The Discomfort Zone : A Personal History
By Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006

      Jonathan Franzen’s memoir suffers from ignorance of that old Twain nugget about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. The author’s first novel, The Corrections, received as much critical praise as it is possible for a novel to receive, and it won the National Book Award to boot. But while it is quite easy to hide a lack of intellectual acuity behind the obscurity of fiction – that is, when you can make up everything you write, it’s not hard to make people think you’re deeper than you really are – it’s not so easy to hide in a memoir. What you write has to be (or should be) the unadulterated core of yourself, and if your internal emperor has no clothes it’s going to show. Uncritical readers will be as awestruck by The Discomfort Zone as they were by The Corrections, but for everyone else, the memoir will make very clear that Franzen is a literary poseur, a self-important writer who is prone to cliché, devoid of significant insight and not very nice.

      Franzen writes of his life growing up in St. Louis in the 1960s and 70s, the son of a railroad engineer (the kind who designs the tracks, not the kind who drives the trains). Franzen was socially awkward, mostly because he was too smart and creative to be liked. He would have us believe that his upbringing was precisely in the middle of America’s socioeconomic map, but his family was actually comfortably upper middle class, his father’s salary twice the country’s median income. Franzen’s early life was easy, and he digs deep to try to find dramatic conflict.

      The memoir is rife with psychological clichés. His incessant whining about his parents’ inadequacies is obviously Freudian, and his lists of his own sins and humiliations are little beyond an egotistical bit of reverse psychology, self-aggrandizement through insincere self-deprecation. Indeed, the author’s assumption that his unremarkable adolescent trials make his life somehow noteworthy is downright laughable. He was an awkward kid? Who wasn’t? Worse, he writes about the highlights of his childhood – most excruciatingly an extremely overlong discourse on his involvement with a hippie Christian youth group – with the narcissistic assumption that we will find the whole tedious affair fascinating.

      When Franzen reaches for insight, he usually misses the mark. A very long analysis of his life via Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip comes up particularly empty. Franzen explains to us the strip’s subtext: Charlie Brown is a loser and Snoopy is a free spirit. Man, this guy is sharp! I’m not sure anyone else has been able to tease that interpretation from Peanuts before! The most useful bit of information to come from the Peanuts riff is that Franzen doesn’t identify with Charlie Brown – "I personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made about the losers" – but with Snoopy, the “protean trickster” of the strip.

      Franzen’s disdain for losers comes out again and again. He casts himself as a political liberal, but when he considers whether or not he should contribute financially to the Katrina relief effort he balks. Why should he, a liberal, give up his hard-earned money when it was the irresponsibility of conservatives that caused the whole mess in the first place? If he helps out, he just lets Bush and the rest of the Republicans off the hook. Better to hold onto his money. Hypocrisy has rarely been so blatant.

      But what of the critics who love Franzen? They’ll continue to insist that he’s great at things such as weaving together multiple trains of thought, when what he actually does is make you very aware that he’s following multiple trains of thought (which all good writers do) because his multiple lines don’t sync very well. Like a bad film director being self-consciously arty, he makes you think “Where in the hell is he going with this?” You trust that a good writer will lead you somewhere worth going, but Franzen’s thought processes rarely converge anywhere very important. He does, however, include diagrams and illustrations in the book, automatically making it a postmodern masterpiece.

      You keep waiting for Franzen to grow up, to achieve some sort of revelation that transforms him from a self-centered, petulant, shallow boy into a humble and compassionate man capable of creating wise art, but the revelation never comes. In fact, Franzen remains unashamedly shallow to the end.

      Franzen would no doubt be horrified to be compared – especially unfavorably – with a lightweight, low-art writer like Bill Bryson, but the sad truth is that Bryson’s new Midwestern memoir of childhood, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, outclasses Franzen’s book on every level, from social criticism to nostalgic humor to psychological insight. The other heartland memoir I’ve reviewed in recent weeks, Debra Marquart’s The Horizontal Life, leaves Bryson and (especially) Franzen in the dust. That Marquart labors on the faculty of a state university in Iowa while Franzen reaps the rewards of critically anointed stardom is a disillusioning illustration of the injustice of the publishing world.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.