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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 history of the decades in which
America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became
a more polarized society.
The story Franzen tells here draws on elements
as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship
in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka’s fiction on his 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, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort
Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart
in the crucible of an everyday American family.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of
The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award
for fiction; the novels The Twenty-Seventh City
and Strong Motion; and a collection of essays,
How to Be Alone, all published by FSG. He lives in
New York City.
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