The Discomfort Zone

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (April 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The Discomfort Zone

First edition cover
Author	Jonathan Franzen
Cover artist	Jacket design by Lynn Buckley Jacket art: "Map of a Man's Heart", from McCall's Magazine, January 1960, pp. 32-33. Adapted from nineteenth-century originals by Jo (Lowrey) Leeds and the editors of McCall's.
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date	September 5, 2006 (2006-09-05)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	195 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	0-374-29919-6 (first edition, hardback)
OCLC	63277685
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 B 22
LC Class	PS3556.R352 Z46 2006

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History is a 2006 memoir by Jonathan Franzen, who received the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Corrections in 2001.^[1][2]

Themes[]

According to L'espresso, The Discomfort Zone reflects the values and contradictions of the American midwest in the 1960s. Franzen holds up Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoons as an exemplary representation of life of the American middle class in the author's home town of Webster Groves, Missouri, and countless similar towns. Values such as the love of nature are described as being related to traditional Protestant values, and as waning because of the decline of traditional religious belief.^[3]

Perhaps most important, Franzen explores the duality of solitude and interpersonal relationships. Primarily using his mother's death as a metaphor for all human relationships, Franzen concludes that relationships are essential to our existence although we often fail to recognize and appreciate their importance at the time.

Contents[]

• "House for Sale" (on the author's mother, sale of the family house)
• "Two Ponies" (on "Peanuts" by Charles Schulz)
• "Then Joy Breaks Through" (on Christian education)
• "Centrally Located"
• "The Foreign Language" (German, that is)
• "My Bird Problem" (the author's marriage, his birding hobby)

References[]

External links[]

• Chapter One, "House for Sale," in The Guardian
• A list of Discomfort Zone reviews at The Complete Review
• Presentation by Franzen on The Discomfort Zone at the Miami Book Fair International, November 18, 2006

This article about a biographical or autobiographical book whose subject was born in the United States is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

• v
• t

This article about a biographical book on writers or poets is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

• v
• t