The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.

Franzen, Jonathan (author).

After winning the National Book Award in fiction for The Corrections (2001), Franzen has proven himself to be an exceptionally engaging essayist, first in How to Be Alone (2002) and now in this cycle of magnetizing meditations on family and culture, love and death, art and nature. A consummate storyteller, Franzen possesses a low-key, even sheepish sense of humor rooted in his middle-class Midwest upbringing. Peanuts was his cherished guide for the perplexed, inspiring a shrewd homage to Charles Shulz that veers smoothly into a poignant portrait of Franzen’s nearly humorless father. Elsewhere, Franzen’s strong-willed mother reigns supreme, and he is at once personally frank and socially revealing in funny and affecting reflections about his church youth group during the freaky 1970s, unrequited love, pranks gone wrong, and literary discoveries. This gratifyingly unpredictable and finely crafted collection ends with a tour de force, “My Bird Problem,” a thoughtful, wry, and edgy musing on marital bliss and misery, global warming, the wonder of birds, and our halfhearted effort to protect the environment.