The Discomfort Zone: a personal history
Jonathan Franzen Fourth Estate, 256pp, £16.99
ISBN 0007234244
The Jonathan Franzen who inhabits this memoir - or "personal history", as The Discomfort Zone is subtitled - is the touchiest, twitchiest, nerdiest little guy you'd ever have the misfortune to be sat next to on a long coach trip. But he could also be you. Like his masterful third novel, The Corrections - a book which, five years after reading for the first time, I still think of nearly every day, such is its accuracy in recording the pootling rituals of family life - it's an anatomy of embarrassment.
In deprecating himself to the point of self- annihilation, Franzen performs the great favour of allowing us all to exhale. By writing so personally, as he does in this series of six essays that - true to the collection's title - induce discomfort amid memories of fist-chewing indignity, he shows that most of what constitutes the feeling of being ashamed is the belief that you're alone in your awkwardness: that no one before or since has ever been so gauche, or so casually stupid.
So we allow the silent vote of our genitals to influence important financial decisions, as he suggests in his first essay on the sale of his recently deceased parents' cherished home. So we spent our early years getting used to being "small and fundamentally ridiculous" (as Franzen describes his childhood self in a detailed meditation on Charles Schulz's Peanuts cartoon), until such time as we had a growth spurt and became, as adolescents, even more fundamentally ridi culous. But bigger.
So what, he says. If only we could give up trying to conceal the thoughts and deeds that make us cringe inside, there'd be a sudden overflow of that sparse human resource, empathy. Franzen gladly exposes the parts of himself that make us like him less and, in so doing, gives us a little insight into why, for instance, marriages break down and global warming happens.
He hasn't got a downer on himself or, indeed, on humanity in general. His belief in our capacity for self-improvement turns out to be his mother's greatest gift; her optimism lives on through him, even though it clearly drove him up the wall when she was alive. (Readers of The Corrections will notice a close resemblance between the late Irene Franzen and that novel's hopeful matriarch, Enid Lambert.)
Sometimes that cheerful solipsism blinds Franzen to reality, a failing that he's too acute to miss in later analysis. In his long final piece, on birdwatching, his marriage, the environment, personal responsibility and, finally, his mother, we catch the writer wasting fossil fuels in search of rare bird species that, one day soon-ish, will no longer exist, in part due to our unfailing ability to stuff our ears with cheese and sing "La-la-la-la-not-happening" every time Al Gore tells us we're doomed.
But then, as we know, humankind can't bear too much reality. That's what fiction, not to mention blind optimism, is for. "I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy," Franzen writes in the Peanuts-themed second essay, "Two Ponies", as though the mournful-eyed dog were three-dimensional. A smothered youngest son, Franzen needed an imaginary friend in order to breathe more easily, so he himself could exist in three dimensions rather than as his family's "warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said". Snoopy was more real to him than he, a living human, was to them. No wonder he spent so much time feeling self-conscious.
Between the two beautifully written pieces that begin the book and the gambolling, tangential one that ends it, there are diverting but less successful ruminations on his attempts to enjoy a Christian youth camp, to get in with the cool kids at high school (a disaster, as one might expect of a teenager who pinned the vest his mother forced him to wear to his pants in order to hide it from view, thus avoiding "fashion suicide") and to learn German while simultaneously trying to learn how girls work. These pieces, one suspects, were more therapeutic to write than they are to read, though they do prove that there is no writer better placed than Franzen to explain why we go to such lengths to pretend we are less complex than we really are.
In an essay that forms part of his earlier non-fiction collection, How to Be Alone, Franzen interviews an academic who has made it her life's work to discover why people read books. She gets his number - as a reader, if not as a person - right away, saying: "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world." Franzen, the boy who communed with Snoopy, writes that he "felt as though she were looking straight into my soul". Reading such honest, awkward, tender pieces as these, the socially isolated individual may feel that bit less lonely.
Lynsey Hanley's "Estates: an intimate history" will be published in January by Granta
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