The style of a piece of writing can dictate readers' perceptions of a topic, and it is a tool that the writer uses to draw them in. There is the wandering prose that you can find each week in the New Yorker. Although at times it seems the author is suddenly going off on pointless tangents, the writing always comes back to the point, making connections between topics that seem completely unrelated.
In his new memoir, "The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History," Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections," uses this writing style, which he acquired contributing to the New Yorker, very functionally. It appeared in the beginning that such a wandering form of prose wouldn't hold for a book length piece of writing, but Franzen is able to turn the disconnected topics of his youth and adult life into a concrete and whole narrative.
"The Discomfort Zone" moves from a brief analysis of Hurricane Katrina and the Bush years to the influence of Snoopy and Charlie Brown on his childhood, then to the life-affirming aspects of bird watching. In the first part of the memoir, Franzen uses the experience of selling his childhood home after his mother's death to engagingly write about contemporary American culture as it has changed since his childhood. The reader becomes aware of the differences that Franzen sees between contemporary and 1970s America because he is able to tie in his experience of Katrina — that of a best-selling author playing golf in California while thousands of fellow citizens are suffering — with his lifelong connection to secure, middle-class America. It's not that Franzen parades or even enjoys his privileged position; it's that it affects his part of American society in a different and important way.
For a while, Franzen's memoir becomes an exercise in exploring middle-class guilt. He grew up in the premier years of the now-classic American comic strip "Peanuts," and he uses its simplistic yet insightful analysis of American society to gain insight into the development of his own family and his own outlook. Franzen juxtaposes — in that New Yorker style prose — Charlie Brown's experience with his own, and turns his childhood memories of the comic strip into cultural analysis. Early on in the memoir, Franzen writes of Charlie Brown's guilt and likens it to his own. Just as he finds Charlie Brown feeling guilty for everything he does, as a child Franzen feels guilty enough about sleeping with certain stuffed animals and not others that he is sure to sleep with them all equally.
For the current generation, whose knowledge of "Peanuts" comes mostly from the animated holiday specials, the comic strip seems to be almost a cultural relic. This makes Franzen's use of it as a defining American institution even more intriguing because the comic defines his generation of Americans in a much different way than it does ours: "The image you have of your own face … is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin, nose and hair package. It's precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces … that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and — simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line — Charlie Brown."
Whether or not this sort of analysis would remain valid for our generation, Franzen's style in his memoir is a spectacular, lighthearted relief from the dense pages and linear writing readers often encounter. When looking at Franzen's picture on the dust jacket, you realize he's the rare author who smiles, as if his intent were to provide a relief from this musty style of writing.
Franzen will appear at the Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium tonight at 7 p.m. to read from "The Discomfort Zone."
