The Discomfort Zone
HarperCollins, 197 pages, $29.95
Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel/memoir, The Discomfort Zone covers some of the same territory as his widely acclaimed Corrections, but does so in a very different fashion. While Corrections is more self-consciously literary and academically hip in its execution, The Discomfort Zone (with the exception of a questionable foray into the realm of German modernism) draws more upon the popular culture of Franzen’s (and, I confess, my own) youth. In Corrections, Franzen boldly expects the reader to “get” (and possibly get rid of) Foucault and the bastions of Critical Theory, but The Discomfort Zone is layered with the gentler – and sometimes more profound – wisdom of Charles M. Shultz’s Peanuts. Even the novel’s opening line “There’d been a storm that evening in St. Louis” is a riff on the venerable Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night”. Unlike Snoopy, however, Franzen follows through with a beautifully written, funny, smart – and sometimes uncomfortable – ramble through a life that was forged “in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class”. Even the protagonist’s neighborhood, Webster Groves, was “in the middle of this middle”.
Growing up in the middle, under the under the watchful eyes of his parents, and figuratively, under the panoptic gaze an entire country, Jonathan does seem to embody the spirit of Charley Brown. He is too young to join older siblings in embracing the 60’s, but old enough record and critique the status quo he is forced to endure. All is revealed through well-executed flashbacks as he faces the bothersome and emotional task of putting his deceased mother’s home up for sale.
It should be noted this is Franzen’s first major work since spurning Oprah (out of fear for his literary reputation) when she tried to select Corrections for her coveted Book of the Month honour. As such, it is tempting to examine The Discomfort Zone as a kind of explication or justification of Franzen’s now legendary million-dollar bit of “Good grief!”. Perhaps, Franzen’s choice of Charley Brown as a kind of patron saint within the novel is a clue to his response. Jonathan is a good egg who makes mistakes, a forty-something man who can still be taken in by the vague promises of a pretty, blonde realtor, an excruciatingly self-conscious man who worries about how a new found love of birding will sit with his friends.
The form of the book may also provide a clue to Franzen’s current thinking about his past literary foibles. Weighing in at just under 200 pages, its brevity and levity seems to blur the line between novel and memoir and contrasts with the much longer Corrections. The brevity of this latest work is also deceptive because its disparate, episodic structure explores many “zones” and provides the reader with many views into Jonathan’s character. The end result depends partly upon how one wishes to assemble the pieces. Admittedly — some of those pieces – such as the narrator’s college memory of an intense exploration of German literature, may be more challenging to integrate than others. After all, not everyone is still wringing their hands over whether Kafka’s Joseph K was innocent or guilty. At the same time, because Jonathan’s life is enigmatic in its own way and emblematic of the late boomer generation, this novel will appeal to twenty-something “children” who stand to learn something new about their ever-so-strange parents. The Discomfort Zone will also hold up to multiple readings and bring a smile to the face of anyone struggling to survive on the frowning side of forty.
Finally, and however unlikely, it would be interesting if Oprah decided to give Franzen another chance. The Discomfort Zone succeeds in prying open a crack or two in the shell of Franzen’s precious literary reputation, but in so doing, the book reveals much that is funny and deep and achingly human.