W.D. Clarke's Reviews > The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

There's an old philosophical joke that, in one of its many forms**, runs: "There are two kinds of people in the world—those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don't". In that spirit, I'd like to propose a corollary, as regards the biographies of writers: there are two kinds of writers, (i) those who meticulously curate their biographies (so as to attempt to shepherd or police future interpretations of their life and work, as with the late Philip Roth, say, by appointing official biographers and/or donating their ephemera to university libraries under strict provisos), and (ii) those who would seek to remove their own persons from literary history, because the man or woman is nothing, the work is all (Thomas Pynchon and Milan Kundera, certainly, plus William Gaddis, who asks, in his novel The Recognitions, "What is an artist, but the dregs of his work?").

There is (at the very least) a third type of author, of course, whose own life intrudes noisily, even anarchically onto the scene and competes with the writing itself for attention, sometimes with deliberate intent (e.g. Norman Mailer), sometimes by accident (e.g. Franzen himself, over the Oprah's-Book-Club-Stickergate phenomenon in connection with his third novel, The Corrections). And sometimes, too in the confessional mode: though such memoirs usually or often come near the close of a writing career and as a preliminary salvo to the curational campaign of type (i), above, on occasion a mid-career writer with something on their chest or in their conscience or both chooses to "bare all" in public, their own reputation be damned—a daring raid against the besieged citadel of their own public persona, if you will, or kamikaze mission….

The Discomfort Zone is just such a book—not an autobiography or memoir in any conceivable "normal" sense of that word, but an examination of conscience, a exercise in self-harrowing, and above all an attempt to connect with a past which has shaped its author and his various obsessions and which is now of course retrievable only via memory. But it is also a stab at self-redemption, or at least the expiation of the poor choices which resulted from those obsessions and the early relationships within whose matrix those obsessions first developed.

In other words, peeps, Jonathan Franzen is a strange dude, and he wants us to know that for some strange reason, one perhaps known only to himself—or at least, I did not figure out the motivation for his having written such a strange account of his strange life whilst reading this strange, but not always estranging book.

His parents were even bigger weirdos. His father… well, I couldn't help but think of the father in George Saunders's flash fiction "Sticks" while reading this book—It's really short, but also poignantly affecting (and super-tragic) and I'll put the whole thing in a spoiler here...

(view spoiler)[ Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he’d built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod’s helmet and Rod had to clear it with Dad if he wanted to take the helmet off. On Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veterans Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was Dad’s one concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup, saying, Good enough good enough good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first time I brought a date over she said, What’s with your dad and that pole? and I sat there blinking.

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile he laid the pole on its side and spray-painted a rift in the earth. Mom died and he dressed the pole as Death and hung from the crossbar photos of Mom as a baby. We’d stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base: army medals, theater tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of Mom’s makeup. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and left it by the road on garbage day. (hide spoiler)]

...but the most relevant bit of it is when the narrator, one of the sons or daughters, sums up enduring life-with-dad, saying,

We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup, saying, Good enough good enough good enough.

A not-so-life-affirming utility-maximizing, gratification-delaying uber-Protestant, in other words. Thing is, though, both parents are on Team Puritan in The Discomfort Zone, and it is mom who seems to deserve, or at least receives, more of the son's scrutiny. The book opens with Franzen relating his returning home after her death to sell the house which was not only her pride and joy, but seemingly one of her chief reasons for living. Life in that house was about improving that house, and improving it was about its future sale—I won't spoil that saga for you. Living in it was to be

cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned. I was the late-arriving son to whom my father, who read to me every weeknight, confided his love of the depressive donkey Eeyore in A. A. Milne, and to whom my mother, at bedtime, sang a private lullaby that she’d made up to celebrate my birth. My parents were adversaries and my brothers were rivals, and each of them complained to me about each of the others, but they were all united in finding me amusing, and there was nothing not to love in them.

All that love though? It comes very late in the book, much later in life (by Franzen's own confession), when the father is gone and the mother is terminally ill. Only then does he at last learn to love her "properly" (I'll get to that). Earlier on, though? It was all about control, control over every single aspect of young Jonathan's life. Here's an example:

In our hotel room in Orlando, I begged my mother to let me wear my cutoff jeans and a T-shirt for the day, but my mother won the argument, and I arrived at Disney World in an ensemble of pleated shorts and a Bing Crosbyish sport shirt. Dressed like this, miserable with self-consciousness, I moved my feet only when I was directly ordered to. All I wanted to do was go sit in our car and read. In front of each themed ride, my mother asked me if it didn’t look like lots of fun, but I saw the other teenagers waiting in line, and I felt their eyes on my clothes and my parents, and my throat ached, and I said the line was too long. My mother tried to cajole me, but my father cut her off: “Irene, he doesn’t want to ride this one.” We trudged on through diffuse, burning Florida sunshine to the next crowded ride. Where, again, the same story.

“You have to ride something,” my father said finally, after we’d had lunch. We were standing in the lee of an eatery while tawny-legged tourist girls thronged toward the water rides. My eyes fell on a nearby merry-go-round that was empty except for a few toddlers.

“I’ll ride that,” I said in a dull voice.

No wonder, then, that young JF becomes rather tightly-wound, and that budding writer JF has to fight them every inch of the way to study German at college (as, unlike English, it can at least be dressed up as possibly leading to a career international banking or something), or that still-older JF tries to control every aspect of his relationships with women.

Much wonder, though, that he wants us readers to know…are we the disreputable friends he was never allowed to have? Or are we but Fathers and Mothers Confessional, granting some virtual or collective or something-something penance and absolution?

I have no idea.

But therein lies the heart of this book, which sometimes I thought I loved, and at other times made me cringe in embarrassment for its author—not because it is badly-written at all (no, the sense we get here is of a man middle-age but of still scorchingly bright intelligence, albeit one who won't stop hovering over himself and screaming "Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough!"), but because why would anyone want to air one's own most embarrassingly dirty linen in public like that?

I have no idea.

Briefly now, cos now I am hoevering over myself and telling myself that I am starting to try even a patient reader's patience, but elsewhere in this book we get quite a lot that is of interest, and of import to Mr. Franzen's psychomachia: a compelling argument in favour of Charles Schulz and the comic "Peanuts" (as well as JF's reasons for obsessing over same), if you can believe it, the early-70s sheer insanity of belonging to a hippy-Christian church youth fellowship called, you got it, "Fellowship"; high school pranks which not only do not go well, but which needs must convince you that teen JF was the geekiest nerd or nerdiest geek, like, evah; an absolutely wonderful, if-anything-too-short account of how German literature (specifically, Goethe and Mann most of all) saved JF from all that earlier (but not the later) stuff; and finally, a closing piece I dreaded after spying it in the Table of Contents, one aptly titled "My Bird Problem".

Now, I am a bit of a fan of the natural world. I like critters, and I like flowers. And I love trees. But Jonathan Franzen, Puritan obsessive-compulsive-son-of-Franzens-and-father-of-none simply loves loves LOVES (and loves to talk about and fly all over the continents after) birds. Loves'em to bits, perhaps even to distraction. But there's a method to his madness, it seems (though I had to wade through a whole lot of bird names to get to it: humans are destructive creatures, and it can be rational to be misanthropic about all that they get up to. Global warming is the ultimate fuckover of Mother Nature, but do most people even care? The misanthrope grins through his Weltschmerz. But he can't love Mother Nature, either ("Whoever imagined that LOVE YOUR MOTHER would make a good environmental bumper sticker obviously didn’t have a mom like mine"), he can only fret over her—until, that is, he discovers her particularities and learns how to love them, in spite himself. To love an endangered bird in spite of its foredoomedness, well—well let JF say it:

To know that something is doomed and to cheerfully try to save it anyway: it was a characteristic of my mother. I had finally started to love her near the end of her life, when she was undergoing a year of chemotherapy and radiation and living by herself. I’d admired her bravery for that. I’d admired her will to recuperate and her extraordinary tolerance of pain. I’d felt proud when her sister remarked to me, “Your mother looks better two days after abdominal surgery than I do at a dinner party.” I’d admired her skill and ruthlessness at the bridge table, where she wore the same determined frown when she had everything under control as when she knew she was going down. The last decade of her life, which started with my father’s dementia and ended with her colon cancer, was a rotten hand that she played like a winner.

Has JF, in learning to love his mother learned to love his fellow humans, much less himself??? Again, I have no idea. JF is still a weird, weird dude, in my estimation, an author I am not sure I would enjoy having a beer with (kind of a litmus test with me, that). But I'm still not sure that I wouldn't enjoy said beer, either. That's a testament to Franzen's skill, here, in making a crazy, uncomfortable (yet still at times compensatory, if not quite comforting) kind of art out of a strange and difficult, yet obviously at times rewarding life and life-in-art.

** You can read all about that joke and its variants, and its variant attributions here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02...