Franzen got savaged by Michiko Kakutani in the original review of this book and then it gets included in the year-end list: either it was a weak year for non-fiction or the Times is Pitchfork-like in handing out low marks to works it actually likes a whole lot but doesn’t respect.*

Franzen’s exposure of his small, petulant side, which I guess some people didn’t like, is balanced by the fact that it resonates, even if he’s making it up or blowing it out of proportion. (He’s obviously too fine a writer not to know that we’re going to be like ‘ugh’ when he wonders if the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will somehow create turbulence on his flight from California to New York.) If you want fake piety, read Pastor Ted’s Hunting, Fishing and Christ. I prefer fake misanthropy.

Still, I thought the last chapter was terrible. Best was “The Foreign Language,” which has a lot of juicy Goethe quotes - which, easy to lose sight of, Franzen may have translated but did not originate. Still:

Elisabeth […] It was the summer I turned ten […] She was nineteen, and her skirts were sensationally short and her little tops sensationally tight, and the world-eclipsing proximity of her breasts and the great southerly extent of her bare legs were intolerable to me. Sitting next to her, I felt like a claustrophobe in a crowded elevator, a person with severe restless-leg syndrome, a dental patient undergoing extend drilling. Her words, being products of her lips and tongue, carried an unwelcome intimacy, and the German language itself sounded deep-throated and wet compared to English. (How prim our “bad,” how carnal their “schlecht.”)

Nobody likes the quotes I pull, ever. Fine. “The Discomfort Zone” is a stupid title, the book is highly readable but fluffy: 6.8/10.

I met Franzen for two seconds two years ago and told him that while maybe everyone in line wanted their copy of The Corrections signed, I’d brought Strong Motion because I thought it was better. Not in so many words. (And it is, by the way, a real American masterpiece.) He was like “I think so too!” Because of SM I’ll read anything he writes.

*Arab Strap, The Week Never Starts Round Here = 6.5!?