Robert Polito: Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone is a sly, rapt book, as much a romance (The Winter’s Tale or Hawthorne) as a memoir or collection of essays. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, proved so culturally ambitious and canny you could miss the insistent, scrupulous detailing around the edges. The essays in The Discomfort Zone trace a thematic, roughly chronological design across six topical, nearly discrete chapters, but here it’s Franzen’s cunning infrastructure that’s easy to overlook amid the vivid, often hilarious, and devastating particulars of his childhood in Webster Groves, Mo.

The Discomfort Zone arcs between two New York moments. At the opening, some six years after his mother’s death, and during the destruction of New Orleans by Katrina, Franzen arrives at his home on the Upper East Side and finds he doesn’t recognize the place.

“I had the sensation of walking into somebody else’s apartment,” he writes. “The guy who lived here was apparently a prosperous middle-aged Manhattanite with the sort of life I’d spent my thirties envying from afar, vaguely disdaining, and finally being defeated in my attempts to imagine my way into. How odd that I now had keys to this guy’s apartment.” At the close of the book, he imagines returning to the same apartment, to the company of a woman he identifies only as “the Californian.”

The question of how Franzen got from his childhood house to that dislocated instant in his Manhattan doorway—and of how he arrived at that second instant, with the Californian—directs the movement and countermovement of The Discomfort Zone. The former is a discovery of writing, books, and art, through such everyday and unlikely interests as Peanuts, church, German lessons, and high school pranks; the latter is a rediscovery of nature and something like love, through divorce and bird-watching.

Again, it’s the details that galvanize, amuse, and rankle: the frog Franzen once dropped in a campfire; the Fellowship retreat where his lunch, along with an embarrassing letter from his mother addressed “Dearest Jonathan,” is stolen; elaborate efforts to ring a tire around the school flagpole; the college German professor who “felt for literature the kind of headlong love and gratitude that a born-again Christian feels for Jesus”; the collection of prize postage stamps that his mother leaves under the bedspread in his old room, knowing he will find them only after her death. Franzen’s description of his self-discovery as a writer mixes recurrent references to “enchantment” with the “authenticity” he learns from the youth minister who leads the Fellowship. He writes about the school day, “And the silence then, at eight-fifteen, when the bells should have rung but didn’t: this quiet transformation of the ordinary...was like the poetry I wanted to learn to write.” If Franzen’s mother’s house was her “novel, the concrete story she told about herself,” a novel he’s now outgrown, his bird-watching also suggests a sort of romance, albeit one that global warming has rendered dark. Franzen’s account of Phoebe Snetsinger, a Webster Groves woman who started birding after she was diagnosed with cancer and lived to see 8,500 bird species as well as the destruction of many avian haunts, reads like a fairy tale, and a bulletin from the end of the world.

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-Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, critic, and director of the graduate writing program at The New School in New York City

Mark Greif: Halfway between essays and memoir, Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone should upset expectations all over the place. Instead of indulging the embarrassed child he was or the successful adult he became, Franzen gives a series of brilliant portraits looking outwards—at his friends, his Christian youth group leader, the birds and natural beauty that tempt him to flee the grasping world of men and women. Instead of basking in reminiscence, he turns to research—family letters, interviews with the adults whose plight he never really knew. He uncovers for us, beneath the novelistic mastery evident in The Corrections, the deeply moral and churchgoing influence which made Franzen such a successful anatomist of individualism and social confusion—an ethos of “old-fashioned Protestants, like my parents, who abhorred waste and made sacrifices for their kids’ future and respected God’s works and believed in taking responsibility for their messes” (174). Franzen couldn’t accept his parents’ world but can’t break its hold. We’ve gotten used to memoirs in which rebels confess to their rotten misdeeds and expect to be loved, but this book is about the pain of living as a good person—one who strikes out for happiness anyway, but rarely finds it unalloyed. The mood is surprisingly religious, and the book is admirable and unique.

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-Mark Greif is co-editor of the literary and political journal n+1

Ruth Franklin: With a few well-known exceptions, novelists tend not to lead very exciting lives. But while lots of time to think and dream is apparently very good for writing fiction, it is not as helpful for writing memoirs. This becomes painfully clear upon reading Jonathan Franzen’s second nonfiction collection, which is primarily a series of vignettes about his childhood and adolescence in Middle America. In the first piece, “House for Sale,” Franzen gets his trademark tone of self-denigration just right, dousing the less-than-earthshaking narrative of how he sold his parents’ house in a clarifying dose of acid (his mother, he observes, has written a sample advertisement for her house “the way someone else might have drafted her own obituary”). But this acerb is quickly diffused in a sea of sentimental reflections–an infatuation with the cartoon Peanuts, the social dynamics of a church youth group–that add up to a portrait of the artist as a young nerd with an overwhelming desire to belong. At one point, Franzen notes that his hometown’s defining trait is an “apolitical niceness,” a phrase not inapt for this milky mush. What happened to the author of The Corrections, a book with a deep, hilarious, perfectly tuned mean streak?

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-Ruth Franklin is an editor and book critic for The New Republic