Jonathan Franzen: Two Books

The Discomfort Zone is a memoir thinly veiled as a collection of essay's by the author of the Nation Book Award winning novel The Corrections. It's funny, occasionally heartbreaking, and gives you insight into the inspiration for the charmingly dysfunctional Lambert family, which is Franzen's own curious childhood.

While the book is scant in pages, it's infinitely readable, filled with tons of hilarious stories and thought-provoking digressions. This is definitely a writer at the top of his game, although you feel like he's sometimes omitting a lot, perhaps to fill another book with. Speaking of filling other books, when I was at the store, I decided to pick up another Franzen book since it was used and relatively cheap.




(Plus the cover possessed a weird metaphysical element to it while I was standing in the bookstore, even though I hardly think I resemble a bookish blond woman (I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't my roommate, Donald Dunbar, too).)

Anyway, don't pay money for this book. Instead, try and find the one essay worth reading in here online, which I believe is titled "Why Bother?" and was published in Harper's in 1996. It's a pretty insanely ambitious essay for an at-that-point unestablished writer, and it hits its mark pretty well, although he makes it clear that the book contains a highly edited and revised version.

Pretty much everything else in here seems kinda rambly, half-baked, or severely outmoded. A lot of the essays are from the late 90's and are about television and technology, and while they contain some interesting ideas and moments of elucidated prescience, they evoke the haughty breathlessness and invective of early Naomi Klein. He does a pretty good sociological dis-assemblage of the severely effed-up Chicago Postal Service, as well as a kinda interesting look at some of Gaddis' work, but you start to think that he published this as a way of cashing in, because the tone, authorship, and content of the rest is pretty dull. Skip this one and read The Corrections if you haven't, and then check out The Discomfort Zone.