Jacket design by Lynn Buckley Jacket art: "Map of a Man's Heart", from McCall's Magazine, January 1960, pp. 32-33. Adapted from nineteenth-century originals by Jo (Lowrey) Leeds and the editors of McCall's.
According to L'espresso, The Discomfort Zone reflects the values and contradictions of the American midwest in the 1960s. Franzen holds up Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoons as an exemplary representation of life of the American middle class in the author's home town of Webster Groves, Missouri, and countless similar towns. Values such as the love of nature are described as being related to traditional Protestant values, and as waning because of the decline of traditional religious belief.[3]
Perhaps most important, Franzen explores the duality of solitude and interpersonal relationships. Primarily using his mother's death as a metaphor for all human relationships, Franzen concludes that although relationships are essential to our existence, we often fail to recognize and appreciate their importance at the time.
Contents
"House for Sale" (on the author's mother, sale of the family house)
"Then Joy Breaks Through" (on Christian education)
"Centrally Located"
"The Foreign Language" (German, that is)
"My Bird Problem" (the author's marriage, his birding hobby)
Critical reception
On Metacritic, the book received a 69 out of 100 based on 27 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[4] In Bookmarks Sep/Oct 2005 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (3.0 out of 5) with the summary saying," Even the critics who admire Franzen’s writing warn readers that they are in for much of the same incessant, almost obsessive, examination that characterized The Corrections".[5] Globally, Complete Review saying on the consensus "Not quite a consensus, but most find it quite successful".[6]
In 2006, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass." Franzen subsequently called Kakutani "the stupidest person in New York City".[7][8]
Marjorie Kehe of The Christian Science Monitor called the book a "whipsaw reading experience" that was both "sharply insightful and frustratingly obtuse".[9]
