A Man Who Looks in the Mirror and Smiles
By Michiko Kakutani
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
The central
characters in Jonathan Franzen’s critically acclaimed 2001 best seller, “The
Corrections,” were an especially unpleasant lot: the hero was a
pretentious disciple of Foucault and Marx, a hypocrite who ranted about the
commercialized world while maxing out his Visa card on expensive wines; his
sister was an obnoxiously competitive hipster; and their older brother was a
bossy, elitist yuppie, given to paranoia, anger and depression.
In his new
memoir, “The Discomfort Zone,” Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself
and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young
jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly
self-absorbed. He tells us that as a child he was “a small glutton for
attention, forever turning conversations to the subject of myself.” He tells us
that he felt put upon by public entreaties to help the victims of Hurricane
Katrina. (“Why should I pony up for this particular disaster?”) And he tells us
that he used to find it difficult to enjoy nature’s beauty: a hike up to a spectacular
summit was never enough; instead he would imagine himself “in a movie with this
vista in the background and various girls I’d known in high school and college
watching the movie and being impressed with me.”
While some
readers will want to give Mr. Franzen points for being so revealing about
himself, there is something oddly preening about his self-inventory of sins, as
though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable. And while it doubtless
takes a degree of self-absorption for anyone to write a memoir, in the case of
this book the author’s self-involvement not only makes for an incredibly
annoying portrait, but also funnels the narrative into a dismayingly narrow
channel.
In fact Mr.
Franzen is so focused on talking about his younger self that he fails (with one
or two exceptions) to make other people come alive. His family — which seems to
have provided considerable fodder for the dysfunctional family in “The
Corrections” — emerges as a blur: his parents are sketched in a desultory
fashion in these pages; his siblings are drawn in an equally offhand manner.
The town of Webster Groves where he grew up — “in the middle of the country in
the middle of the golden age of the American middle class” — is rendered with a
lot less detail than the Midwestern suburb conjured up in “The Corrections,”
and his later peregrinations around the country feel strangely disembodied as
well.
There are two
extended riffs in this volume where Mr. Franzen momentarily puts aside his
fascination with himself to give the reader some wonderfully observed musings
on two subjects that have long preoccupied him: Peanuts cartoons and
bird-watching.
He makes the
delights of sighting a rare masked duck or whooping crane palpable to even the
most bird-agnostic of readers, conveying the solitary rituals of bird-watching,
before he abruptly wearies of the pastime, having booked sightings of 400
different types. He similarly captures the appeal of Charles Schulz’s comic
creations: the perpetual loser-dom of Charlie Brown, Snoopy’s “confidence that
he’s lovable at heart,” the “Bethoven-sized ambitions” of Schroeder.
Unfortunately,
Mr. Franzen undermines his sensitively observed analysis of Peanuts by adding
that he “personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made
about the losers” like Charlie Brown. He proceeds to recount his showdown in a
Homonym Spelldown with another student named Chris Toczko, writing that “I was
a nice enough little boy as long as you kept away from my turf” and that Toczko
made the terrible mistake of being unaware of the fact that “I, not he, by
natural right, was the best student in the class.”
Indeed the
young Mr. Franzen comes across as less of a Snoopy — “the warm puppy who amused
the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table
and wrote cute sentences in his notebook” — than as a kind of mean-spirited
Lucy on steroids. He describes how he once “dropped a frog into a campfire and
watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log.” He describes reasoning
that “not having kids freed me altogether” from having to worry about things
like global warming: “Not having kids was my last, best line of defense
against the likes of Al Gore.” And he describes the judgmental outlook
that he and his wife shared for many years: “Deploring other people — their
lack of perfection — had always been our sport.”
As described
here, that marriage sounds like another hellish exercise in self-absorption.
Mr. Franzen writes that he and his wife “lived on our own little planet,” spending
“superhuman amounts of time by ourselves.” He fills his journals with
transcripts of fights they’ve had, and writes that they both “reacted to minor
fights at breakfast by lying facedown on the floor of our respective rooms for
hours at a time, waiting for acknowledgment of our pain.” “I wrote poisonous
jeremiads to family members who I felt had slighted my wife,” he adds, while
“she presented me with handwritten fifteen-and twenty page analyses of our
condition; I was putting away a bottle of Maalox every week.”
Just why anyone
would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the
self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains
something of a mystery. In fact, by the end of this solipsistic book, the
reader has begun to feel every bit as suffocated and claustrophobic as Mr.
Franzen and his estranged wife apparently did in their doomed marriage.
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