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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The
Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Uncaring Somewhere on
the pages of Jonathan Franzen’s memoir The
Discomfort Zone, déjà vu set in as I recalled my summary reaction to his
2001 award winning novel, The
Corrections: didn’t like what he says, but like how he says it. The same
uncaring feeling I had about Franzen’s fictional
characters, I had about him in reading this memoir. I didn’t want to spent
time with him at all. Here’s an excerpt, from the end of the chapter titled,
“Two Ponies,” pp. 48-51: The purpose of a comic
strip, Schulz liked to say, was to sell newspapers and to make people laugh.
His formulation may look self-deprecating at first glance, but in fact it is
an oath of loyalty. When I. B. Singer, in his Nobel address, declared that
the novelist’s first responsibility is to be a storyteller, he didn’t say
“mere storyteller,” and Schulz didn’t say “merely make people laugh.” He was
loyal to the reader who wanted something funny from the funny pages. Just
about anything—protesting against world hunger; getting a laugh out of words
like “nooky”; dispensing wisdom; dying—is easier
than real comedy. Schulz
never stopped trying to be funny. Around 1970, though, he began to drift away
from aggressive humor and into melancholy reverie. There came tedious
meanderings in Snoopyland with the unhilarious bird Still more
harmful to Schulz’s reputation were his own kitschy spinoffs.
Even in the sixties, you had to fight through cloying Warm Puppy
paraphernalia to reach the comedy; the cuteness levels in latter-day
“Peanuts” TV specials tied my toes in knots. What first made “Peanuts”
“Peanuts” was cruelty and failure, and yet every “Peanuts” greeting card and tchotchke and blimp had to feature somebody’s sweet,
crumpled smile. Everything about the billion-dollar “Peanuts” industry argued
against Schulz as an artist to be taken seriously. Far more than Disney,
whose studios were churning out kitsch from the start, Schulz came to seem an
icon of art’s corruption by commerce, which sooner or later paints a smiling
sales face on everything it touches. The fan who wants to see him as an
artist sees a merchant instead. Why isn’t he two ponies? It’s hard to repudiate a
comic strip, however, if your memories of it are more vivid than your
memories of your own life. When Charlie Brown went off to summer camp, I went
along in my imagination. I heard him trying to make conversation with the
fellow camper who lay in his bunk and refused to say anything but “Shut up
and leave me alone.” I watched when he finally came home again and shouted to
Lucy, “I’m back! I’m back!” and Lucy gave him a bored look and said, “Have
you been away?” I went to camp myself, in
the summer of 1970. But aside from an alarming personal hygiene situation
which seemed to have resulted from my peeing in some poison ivy, and which,
for several days, I was convinced was either a fatal tumor or puberty, my
camp experience paled beside Charlie Brown’s. The best part of it was coming
home and seeing Bob waiting for me, in his new Karmann
Ghia, at the YMCA parking lot. Tom was also home by then.
He’d managed to make his way to his friend’s house in For the
first time, in the months that followed, my parents’ conflicts became
audible. My father came home on cool nights to complain about the house’s
“chill.” My mother countered that the house wasn’t cold if you were doing housework all day. My father
marched into the dining room to adjust the thermostat and dramatically point
to its “Comfort Zone,” a pale-blue arc between 72 and 78 degrees. My mother
said that she was so hot. And I
decided, as always, not to voice my suspicion that the Comfort Zone referred
to air-conditioning in the summer rather than heat in the winter. My father
set the temperature at 72 and retreated to the den, which was situated
directly above the furnace. There was then a lull, and then big explosions.
No matter what corner of the house I hid myself in,
I could hear my father bellowing, “LEAVE THE GOD-DAMNED THERMOSTAT ALONE!” “Earl, I
didn’t touch it!” “You did!
Again!” “I didn’t
think I even moved it, I just looked at
it, I didn’t mean to change it.” “Again!
You monkeyed with it again! I had it set where I
wanted it. And you moved it down to seventy!” “Well, if
I did somehow change it, I’m sure I didn’t mean to. You’d be hot, too, if you
worked all day in the kitchen.” “All I ask
at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the
Comfort Zone.” “Earl, it
is so hot in the kitchen. You don’t know, because you’re never in here, but it is so hot.” “The low end of the Comfort Zone! Not even
the middle! The low end! It is not too much to ask!” And I
wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative.
It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to
become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be. My father
eventually applied technology to the problem of temperature. He bought a
space heater to put behind his chair in the dining room, where he was
bothered in winter by drafts from the bay window behind him. Like so many of
his appliance purchases, the heater was a pathetically cheap little thing, a
wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning
orange mouth which dimmed the lights and drowned out conversation and
produced a burning smell every time it cycled on. When I was in high school,
he bought a quieter, more expensive model. One evening my mother and I
started reminiscing about the old model, caricaturing my father’s temperature
sensitivities, doing cartoons of the little heater’s faults, the smoke and
the buzzing, and my father got mad and left the table. He thought we were
ganging up on him. He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also
forgiving him. Franzen’s vocabulary is impressive, his prose
well-crafted, but what he says left me caring not a wit. The
Discomfort Zone will appeal to readers who enjoy fine prose, but those
who read memoirs for insight into the human condition will find more
enlightenment elsewhere. Steve Hopkins,
October 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the November 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Discomfort Zone.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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