The Discomfort Zone

Jonathan Franzen arrived late and last in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. From "a small and fundamentally ridiculous person," he grew into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. Chronicling a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood, The Discomfort Zone also captures a middle-class family in the turbulent 1970s and spotlights the decades when America turned away from its mid-century idealism and became more polarized. Franzen reveals the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship, 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 he learned from watching birds. His writing is warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize his fiction, but here the main character is Franzen himself, a man with an utterly unique mind and heart. Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction and an enormous international bestseller. His other books include the novels The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion and a collection of essays, How to Be Alone. He writes frequently for The New Yorker and lives in New York City.