The Discomfort Zone A Personal History
Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 9/5
Jonathan Franzen’s first collection of essays, How to Be Alone, included pieces about his father’s battle with Alzheimer’s, the now infamous run-in with Oprah’s Book Club, and a surprisingly stimulating piece on the dysfunction of Chicago’s notoriously bad postal service. Many of those essays had appeared earlier in magazines and, perhaps as a result, How to Be Alone seemed somewhat disjointed.
While portions of the author’s latest collection of essays, The Discomfort Zone, have previously appeared in The New Yorker, these essays are fluid, linear and satisfying as a collection in a way that How to Be Alone was not. In it, Franzen turns his attention to his own past, a move that is dangerous both for its apparent egoism and its potentially prosaic execution. Few things, in fact, seem as blasé and self-serving as the recounted memories of a person who has experienced terrific success.
To Franzen’s credit, this new collection is as absorbing as his fiction and as sharply critical as his expository pieces. As was the case in How to Be Alone, Franzen is at his best when he aims for objectivity, even and especially when honest accounting doesn’t come easy. While he doesn’t spare himself from critical examination, he doesn’t fall into the kind of cloying self-deprecation that’s become the bread and butter of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, either. He recognizes his faults and doesn’t make excuses for his frivolities, his “sweeping moral judgments” and his ogling of “beer commercial cleavage.”
The six essays in The Discomfort Zone offer us a Jonathan Franzen who is no elitist, but is instead someone who is worried about being labeled as such. He’s a contemporary urban everyman, a transplant from a Midwestern suburb, and he wants what we all seem to want: to be a better person, a better steward of the environment, a better friend, son and brother.
These tender, thoughtful essays explore those desires in a way that allows the reader tremendous access to the idealism and sensitivity that makes Franzen’s writing — fiction and non-fiction alike — so moving and so completely relatable.
Nate Brown
