Book Review: The Discomfort Zone

Book #110 of 2010

I have been spectacularly awful about reviews recently. It’s mostly that my real life has gotten ridiculously busy as I started uni again, moved into a new apartment (and all the unpleasantries that accompany that, including fixing the broken appliances, buying random bits of furniture, getting internet, registering with local council, calling up G&E companies — oh man, being an adult is fun) and seeing people I haven’t seen in over seven months. Oh, and of course, going to lectures, studying, and traveling. 

Anyway, I’m going to try and churn out reviews, so I apologise if they’re less than stellar, it’s been a couple months since I’ve read most of these books and I want to be back up to date.

So, after reading Freedom, I was very much looking forward to reading more of Franzen’s work. I didn’t want to read The Corrections right away, because although I owned it, Franzen took his time coming up with a new book and I’d rather leave a bit of a gap between his two great novels. And I was curious about the man behind the words, especially after watching a couple of interviews with him and seeing his thinly-veiled contempt for having to go through all these interviews and his little twitch when he was asked banal questions.

The Discomfort Zone is an interesting read. Part of what struck me about it is what I felt about Freedom — that this man could be any other man, in any other job. He could be your neighbour or your best friend. He has similar memories and went through similar tribulations. Then the roads diverged and instead of being John Doe, he became Jonathan Franzen. One of the things that amused me was his real-life interest in birdwatching, since it became such a large part of Freedom.

The book is a quick read, and if you like Frazen, it’s a curiosity. But it could almost (almost, because you can still tell it’s a memoir) be seen as a novel that someone like Raymond Carver would write — not stylistically perhaps, but definitely as a notion.