Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #251611 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-21
• Released on: 2007-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. National Book Award–winner Franzen's first foray into memoir begins and ends with his mother's death in Franzen's adulthood. In between, he takes a sarcastic, humorous and intimate look at the painful awkwardness of adolescence. As a young observer rather than a participant, Franzen offers a fresh take on the sometimes tumultuous, sometimes uneventful America of the 1960s and '70s. A not very popular, bookish kid, Franzen (The Corrections) and his high school buddies, in one of the book's most memorable episodes, attempt to loop a tire, ring-toss–style, over their school's 40-foot flag pole as part of a series of flailing pranks. Franzen watches his older brother storm out of the house toward a wayward hippe life, while he ultimately follows along his father's straight-and-narrow path. Franzen traces back to his teenage years the roots of his enduring trouble with women, his pursuit of a precarious career as a writer and his recent life-affirming obsession with bird-watching. While Franzen's family was unmarked by significant tragedy, the common yet painful contradictions of growing up are at the heart of this wonderful book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker): "You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do." (Sept.)
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From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—In this entertaining portrait of the artist as a young geek, Franzen is as offhand about his geekdom and failures as he is about his talents and successes. He retraces his childhood resistance to his parents' way of life as he became a rebel in his own cause. He confesses that he has become a bird-watcher as an adult; he is like an interesting variety of one of the birds that he enjoys finding. Even while describing his personal oddities and those in the people around him, he finds awkward beauty in their quirks and imperfections. The book begins and ends with the death of his mother. Their difficult relationship is one of many he examines. He is a human watcher willing to report in detail on behavior, whether that of his parents, loved ones, or himself. As he studies who he has been and who he is now, Franzen discovers truths about the world around him. This is a world in which many teens find themselves, and seeing the ways the author navigates and survives can entertain and comfort while offering assistance in the process of self-discovery.—Will Marston, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Jonathan Franzen, the National Book Award?winning author of The Corrections (and, infamously, the only writer to refuse initiation into Oprah Winfrey's book club), leaves few readers ambivalent about his work, be it through his seriocomic attitude toward life's uncomfortable moments or the difficult issues that he tackles with exuberant irreverence. 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. Other critics dismiss the work as the ramblings of a postadolescent malcontent. In any case, the essays are cautionary tales for Franzen's baby-boomer generation, many of whom would only reluctantly admit to sharing the author's worldview.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Mixture of Great, Okay and Yawn
Mr. Franzen clearly is a gifted writer. His ruminations about his parents, friends, interests and silly pranks were highly entertaining and his psychoanalytical observations were thought-provoking. This helped tremendously in convincing me to wade through a few small sections of the book which I found about as compelling as watching paint dry. I could have done without most of the chapter about his learning German. But, heh, it's his life. Who am I to tell him what to highlight from his past? The memoir gives you a good idea of what makes Mr. Franzen tick. An intelligent, honest and somewhat enjoyable read.

Tepid, humorless ramblings of a rich guy with very little to say
The whimsical cover art and design of this book gave me the impression that it might have a humorous tone, and perhaps a certain self-effacing charm. However, while Franzen is a very capable wordsmith, and he is at times quite modest and introspective, there is a certain lack of humor and warmth here that is disappointing and even troubling. I would even go so far as to say that there is a certain Germanic coldness to Franzen's memoir (and not surprisingly, Franzen's pronunciation of German quotes in the audiobook version are impeccable). He describes his mother's long list of ailments with a strange detachment that I found almost chilling, and his references to adolescent interactions with the opposite sex are oddly listless and devoid of passion. It seems he would rather blather on for pages with the ponderous details of his bird-watching adventures, listing every species he has ever observed, than devote that space to the nuances of his interpersonal relationships. I was left with the impression of Franzen as a rather cold, soulless individual with some serious issues with his Mom and perhaps with women in general. My other main criticism is that there seems to be no particular direction to the narrative thread. I was almost left with the suspicion that they paid Franzen by the word, and he was trying to fill up space with irrelevant trifles, rather than look too deeply into himself for any truly meaty material. Lastly, his use of random SAT words at the oddest times ("infungible" is an example) put the final nail in whatever bit of humanity or life this pointless tome might have possessed. I now feel the urge to read some Ernest Hemingway or Jack London, in other words the writings of men who actually perspired and got callouses on their hands at some time in their lives, after subjecting myself to the tepid musings of this semi-likable, pampered, obessive-compulsive geek.

Discomfort and Revelation
These autobiographical essays teeter between personal revelation and keeping the reader at arm's length and the discussion at an intellectual level. Franzen describes in unforgiving detail how he chose the wrong realtor to sell his mother's house. We see him fall for the flirtatious sales pitch of the woman in tight jeans but not the reaction of his brothers once the error is discovered. He describes his attraction to his future wife because she is a precise, brilliant reader, but he seems incapable of explaining why that's not enough to make the marriage work. The failure of the marriage and reaction of his brothers remain just off stage. Franzen as an adult isn't far removed from the child who told his mother that he didn't hear the fight between his brother and father the night before -- everyone is safer if we carry on as if nothing happened.

The result is carefully crafted tension between Franzen's reticence to talk about intense messy feelings (except perhaps by allusion to Kafka) and meticulous cataloguing of everything incidental to those feelings. Trapped between the contradictory desires to be known and to remain distant, Franzen is at his thoughtful, ambivalent best.