If this new memoir is any guide, Jonathan Franzen has been a life-long connoisseur of guilt. Growing up the third son of thrift-minded parents in a middle-class suburb, he carried around a mental tally of guilt- worthy sins, from "shunning my mother's hugs" to "neglecting the stiff-limbed, scratchy pelted Mr. Bear."
This yoke of guilt did not become less powerful as Franzen grew up—quite the opposite. His struggle to break its leash is the subject of The Discomfort Zone, an alternatingly funny and oppressive memoir that paints a portrait of a man practically paralyzed with self-consciousness.
Arranged in six chapter-like essays, the book proceeds from Franzen's childhood in a St. Louis suburb to his adulthood in New York City, where, as a middle-aged man, he worries that the pleasure he gets from bird-watching proves he is in "the grip of something diseased and bad and wrong."
The Discomfort Zone provides a pretty thorough map to where this neurotic sense of guilt comes from. Franzen's father was a hard-working engineer who distrusted frivolity. His mother emerges as a scold who lived to pass judgment. Franzen describes how his brother came from college with a girlfriend named Lulu, which makes his mother "practically psychotic with hatred. 'Lulu?' 'Lulu?' What kind of person has a name like Lulu?' She gave a little creaky laugh. 'When I was a girl, a lulu was a crazy person! Did you know that?'"
It's understandable why voices like this would send a budding artistic sensibility burrowing inward. But it also has clearly made Franzen very angry. He explored this intergenerational anger in his award-winning novel, The Corrections, but allows it to smolder at the margins here. This omission feels like it starves the book of some much-needed oxygen.
The supporting cast of Mr. Franzen's life are crowded out by his own towering self-importance, which he satirizes mercilessly. In "The Foreign Language," an essay about learning German and his trouble with the opposite sex, he describes how "in my senior year journal, while I waited for Siebert to return from her first year of college, I constantly policed my feelings about her. I wrote "Don't CANONIZE her' and 'Don't be in love.'" A decade later, with a young wife, his coping skills were hardly more advanced. "We reacted to minor fights by lying facedown on the floor of our respective rooms for hours at a time, waiting for acknowledgement of our pain."
This is humorous material, but the build-up can be grinding. One can only hear so much about Franzen's drastic adolescent nerdiness, his passive-aggressive attempts to meet girls, his anxiety before his discomfort in being himself becomes our own. In most cases that is the sign of good writing—and Franzen is most assuredly a fine stylist. There are whole passages of this book that sing with absolutely gorgeous prose. But beauty is not enough. We read memoirs to experience a life, not just a consciousness. As an artist, Franzen allied himself to the latter a long time ago.