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Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays will appeal to readers who appreciated his novel The Corrections, the literary sensation of 2001.
Franzen's novel is an unsparing portrait of a family and a society. It's built on the tensions between an aging Midwestern couple and their more sophisticated and troubled children, who have escaped to the East Coast.
His collection of six essays offers glimpses of the tensions in Franzen's own family and his uncomfortable childhood in Webster Groves, Mo., "in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class."
The subtitle, A Personal History, is too grand. The collection is mostly a portrait of the middle-aged novelist (Franzen is 47) as a self-absorbed, bookish teenager, "exposed" by an athlete who "accused me of preferring the dictionary to any other book."
Franzen offers no explicit connections between his fiction and his life. Nor does he offer more than a fleeting glimpse of his life as a "comfortable modern New Yorker" or mention his famous flap with Oprah Winfrey.
(The talk-show host kicked Franzen and The Corrections out of her book club when, in the name of "high art," he expressed his discomfort with being selected.)
The Discomfort Zone title comes from his parents' unending battle over their thermostat, which offered a "Comfort Zone" between 72 and 78 degrees. His father, a railroad manager, like the father in The Corrections, would complain about the chill. His mother, who resembles the mother in his novel, shot back that the house wasn't cold "if you were doing housework all day."
As in his fiction, more is at stake here than the temperature.
As an essayist, Franzen has a talent for seamless transitions and for weaving together multiple lines of thought, which is harder than it looks.
He is at his best on his high school pranks and passions for bird-watching and for Charles Schulz's comic strip Peanuts.
He writes: "Peanuts was steeped in Schulz's awareness that for every winner in a competition there has to be a loser, if not twenty losers, or two thousand, but I personally enjoyed winning and couldn't see why so much fuss was made about the losers."
As a winner, Franzen surveys economic ironies: "This is a great time to be an American CEO, a tough time to be the CEO's lowest-paid worker. A great time to be Wal-Mart, a tough time to be in Wal-Mart's way," and for authors, "better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list."
That's about as good a summary as I've read of the times we live in.
The Discomfort Zone
By Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
195 pp., $22
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