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626 ratings, 3.33 average rating, 134 reviews
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published
August 21st 2007
by Picador USA
binding
Paperback, 208 pages
isbn
0312426402
(isbn13: 9780312426408)
description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’s tale of growing up, squirming in his own übe...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 911)
Read in September, 2006
A Mixed Bag
I believe Jonathan Franzen fans will be both delighted and disappointed with this collection, The Discomfort Zone. It starts out very strong, showing off Franzen's remarkable vocabulary, storytelling ability, and his disregard for political-correctness. In a piece called, "House for Sale," Franzen tells what it feels like to take on the chore of emptying and selling what was his childhood home. Anyone who has faced the death of a parent and has undergone this...more
I believe Jonathan Franzen fans will be both delighted and disappointed with this collection, The Discomfort Zone. It starts out very strong, showing off Franzen's remarkable vocabulary, storytelling ability, and his disregard for political-correctness. In a piece called, "House for Sale," Franzen tells what it feels like to take on the chore of emptying and selling what was his childhood home. Anyone who has faced the death of a parent and has undergone this...more
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Read in September, 2006
Jonathan Franzen has come home to St Louis to get his parent's house ready to sell after the death of his mother. While he is waiting for it to sell he reflects on the significant moments of his life with particular emphasis on his childhood. The language in the book is beautiful and it is well constructed but for me, the characters were flat and uninteresting. For someone who has had such a rich and varied life and writes so well I think he could have come up with more interesting things to tal...more
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Read in July, 2008
I am perplexed by the New York Times reviewers’ antipathy to this book. I have always found Franzen to be a captivating essayist, and Discomfort Zone is no exception. Most distressing to his critics, it seems, is Discomfort Zone’s abundant narcissism--but I found the essays to be a reflection on youthful egotism from a mature and contrite remove. To the Times reviewers, Franzen’s description of his family is sterile and unloving. His “disarming, sometimes misguided candor,” seems inste...more
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Read in March, 2008
Last week I was reading Andrei Codrescu's Involuntary Genius at home and listening to Franzen's Discomfort Zone at work. There isn't a doubt in my mind that Codrescu has lead the better life. It kills me that it's Franzen I can relate to. Why, why, why does my heart sink into my stomach when I'm faced with the brands of soy milk that I never buy? Why do I make a ceremony of apologizing to things before throwing them away? Where does this guilt come from? It has to be our least use...more
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Read in February, 2008
I was surprised that I enjoyed this book, really. I don't normally expect much from people not that much older than me who write "memoirs"--those are things you write when you can't write anymore--but this was a lovely example of "memoire": those little lessons we can observe through memory.
Unbeknownst to the friends who gave this book to me as a gift (hi Kathleen!), Franzen and I share more than an alma mater. We share an awkward childhood, an ambiguous coming-of-age, and...more
Unbeknownst to the friends who gave this book to me as a gift (hi Kathleen!), Franzen and I share more than an alma mater. We share an awkward childhood, an ambiguous coming-of-age, and...more
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Read in February, 2008
I listened to this as an audiobook on the way back from Bloomington. It was pretty entertaining, just a lot of stories about Franzen's childhood and adolescence. Once he gets to be a grownup though he gets super obsessed with bird watching, which is not exactly the most fun thing to read about. And he seriously goes on about it. Also, he expresses very conflicting views about environmentalism throughout the book, which makes it a little hard to figure out what exactly he is trying to say. H...more
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Read in January, 2008
Somehow, I never read THE CORRECTIONS (I know.) So I'm a little lost and a little late to the party. Maybe it's better to approach this personal history outside the context of That Book, though.
Franzen is brave in revealing some general, painful unlikeability, particularly as a teenager. And there are moments of beauty, here, precise moments captured as if he's the first person to ever write about them. The collection opens with this:
"There'd been a storm that evening in St. Lou...more
Franzen is brave in revealing some general, painful unlikeability, particularly as a teenager. And there are moments of beauty, here, precise moments captured as if he's the first person to ever write about them. The collection opens with this:
"There'd been a storm that evening in St. Lou...more
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Read in December, 2007
I resisted reading this book because I'd already read two-thirds of it in the New Yorker, and the book itself got some pretty negative reviews. Nevertheless, I found it quite pleasurable to read (or re-read). There are some really funny moments in it, as well as some astute political analysis, much of which overlaps with The Return of the L Word, surprisingly. I also enjoyed the St. Louis milieu of the memoir. On the other hand, I couldn't help but think of how much better The Tender Land is tha...more
Read in November, 2007
Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections, the 2001 National Book Award for fiction winner. He has also written two other novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion along with a book of essays How To Be Alone. Mr. Franzen’s books are rich with truth, his truth. In The Discomfort Zone the reader gets a glimpse inside his life through six personal essays.
The book opens with "House For Sale." This chronicles the experience of the sale of his family home after his mother’s deat...more
The book opens with "House For Sale." This chronicles the experience of the sale of his family home after his mother’s deat...more
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Franzen is hilarious, and sometimes seems to be describing my own childhood neuroses in his stories. I love "My Bird Problem," but my favorite is "Two Ponies," in which he reminisces about the Peanuts comic strip. Here's my favorite paragraph:
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I felt guilty about Toczko. I felt guilty about the little frog. I felt guilty about shunning my mother's hugs when she seemed to need them most. I felt guilty about the washcloths at the bottom of the stack in the linen close...more
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I felt guilty about Toczko. I felt guilty about the little frog. I felt guilty about shunning my mother's hugs when she seemed to need them most. I felt guilty about the washcloths at the bottom of the stack in the linen close...more
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Read in July, 2008
I finally started this book of memoir essays, another lovely gift from Barbara and Howard (thanks!) I enjoyed the first essay. He really goes balls out aligning the personal and the social. I am too lazy to type in a quotation, but the first essay was all about his personal experience of the economic shifts from the 60s till now (shrunken middle class, post-civil rights and racial identity politics, etc). The second essay I already read in the New Yorker, which published it around when Charles...more
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Read in July, 2007
I greatly admired The Corrections and How to Be Alone, which is why I was initially hesitant about Franzen following up with a memoir. It felt like Tiger Woods following up the Masters with pickup games at a Par 30. By which I mean, there's no question Franzen's a master wordsmith--so when he deliberately curtails his ambitions, I feel slighted as a reader.
The half-dozen ...more
The half-dozen ...more
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Read in June, 2008
I enjoyed reading Franzen's essays in How to Be Alone, so I was excited to read this as well. Also, because I think The Corrections is one of the best novels out there, I've been looking for more details about the author, to see how his experiences turned him into the author that he is.
I don't think his essays stand up to The Corrections, but I do enjoy reading them. I like how his writing makes me uncomfortable but in a very real way. And I do like how his essays nos...more
I don't think his essays stand up to The Corrections, but I do enjoy reading them. I like how his writing makes me uncomfortable but in a very real way. And I do like how his essays nos...more
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Read in April, 2008
Franzen's collection of essays, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker in shorter forms, explore the effect childhood has on our adulthoods, and vice versa. I'm teaching this in my memoir writing class this summer, with the hope that my students--people on that track between childhood and adulthood--will see the connections between themselves and the outside world. Franzen makes odd connections between himself and the things around; one essay connects him and "Peanuts," ...more
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I had planned to start this little review like this: Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone is a rather unmemorable collection of personal essays dealing with and recalling, among other things, his relationship with his parents, adolescence, birding, and Snoopy, and is much less focused than his previous book of essays How To Be Alone. Then I thought, that’s not very nice, he’s writing about his childhood and baring all of his insecurities and quirks and self-consciousness that is, well, e...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
the npr set
I listened to this book on the old ipod while I occasionally went running and didn't listen to pumping techno music. In some ways I get a bad vibe that after he wrote a really sick book (The Corrections) and then threw something together (that really awesome essay collection) he's kinda kicking back before he goes for another really big one. And there's nothing wrong with that. The memoir thankfully picks and chooses periods of time from his life instead of following it chronologically , the mor...more
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Read in October, 2008
A lot of this is very good, but I just wish he hadn't ended with the bird essay. I really could not care less about birding, and though I recognize he's using it as a backdrop for exploration (exorcism?) of some personal issues, that piece just poisons my opinion of the work as a whole. I guess he successfully avoids veering into self-pity when discussing his disastrous personal relationships, which is not an easy thing to do. However, even an objective retelling of his wretched marriage and ...more
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Read in December, 2006
recommends it for:
Memoir fanatics, suburban nostalgiacs
Franzen's short personal essays first attracted me to his writing, and I still find them much better (more fun, more insightful, more memorable) than The Corrections. The short essay "Centrally Located" is probably my favorite story ever. It was originally published in the New Yorker under the title "Caught," and if I'm not mistaken, he's added some things to this version. Having read that story first, it was great to read these other stories, about his marriage and his colle...more
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Read in January, 2008
I deeply love Jonathan Franzen's book of essays "How To Be Alone," but that collection had more discrete essays that were self contained. This collection is a little overblown, threatening to spew out of the loose constraints Franzen has put it into. As always, the writing is compelling, and one gets the sense of a larger mind and purpose at work, but at the end, I wanted to ask, "What? What was that all about?"
I do have to say that the first essay, which details Franze...more
I do have to say that the first essay, which details Franze...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommends it for:
fans of "The Corrections"
I read this memoir sometime after reading Franzen's "The Corrections" and "Strong Motion".
I loved TC--it's one of my favorite American novels. However, I thought "Strong Motion" was curiously weak and flat.
I had a feeling that TC was one those books that was "writ in blood"--a performance not to be repeated. Reading TDZ confirmed this suspicion for me. The reason that the characters in TC seem so real and resonate so strongly is that they are quit...more
I loved TC--it's one of my favorite American novels. However, I thought "Strong Motion" was curiously weak and flat.
I had a feeling that TC was one those books that was "writ in blood"--a performance not to be repeated. Reading TDZ confirmed this suspicion for me. The reason that the characters in TC seem so real and resonate so strongly is that they are quit...more
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