Oh how glad I was to read this: a great takedown by Daniel Mendelsohn of Johnathan Franzen’s memoir, “The Discomfort Zone”. All I needed to read was a brief synopsis of the book to know I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible.
After having read a few lukewarm (read, overly polite) reviews, finally someone comes out and gives it a good whack. Mendelsohn’s browbeating is so strong at times that one can’t help but rubbernecking at the accident that is Franzen’s bare-all “personal history”:
Structure, alas, is the least of this book’s problems; the real issue is content: the person whose history emerges in these pages, however haphazardly, is not one you want to know. And — far worse — the inevitable revelations about the real-life sources of Franzen’s fictions that you get here make you reconsider the novels more harshly, rather than more compassionately.
To be fair, I did enjoy The Corrections, and the whole flap with Oprah was amusing, but, as far as I can tell from Mendelsohn, I don’t want to be reading a book of “pronouncements [that] are everywhere marred by the same graduate studenty know-it-all-ness that you recall from the author’s behavior in real life, and which you recognize in certain of his characters — Chip, say, the loathsome pomo hipster academic antihero of “The Corrections.”
November 2, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Did you see that some people took some issues with Mendelsohn’s review in the NY Times Review of Books “letters” section? Either way, I no longer want to read Franzen’s work.
November 3, 2006 at 12:54 am
No, I hadn’t but thanks for pointing it out! here is the link to three of the letters, were there more?
Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed Mendelsohn’s review, I’m glad that someone had the gall to be so negative – someone had to do it.
Finally, I just found out that Mendelsohn is going to be coming to Northwestern in February to talk about his new book “Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.”