How Jonathan Franzen Learned To Stop Worrying (Sort Of)

Jonathan Franzen is looking for an owl. He got a tip off the Internet about an owl living in a particular tree in this particular park in sunny San Jose, Calif. Now we are staring at the tree with binoculars from a distance of about 20 ft. Is the owl not home? Is it using some owl camouflage power on us? Is this even the right tree? In the past hour Franzen, 47, who's a pretty hard-core bird watcher, has already spotted California quail, some towhees, a scrub jay, a flicker and a few acorn woodpeckers. So far no owl, though.

Bird watching isn't actually Franzen's main gig. You probably know him as the author of the huge 2001 best seller The Corrections, a symphony of Midwestern, middle-class mental suffering that conveys depression and anxiety more entertainingly and eloquently than almost any book I've ever read, and which almost instantly made him the premier literary novelist in his age bracket. You might also possibly remember Franzen as the man who rather too honestly expressed his ambivalence over being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, prompting Winfrey to honestly, unambivalently rescind her invitation to come on her show.

So who is this cheerful, good-natured, owl-spotting nature boy? And what has he done with Jonathan Franzen? He's not the same tortured genius who wrote The Corrections. Success has changed him. He's a slightly different kind of genius now. His wonderful and supremely personal new memoir The Discomfort Zone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 195 pages) offers a few clues as to why.

Franzen grew up nerdy and nervous in a small, comfortable town in Missouri called Webster Groves. Here are a few things that young Jonathan was afraid of, according to The Discomfort Zone: "spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls," and most of all, "my parents." When he wasn't afraid, Franzen was embarrassed. Here's another list citing reasons why the boy Franzen wasn't popular. "I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on."

In places The Discomfort Zone reads like outtakes from a Judy Blume young-adult novel. On a church retreat, a girl caught Franzen cheating at cards and thereafter addressed him as "Cheater." He once publicly confused the words masturbation and menstruation. For a high school speech class, he brought in his stuffed Kanga and Roo toys to illustrate his talk about Australian wildlife. "It's like, if I were making a list of things that I don't want to talk about and don't want to write about publicly, these would be at the top of it," Franzen says. "That's the organizing principle: precisely the things that I think are least suitable for public consumption are the ones that I wanted to find a way to write about publicly, and to try to forgive myself for, by making myself a laughable figure."

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