorker. Each paints a picture of Franzen’s emotional development. The second, for example, describes a boy aware of his many sins but comically oblivious to the degrees by which they vary: “Just after summer vacation started, Toczko ran out into Grant Road and was killed by a car. What little I knew then about the world’s badness I knew mainly from a camping trip, some years earlier, when I’d dropped a frog into a campfire and watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log... I felt guilty about Toczko. I felt guilty about the little frog. I felt guilty about shunning my mother’s hugs when she seemed to need them most. I felt guilty about the washcloths at the bottom of the stack in the linen closet, the older, thinner washcloths that we seldom used. I felt guilty for preferring my best shooter marbles, a solid red agate and a solid yellow agate, my king and my queen, to marbles father down my rigid marble hierarchy.”The most enticing thing about Franzen’s essays is his use of the objective correlative. In his early childhood, the author’s identification with Snoopy of the Peanuts comics conveys all we need to know about his buoyant and wicked playfulness. In his early adulthood, the author’s fascination with dark, psychological German literature dovetails his sexual preoccupations, his frustrated literary ambitions, and the realization of his parents’ frailty. In each essay, the objective correlative weaves neatly into the personal history, sometimes as a reprieve from the traditional narrative and sometimes as a momentum-building digression from it. It’s an effective mechanism, mostly light-hearted, sometimes nerdy, and almost always charming.
What do You think about The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006)?
I've been reading far too many memoirs and autobiographies for someone who's on record as hating them. For this one, my specific aim was to establish if an anonymous inquirer was right in believing me to have been too generous in my review of The Corrections. Regrettably, I was unable to answer this question with certainty, The Discomfort Zone not being a straightforward autobiography or memoir so much as an elaborate attempt on Franzen's part of proving himself not to be the most boring person in the world. It's a small comfort that Franzen didn't succeed in his mission either; in fact, he may be the most intensely dull person on the planet, to the point where I can't imagine what possessed him to write a memoir, or his publisher to publish it.He's the living embodiment of the stereotypical inoffensive, sheltered, self-absorbed Midwestern liberal who moved to the East Coast to partake in uninteresting gentrification, who seems to be oblivious to the fact that there's absolutely nothing remarkable about him. He believes ― or desperately wants to believe ― his various insecurities and neuroses make him interesting, pointing to other, arguably more interesting people who also had insecurities and neuroses; it doesn't work that way. He commits various small sins against what he believes to be mainstream liberalism, unaware that his kind of lack of integrity is precisely what has defined American liberalism for decades, and as such isn't interesting so much as tediously expected. He takes up birding, of all things, because... well, I'm not sure.The only message I got from the whole thing is that Franzen is mildly autistic, which, again, isn't interesting (it's almost fashionable). It's certainly true that I'd much rather live in a world peopled by people like Franzen than in one full of some of the other people whose autobiographies I've read over the years, but that's as far as it goes.At least it helped me make up my mind about whether I should read Freedom.(The answer is no.)
—Koen Crolla
First off, beautiful cover, so kudos to that. I'm trying to decide whether the Discomfort Zone refers to Franzen's childhood or his adult life. This book was written after Franzen's mother died, so it seemed to me like he was using the written word as a coping mechanism. Franzen had an upper-middle class upbringing in an affluent neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. He grew up in his own little world and was a pretty well adjusted kid who seemed to be more of a grown up than a child. He was geeky, and awkward, interested in things that normal kids would never give the time of day to, and had to cope with the fact that his career choice was not exactly what his father wanted. So big deal, he had overprotective, overbearing, meddling parents, I can relate, what's next? Well, to be quite frank, nothing much. I guess I expected to read about his life before and after The Corrections, about his career, about the big Oprah incident, but he focuses more on other aspects of his life and his career is maybe mentioned in passing. Nonetheless, I could see a lot of his characters in his family members. For example, his mother was probably the inspiration behind Melanie Holand from "Strong Motion", his father for Alfred Lambert from "The Corrections", and Franzen himself for Walter Berglund from "Freedom". I wouldn't call this a must read for any Franzen fan, it won't put you off of Franzen (thank God, that's what I was scared of), but a fictionalized Franzen is much more interesting than the real Franzen.
—Nicole
Franzen, author of the flawed (and overpraised) novel The Corrections, is a good prose stylist who none the less makes my hairline hurt when I encountered his essays in the collection How to Be Alone. Bright, ironic, discerning, Franzen took off on several topics, filtering his observations through his general air of feeling people, places and things are an imposition on his right to be in a bubble, brilliant and unsoiled by alien hands. Fine , I thought, his itchy irritation with things was worth the toleration due to his finesse as a prose stylist, and the sheer abundance of unexpected insight on a range of items, small and smaller. Franzen thinks a lot, and blessedly he writes well enough to make his slightest notion interesting. The Discomfort Zone, though, brings his antsy tone to a grating pitch, like a plumbing squealing late in the night,These set pieces, recollections of a man who is unhappy he's middle aged and more intensely self aware than he ever has been,use up a readers' empathy. Though often moving--the piece about trying to sell his parents house after their deaths got me by the throat a couple of times--Franzen's writing takes on the rhythm of someone speaking perfect sentences without the slightest variation in tone. Not a single inflection intrudes. He just goes on about what was and what was there and what it contained and what it smelled like and who made him nervous and who he liked and who betrayed him and what they wearing and what the ordered for lunch...You get the idea.
—Ted Burke
