How Jonathan Franzen Learned To Stop Worrying (Sort Of)

By By Lev Grossman/San Jose

Jonathan Franzen is looking for an owl. He got a tip off the Internet about an owl living in a particular tree in this particular park in sunny San Jose, Calif. Now we are staring at the tree with binoculars from a distance of about 20 ft. Is the owl not home? Is it using some owl camouflage power on us? Is this even the right tree? In the past hour Franzen, 47, who's a pretty hard-core bird watcher, has already spotted California quail, some towhees, a scrub jay, a flicker and a few acorn woodpeckers. So far no owl, though.

Bird watching isn't actually Franzen's main gig. You probably know him as the author of the huge 2001 best seller The Corrections, a symphony of Midwestern, middle-class mental suffering that conveys depression and anxiety more entertainingly and eloquently than almost any book I've ever read, and which almost instantly made him the premier literary novelist in his age bracket. You might also possibly remember Franzen as the man who rather too honestly expressed his ambivalence over being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, prompting Winfrey to honestly, unambivalently rescind her invitation to come on her show.

So who is this cheerful, good-natured, owl-spotting nature boy? And what has he done with Jonathan Franzen? He's not the same tortured genius who wrote The Corrections. Success has changed him. He's a slightly different kind of genius now. His wonderful and supremely personal new memoir The Discomfort Zone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 195 pages) offers a few clues as to why.

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, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on."

In 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's the organizing principle: precisely the things that I think are least suitable for public consumption are the ones that I wanted to find a way to write about publicly, and to try to forgive myself for, by making myself a laughable figure."

He 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 of a single body to animate roadsides and backyards across thousands of square miles."

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 it is that the article was so silly in so many ways, I just didn't want to engage with it. I didn't want to dignify it."

The 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."

The new, less fearful Franzen is a less tightly wound Franzen. After The Corrections, he got cable and developed what he calls "a Law & Order problem of significant dimensions." He stopped hunching his shoulders. He took up bird watching. "I spent whole days doing that, which would have been inconceivable, first 20 years out of college," he says. "To do something just for fun, for a whole day, on a weekday? That was totally new." Although based in Manhattan, he and his girlfriend spend part of the summer near San Jose, Calif. Basically, he's happy for the first time in his life. He has even made a truce with his old nemesis: next month O magazine will run a two-page spread on The Discomfort Zone. "I'm not sure all is forgiven." He thinks about it and chuckles. "But maybe it is."

Franzen is also working on a new novel. It's poor form to grill a writer about a work in progress, but I do it anyway, and he throws me a few cryptic crumbs. "The deep ecologists like to say that nature bats last," he says. "Whenever anyone is trying to say, mankind is smarter than nature ... we are of nature. And nature does therefore always bat last." So something political? "Certainly that's another thing I've been doing over the past five years. Being upset over the state of American politics."

He's not completely cured. In conversation Franzen is still a little anxious and nerdy, and he throws in monster 30-second pauses while he agonizes--literally, he looks as if he's in agony--over precisely what word to say. He still wears horn-rims. He asks several times if he's being interesting. He can't resist throwing out weird little factoids that have adhered to his sticky, hyper-retentive mind (according to Franzen, 43% of Subaru owners are Republicans; every person in the continental U.S. lives within one mile of an owl; scrub jays kill an estimated 100 million songbirds a year in California alone). And writing is still a struggle. He works in a darkened room, with earplugs, noise-canceling headphones and something called pink noise (it's like white noise but with more bass) playing in the background. "You think, my God, I've been writing for 20 or 25 years, I ought to recognize in half a day when I'm on the wrong track," he says ruefully. "You wonder how on earth you ever wrote anything that didn't suck."

You can cut down on fear and embarrassment and disappointment, but you can never quite go cold turkey. "The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away," Franzen writes in The Discomfort Zone. And he never does find that owl. But somehow it doesn't really bother him. "Much of bird watching is about disappointment," he says. "Part of the appeal is that really, more often than not, you don't see what you're looking for. The great pursuits are more about failure than about success."