The Discomfort Zone

Jonathan Franzen arrived late and last in a family of boys in Webster Groves Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development 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 mid-century 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 from 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.