I picked this book up on a whim a few days ago. I hadn’t managed to get into the book I was reading at the time and was looking for something completely different. That day I had also rearranged a couple of bookshelves in a fit of pique, and thanks to double-stacking this had got lodged down the back somewhere. Newly rediscovered, and sitting right in my eyeline, The Discomfort Zone immediately became my next read.

Jonathan Franzen is probably best known as the author of The Corrections, his 2001 novel about a Midwestern couple and their three adult children trying to rub along as best they can. I read that about three years ago, loved it, and immediately recommended it to all and sundry. Later I read his collection of essays How to be Alone and was less struck with it. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I was a bit disappointed with it. So how would I feel about another work of non-fiction? If The Corrections won a 5/5 from me, and How to be Alone won 3/5, then The Discomfort Zone sits right in the middle at 4/5. So sayeth Kirsty’s highly scientific book categorization method.

Rather than being a straight autobiography or memoir, this is a collection of six essays that are obviously best read in order but similarly could be stand alone musings on different aspects of Franzen’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Each one takes a different subject as its central point – the house he grew up in; his love of Peanuts cartoons; the church youth group he attended; the pranks he and friends played at school; studying German at college; his developing obsession with bird watching as an adult – and from there picks out wider themes around them. The section entitled Two Ponies, which took Franzen’s love of Peanuts as its central point, particularly resonated with me.

For one, I am engaged to one of the world’s biggest Peanuts fans. When he moved in with me just over two years ago, over 50 books concerning Charlie Brown, Snoopy et al came with him. So, understanably, anything Peanuts-related is inextricably tied to FH for me. It pricks my ears up. Indeed, I was reading out passages from Franzen’s essay to see whether FH agreed with his pronouncments or not.

But on a larger scale, the chapter was about the odd isolation that childhood can bring, and Franzen seems to have identified with Charlie Brown thanks to

“…Schulz’s awareness that for every winner in a competition there has to be a loser, if not twenty losers, or two thousand…”

…although he didn’t necessarily realise that at the time. As different as Jonathan Franzen’s and my childhoods were (different era, different country, different family set up, different gender) I can relate to that strange need to define oneself, even if it is in retrospect. I felt that that was what he was doing in this book, trying to unravel exactly who he was at each point of his life, and how that shifting amounted to the person he is today. In that sense then The Discomfort Zone is truly a “personal” history. The history of a person, and of personality, and of the people around him. It is also both completely personal to him and his experience but equally applicable to everyone. Everyone has those moments that seem insignificant but in retrospect define a whole section of life. 

And because those moments can be so personal, sometimes they alienate just as much as they entrance. While I lapped up the parts about books and literature and Peanuts, as well as the chapter about the intricacies of a church youth group, the last chapter about bird watching didn’t quite connect. I agreed with the political and environmental points he was making, and I was moved by the idea of his increasing interest in the hobby acting as a distraction from the grief following his mother’s death and the realization that he would never have children as he had wanted, but the birds themselves… didn’t do it for me. It’s just not my thing, and certainly not Franzen’s fault.

The Discomfort Zone is a funny, affecting, poignant book that charmed me almost entirely, give or take a twitching. It certainly reignited my interest in his work after my slight dismay with his other non-fiction, and now I’m off to investigate his earlier novels. Has anyone read them? What did you think?