Some things just make you cringe.

Take, for instance, parents dressing their teenage son up like a square and then dragging him around DisneyLand. They saved up just to give him this gift. He couldn't imagine anything worse. Or a girl saying with a straight face to her love-interest that her fall off a thirty-foot tower might have been a Freudian slip —that she wanted to climb the tower because she knew that's what his former girlfriend did the night before, that she refused a rope in order to prove herself superior, and that she must have let go and fallen because the boy didn't love her.

Then there's the case of the man who, with words, can eidetically reconstruct the ridiculousness of human behavior. His novel of suburban dysfunction won the 2001 National Book Award. His five main characters are so real—so infuriatingly flawed and frustratingly well-intentioned! The man is brilliant. Then, in 2006, he comes out with The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, a collection of five memoirist essays that bombs—namely because he reveals himself to be just as annoying as one of his characters

Jonathan Franzen authored the first two cringe moments, and his ability to write them so well makes him the subject of the third.

Drawn from Franzen's reserve of Midwestern domestic discontent, The Discomfort Zone 's five essays catalogue Franzen's artistic and sexual blossomings on the road from frustrated boy to unhappily married man. If nothing else, Franzen excels at character details and adolescent angst. He portrays his real parents just as vividly as he did Alfred and Enid, the incredibly similar, "fictional" parents in his immensely successful novel, The Corrections. As heard through teenage ears his mother's earnest, nagging voice, simultaneously cloying and critical, brings her back to life just as his father is brought back to life by his few outbursts—"LEAVE THE GOD-DAMNED THERMOSTAT ALONE!"—and general lack of voice.

The problem with this new collection isn't that Franzen can't write nonfiction. His 2002 collection of essays, How to Be Alone, is very strong—the opening essay, "My Father's Brain," is stunning. The problem is that in a "personal history" the author turns the nonfiction on himself.

"Himself," in this case, is the kind of man whose first fear after hearing his crush had broken her back in a thirty-foot fall was that his parents were finding out, as he says, "before I could tailor it for them"—that is, before he could apply his magic, writerly touch. A middle-aged man making the aside "in the decade when I left my wife and took up with a twenty-seven-year-old and really started having fun" is equally irritating. But to proudly proclaim, after getting over a girl, "The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page," is unforgivable.

In fiction it's often the case that the more grating the narrator, the better the book. Not true of nonfiction. In memoir especially, positive self-presentation is critical. It determines the degree to which the reader will sympathize with the main character and thus the degree to which the reader will engage with the book. Readers, as a rule, hate arrogance. We want a narrator who boosts our self-esteem. We want a narrator at least as weak as ourselves. As long as it doesn't smell of self-pity, almost any flaw will do.

Practitioners of the personal essay tend to take one of two approaches. Some, like Joan Didion, choose to present themselves as psychologically unsound — neurotic and depressive and everything in between. Others, like David Sedaris, opt for awkward and maladjusted. With his "anti-anxiety ensembles" and his "irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns," Franzen aims for the latter. After a Christian Fellowship election, Franzen writes, "As the candles approached me and passed me by and descended—'Ohhh!'—on other lucky souls, it was painfully clear how much more popular and mature than I the winners were."

But then, of course, a candle comes his way, giving Franzen the opportunity to gloat, "all I could think of was how happy I was." The reader, on the other hand, couldn't be more nonplussed. Franzen might describe himself humbly as "small and squeaky and a lot more articulate than...mature," yet every essay seems a veiled attempt to prove himself just the opposite.

We can admire ruthless self-dissection and brutal honesty—perhaps even arrogance—if we expect it to be redeemed by a retrospective sense of humor. It's refreshing to hear someone admit, as Franzen does, to worrying that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina might create unpleasant turbulence on his flight back to New York. So long as he blushes a little after.

But for all the professed humility, it's embarrassing what things go without blushing in The Discomfort Zone. At one point, Franzen writes that the cartoonist Charles Schultz "wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist." Because Franzen implicitly identifies with Schultz, the statement stinks with self-righteousness. Franzen desperately wants to celebrate the writer in himself. But his attempt to use Schultz's "failure-inspired" Peanuts to illuminate his own domestic strife falls short. Not liking the narrator doesn't leave the reader with much patience for his strained literary matchmaking. An essay on getting divorced and feeling bad for birds ("The Bird Problem") is annoying, and learning the language of love alongside the frigid language of German ("The Foreign Language") is as unconvincing as it sounds. The pairings are poor and so the relationships he draws between them imminently fail, much like, unsurprisingly, Franzen's own.

In "House for Sale" Franzen jumps from selling his mother's house, to not wanting to contribute to Katrina relief, to his parents getting caught inviting friends to a client's house when they thought the client was away, to begrudgingly riding the Disney land merry-go-round enough times to get their ticket's worth. The Corrections proved Franzen a master of story. We don't want to be flung from subject to subject, especially if the theme uniting them is flat. The sole thread running through this hodgepodge is ostensibly frugality. But by the end, it's Franzen's reader who feels shortchanged.

Franzen's pompous self-presentation is all the more disappointing because of his vow in the "A Word About This Book" prelude to How to Be Alone. Commenting on his 1996 essay about the dismal fate of fiction, Franzen writes, "The first third of the Harper's essay was written from this place of anger and despair, in a tone of high theoretical dudgeon that made me cringe a little now....I intend this book, in part, as a record of movement away from an angry and frightened isolation towards an acceptance—even celebration—of being a reader and a writer."

Although Franzen is still congratulating himself on being a reader and writer, his abnegation of theoretical dudgeon certainly didn't last long. The Discomfort Zone marks a return to self-medicating self-righteousness. Almost every essay detours into a cultural tirade, and usually not a particularly interesting one. "A great time to be Wal-Mart, a tough time to be in Wal-Mart's way" has become a bad, liberal cliché, and Franzen's use of it sounds like self-parody.

There are moments when Franzen approaches a good insight, but we've jinxed him so much with our dislike that every time he swings to land an emotional punch, he misses. When his father is hurt by his family making fun of a crappy old space heater, Franzen concludes, "He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also forgiving him." It's symptomatic of what's wrong here that the sentence is more poignant when extracted for a review than when read along with the rest of the essay. No one's asking Jonathan Franzen to be a less insufferable guy. But if he wants us to care about his life, he should work harder to put that much-talked-about personality makeover on paper. Either that or, Franzen should stick to fiction, a genre that encourages people to keep on pretending.

 

Maybe Francesca Mari is pasty, paranoid and plaid-festooned.