My problem is that I don’t have a bit of a problem with The Discomfort Zone: A Personal, History, Jonathan Franzen’s autobiography published in 2006. I’m a fan, to begin with. I now recall his allegedly bitter tirade against Oprah. (Remember his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections and its ouster from the Book Club?) Guess he would never give the Queen the time of the day.
This lack of a problem begins and ends with the beauty of having read The Corrections, which I can remember now as about a conservative Midwestern family life, the contradicting feelings toward filial love, and the emergence of a radically new person. Franzen’s own life is not far from this, if not exactly identical to. To others, this kind of repetition could be seen as a vain or unnecessary venture, or as if early intimations with this individual is replicated out of the poverty in new shared discoveries; to me, it’s a testament to a kind of writing genius. A former writing prof once told us that it’s tricky to translate one’s life into fiction, as there’s always this danger: “It’s too close that you can’t see it.”
This is not to say, though, that Franzen no longer brings something new to the table in The Discomfort Zone. He makes it a point to let the self take the backseat, perhaps as a resolve against the oft-committed crime of boring, in-your-face vanity. It’s as if the self is merely given the privilege of being inserted in between the First Congregational and hippiedom; the dissection of Charlie M. Schulz’s artistic genius in Peanuts and a three-level interpretation of Franz Kafka; in the glaring reality of global warming and the lack of federal support to counter it.
Franzen says here that when you’re an adolescent, you’re stuck with that self-consciousness that tells you you’re just waiting for the real story to happen. And death, accordingly, is the real story, no matter what prank you pull off to vie for attention: art, comics, literature, even modern bureaucracy. Reading this is like falling in love all over again with The Corrections or languishing over How To Be Alone. Glad to know that this bespectacled American liberal I admire, just like the rest, is just waiting for the real story to unfold.
