Jonathan Franzen reflects on his
life and the world in his new book, The Discomfort Zone.  It is a
collection of six essays, telling tales from his childhood and his later life,
with thoughts about his family, his friends, his ex-wife and other partners,
the Midwest, New York, the environment, and birding.  Franzen, author of The
Corrections which won a National Book Award in 2001, is an excellent
writer, but his life is not so interesting. 

These essays have a meandering
quality which adds to the sense of self-indulgence that most memoirs risk. 
Franzen writes about some of the difficult times in his life, but he also
writes about his rather unexceptional childhood.  Readers are left wondering
why he thinks we should know all about his life.   He writes about going back
to his parents’ house in Missouri after his mother had died, cleaning it up and
arranging with a realtor to sell it.  This triggers many memories for him, and
so we learn about his adolesence.  He focuses on his
struggles with his mother, and explains how he found it difficult to simply
accept her love without resisting the conditions she imposed.  His parents were
prim and conservative, so it is not surprising he didn’t want to accept their
values as a teenager in the 1970s; looking back, he seems to regret that he wasn’t able
to rise above his childish reactions and express his feelings more openly.  In other essays, he looks back on his
participation with a church teen group with mixed feelings, and wondering at
his own naivety.  He was an unfashionable and geeky adolescent, and he was
mainly interested in reading and writing his own journals.  He tells in some
details some of the pranks that he and his friends played, and they sound like
an episode of Freaks and
Geeks.  When he writes about his college experience, he talks about his
love of German authors and discusses at some length his thoughts about Kafka’s Josef
K.  In the final essay, he goes into his discovery of bird watching; he is
quite aware that is it not a hobby with a great deal of sex appeal, but he is
comfortable with this now. 

I wonder who is really going to
enjoy these essays.  I might have said that they would be interesting for
people who can identify with Franzen, except that I’m also a white male about
the same age as him, with an adolescence that was every bit as awkward and
geeky, yet the book left me cold.  So I don’t know who will be gripped by
Franzen’s stories. 

The unabridged audiobook is read by
Franzen himself.  He is a good performer of his own work, reading with energy
and conviction. 

Link: Highbridge
Audio

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.