The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

New
Hardcover
2006
$12.01

Brilliant, award-winning personal history from the author of 'The Corrections'. Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. 'The Discomfort Zone' is his intimate memoir of his growth from a 'small and fundamentally ridiculous person,' through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal insight into the decades in which America took an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals. The stories told here draw on elements as varied as the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds. These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction -- but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring and arrestingly honest, Franzen narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

Synopsis

Brilliant, award-winning personal history from the author of 'The Corrections'. Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. 'The Discomfort Zone' is his intimate memoir of his growth from a 'small and fundamentally ridiculous person,' through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal insight into the decades in which America took an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals. The stories told here draw on elements as varied as the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds. These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction -- but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring and arrestingly honest, Franzen narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Edition: First Thus
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 02 Oct 2006
ISBN 10: 0007234244
ISBN 13: 9780007234240
Book Overview: BRILLIANT, AWARD-WINNING PERSONAL HISTORY FROM THE AUTHOR OF The Corrections

Media Reviews

'His discreetly devastating comic timing derives from the tension between the optimism of his ambition and the reality of the attempts to deal with the experiences that have marked his career as one America's best novelist and essayist.' Times 'Franzen's memoir is cleverly written and often fun to read!He's funny and self deprecating!' Sunday Telegraph 'Wonderful and supremely personal!' Time Magazine 'Reading such honest, awkward, tender pieces as these, the socially isolated individual may feel that little bit less lonely.' New Statesman. 'The close of this book is almost miraculous; we are reminded that Franzen, at his best, can write like a dream.' FT Magazine 'Just when you think you've had it with inconsequential memoirs along comes Jonathan Franzen to remind you that, in the right hands, even the most slight material can spring unnervingly to life. The Discomfort Zone is deeply loveable: clever, honest, brilliantly well-written and -- rarest of all -- funny!Franzen is an unusually plain-hearted writer -- you feel that he could not dissemble if he tried, which is rare in an artist -- and it is that which gives everything he does its unique flavour.' Rachel Cooke The Standard and The Scotsman. 'Beautifully crafted.' Metro 'There is a direct honesty behind these portraits that is admirable!this new volume will be rewarding for readers who enjoy Franzen's often humorous attempts to anatomize his divided feelings of shame and his social anxieties.' Times Literary Supplement 'In the best sense, this book takes Franzen towards that hoped-for comic archetype. He has the honesty to let the trivial and the weight co-exist and, like Schulz, has the knack of making his self-absorption universal!In our age of harsher polarities and extremes, his knowing elegies for that median time and place make luminous, essential reading.' The Observer

Author Bio

Jonathan Franzen is the author of 'The Twenty-Seventh City', 'Strong Motion' and 'The Corrections'. His fiction and nonfiction appear frequently in the New Yorker and Harper's, and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and the New Yorker. He lives in New York City.