Word: franzens
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...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...
...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...
...certainly found a way. If it were possible to calculate the frequency of mots justes in a piece of prose, Franzen's ranking would be through the roof. He puts up Updikean numbers. His writer's eye picks out the "chevroned metal floor" of a merry-go-round, and a man with a ponytail "as thick as a pony's tail." A cheap space heater is "a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth." The California towhee, one of his favorite birds, is like "a friend whose energy and optimism had escaped the confines...
Though not everybody loves Franzen. After he got labeled a snob in the Oprahgate affair (and Winfrey had moved onto embracing and then birching James Frey--is this a pattern of abuse?), Harper's magazine published a long cover story by the writer Ben Marcus accusing Franzen of betraying the cause of difficult, experimental writing in favor of mere popular storytelling--essentially, of not being enough of a snob. It's like the guy can't win. "I'd done him a number of favors, done nice things for him," Franzen says of Marcus. "My real feeling about...
...story of The Discomfort Zone is largely the story of Franzen shedding his fears, or at least learning to live with them. And the success of The Corrections has been a big part of that. "I really hit the jackpot," he says, sounding as if he's still freshly relieved. "I wrote the book that I wanted to write, and then--which couldn't be counted on--it got a tremendous amount of attention. So that burning feeling of being unrecognized for what I felt myself to be is momentarily alleviated...