THE DISCOMFORT ZONE: A Personal History
by Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate ₤15.99, 256 pages
Jonathan Franzen is best known for The Corrections, which won the 2001 National Book Award in the US. The Corrections was a great big novel of middle-aged concerns: Parkinson’s disease, financial investments, the emotional mechanics of family reunions. In contrast, his previous and lesser-known novel was full of the worries of a younger man. Strong Motion, published in 1992, was a story of earthquakes and first love. Its scientific density - Franzen worked in a seismology lab before becoming a writer - never distracted from the playful association of the two storylines. Shifting plates and colliding hormones each became an evocative metaphor for the other.
The Discomfort Zone is not a novel but a memoir, and returns to the themes and techniques of Strong Motion. For it is a book of youthful worries. Like the earlier novel it tells the tale of growing up not only straight, but also in a series of feints at other subjects: the Peanuts cartoon strip, German literature, birdwatching. In a series of chronologically disordered but stylistically similar essays, many of which have been previously published in The New Yorker, Franzen recounts his earlier life as a series of crisis points. He worries about girls and the cool kids at school; his first marriage collapses; his mother dies and he sells the family house. At each transition, like a Romantic poet, he finds metaphors for his emotional discomforts in the world around him.
Franzen’s strength as a memoirist is that he is willing to present himself as occasionally unattractive: weak and complacent. While Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, he describes himself playing golf in California and worrying about where he would buy the lemons for that evening’s margaritas.
Growing up middle-class in the Midwest he was, he writes, “cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned”. He captures perfectly a particular American tone of entitlement and indifference. Franzen writes cleanly and well. But it is the kind of easy style that could be mistaken for laziness, as in his tendency to pile up description in phrases such as “to rip or slice or pry or slide” or “an impressive and elegant and beautiful feat”.
This spectre of laziness, of over-security in his own stylistic and imaginative gifts as a writer, haunts Franzen’s book. Every family anecdote here presented is attached to a larger cultural resonance. When his brother Tom runs away from home in the 1960s: “an epidemic had broken out across the country. Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not go to college, ingesting every substance they could get their hands on.” In insisting on the epidemic, we learn nothing of Tom. For Franzen, the anecdote is no more than a parable.
His constant hunger for symbols in the place of specifics leaves this short book often sounding pompous, ballasted to the ground by the weight of its author’s imaginative ambitions. His claim, for example, that at a certain age “I’d been reading German literature and was becoming a person myself” is inevitably ludicrous. Too often his free-floating associations become baffling, and metaphorical digressions read as ruminations rather than fertile parallels. One essay, on teenage pranks, is twice interrupted by irrelevant paragraphs on high school crushes that have no resonance with the narrative he is trying to tell.
Each of the weaknesses of this book, however, has a parallel strength. Even as it is at times vague and over-determined, Franzen sketches well the landscape of adolescence where every passing glance at a girl carries a wistful erotic charge; even as his parents and brothers remain oddly absent, he has a sharp eye for the details of minor characters. Of one admired camp adviser, Bill Symes, he writes: “Listening to the radio in his VW bug, he might suddenly cry out, ‘I want to hear... Meal Ticket by Elton John!’ and slap the dashboard. The radio would then play Meal Ticket.” This is an affectionate minute portrait, thick with local description of a time and place.
The final essay, “My Bird Problem”, is the strongest. It links birdwatching to Franzen’s reluctant concern for the environment, and then to his collapsing marriage and later love for a woman who did not want his children; from there to his mother’s painful and proud death. In describing the wretched final stages of his marriage, he pauses to note: “what was wrong, I decided, was modern industrialized society’s assault on the environment”. He is able to mock himself, and yet the metaphorical link - between the world and “our marital planet” - works for him, and frees his writing from the earlier convoluted pretensions. “I couldn’t imagine never smelling her again,” he writes, simply, of his recently departed wife. This essay is a quiet wonder of association, complicity and warmth, and the close of the book is almost miraculous; we are reminded that Franzen, at his best, can write like a dream.
