Jonathan Franzen extols the virtues of virtue, insists he doesn’t hate St. Louis and describes how it felt to enter The Discomfort Zone

Illustration by Ryan Greis

Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

Tennessee Williams referred to his hometown as “that dreaded city of St. Pollution.” T.S. Eliot freely admitted that his strong brown god was the Mississippi River as it flowed past the Landing, but obscured its  Midwesternness by calling it the Seine or the Thames. William Burroughs, in The Place of Dead Roads, referred to St. Louis by its proper name but put an imaginary “Dead Boy Creek” in the nearby landscape. And Marianne Moore hardly ever bothered referring to St. Louis at all. She was more interested in pangolins and the Dodgers. 

By comparison, Jonathan Franzen has been pretty evenhanded with his hometown. The St. Louis of his novels—The Twenty-Seventh City and The Corrections—may be a creaky brick metropolis full of stoics in sturdy shoes and wool slacks, but the characters are dignified, hard-working, self-sacrificing, all the more tragic in their refusal to be maudlin about their losses. Granted, The Corrections is partially set in a St. Louis-like city monikered “St. Jude” after the patron saint of lost causes, but this seems more in reference to the psychic latitude and longitude of the characters than to the city itself. In all, three of Franzen’s four books (the exception being Strong Motion, which was set in Boston), feature either a fictionalized St. Louis or, in the essay collection How to Be Alone, the actual city.

That’s why, when word hits the street that there’s a new Franzen piece in The New Yorker, St. Louisians rush to the nearest bookstore and read it standing at the magazine rack. They do this because it’s rare to see St. Louis in the national news unless we’ve been hit by a tornado (or a cocker spaniel’s cast a vote, or an alderwoman has peed in a trashcan while holding the floor at city hall). That kind of press trains us to give the story a good speed-read first, scanning for the sections that will, however well-meaning, burn like Merthiolate.

“I don’t know where they got that,” Jonathan Franzen says, genuinely perplexed, when told that some locals thought “Meet Me in St. Louis”—his essay about trying to emote for Oprah’s film crew after The Corrections was chosen for her book club—made St. Louis look bad. (The offending passage cited most often was Franzen’s description of being shot “in the shadow of an Arch that means nothing to me,” meanwhile developing a rash on his torso that he described as a “flaming, shingles-like band of pain and itching.” This translated, for hypersensitive St. Louis, as a statement that the Arch was meaningless—or that it had mysterious allergenic properties.) 

I ask him whether he considers himself part of the tradition of Eliot, Burroughs and Williams—writers who drew from the aquifers of their childhood memories of St. Louis in order to write, yet couldn’t personally stand the place. 

“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” He laughs but sounds shocked, maybe a little offended. “I do come back, though,” he says. “I come back all the time.” The problem, he explains, isn’t that he hates St. Louis. It’s that every time he returns, everything shrinks; the idealized Webster Groves of his youth fades a little bit more. The city shifts in subtle but, to one who’s been away, profound ways. There’s now real estate built over the woods near Kenrick Seminary where he and his friends used to play. 

“Of course, it’s an irrational anger,” he sighs, after expressing dismay that what used to be trees and grass is now a subdivision. “I realize that.”


Webster Groves’ streets are full of century-old trees and century-old wooden houses, an anomaly in bricky St. Louis. Nestled among the wooden two-stories are dozens of Lustron houses (the quintessential postwar house; prefab, made of steel and porcelain, they were an attempt to cash in on the thousands of G.I.s who returned from the war, wanting to start families, only to find themselves sleeping in grain silos). In those trees roost hordes of glossy black crows; growing around the trunks, rings of supernaturally healthy hostas. When Charles Kuralt came to town in ’66 to film a CBS documentary, 16 in Webster Groves, Webster’s pleasant appearance hardly worked to its favor. He cast it as a suburb full of cocktail-party moms, pipe-puffing Cold War dads, dead-eyed quarterbacks and “soshie” girls rhapsodizing about the mood-lifting properties of a good set of flatware. 16 still raises ire in Webster 40 years later (though strangely, one of the few places one can still find a copy of the film is in the Webster Public Library).

It’s in Webster that Franzen sets much of his new book, The Discomfort Zone, and the characters are the Franzens of Webster, circa the ’60s and ’70s, as well as friends and kin dating up to the present day. He writes of selling his mother’s house after her death, and about her final to-do lists, including one that included the checked-off “decide about afterlife.” In another chapter, Franzen and his buddies abscond with Webster High’s school-bell clappers, leaving “quatrains of doggerel,” sealed in glass ampules as clues to their whereabouts. There’s also an account of attending a UCC Fellowship led by a marvelous berzerker of a pastor, Bob Mutton, who looked like Jesus even when playing basketball, and whom Franzen contacted for help in supplementing his ninth-grade memories of Fellowship Camp.

“Jonathan has an extraordinary work ethic,” says his agent, Susan Golomb, referring to his journalistic approach to the memoir.  “He really feels a responsibility as a writer—to his readers and to the truth. He’s the most diligent person I know.”

Franzen himself says it would have been impossible to write stories with any depth or richness to them without conferring with his brothers (“who were very dear about it”) and old friends.

“Luckily, I hadn’t burned any bridges,” he says. “When you actually go back and talk to other people who were there, it allows you to add color and detail and dialogue and really bring it to life on the page. I think they know that if I’m going to make fun of anyone, if anyone is going to take the fall, it’s going to be me.”

(Or Charles Kuralt, who receives a bit of a poke in the Fellowship chapter, as Franzen explains the “tonal” problems with 16 in Webster Groves: “When Kuralt, with a desperate grin, asked a group of Webster Groves parents whether a civil-rights march might ‘sort of inject some life into things around here,’ the parents recoiled from him as if he were insane; and the filmmakers, unable to imagine that you could be a nice person and still not want your 16-year-old in a civil rights march, cast Webster Groves as a nightmare of mind control and soulless materialism.”)

Unlike CBS’s version, the Webster of The Discomfort Zone (the title refers to the arguments Franzen’s parents had over the thermostat’s  “Comfort Zone ... a pale blue arc between 72 and 78 degrees”) is marked by “a kind of apolitical niceness,” but still a place where 16-year-olds smoke pot, steal lunches and grow wispy ’staches. Franzen paints himself, by contrast, as the kid with a too-short haircut, scared of things like insomnia, jellyfish and the thou-shalts handed down by his parents. The tone is sparklier, looser, a little lighter than the sometimes crushing, Saturnalian sadness of The Corrections. St. Louis does not come off as a lame foil to New York City but as a little Eden that, like all Edens, had to be left behind. Those St. Louisans who have stood at magazine counters will recognize themes and riffs from previous New Yorker pieces, but as Jonathan Galassi, Franzen’s editor, explains, “he wrote a new book based on those essays. He did a lot of rethinking and reworking to make a book that coheres and talks about the issues of home and growing up in a way that is, I think, very original.”

“It’s really a personal history now,” Golomb agrees, “but it also happens to have reflections of the culture. I love the Fellowship piece ... It’s actually very funny, the editor who bought the audio rights to the book was in Fellowship as well. So it’s brought together a whole cult of ex-Fellowship people.”

Even members of the ex-Fellowship cult, though, may be disappointed that the new book isn’t a novel.

 “I am working on some fiction,” Franzen counters. “But I’m not going to publish a book just to be publishing a book. Of course, the danger is that, if you disappear for five years to write a novel, you’re afraid people are going to forget you—though the truth is, they forget you in six weeks.”

Those who scowled over the Arch passage, on the other hand, may take heart. While Franzen makes it clear his heart is always in New York (which he described in “Meet Me in St. Louis” as “the city, of all the cities in the world, that feels to me like the home I grew up in”), it’s obvious, within a larger narrative, that this is not the same thing as hating St. Louis. Maybe that’s why The Discomfort Zone seems to cast the city in more loveable terms than in earlier books; though Franzen still describes a city full of pragmatists and traditionalists, with rusting warehouses full of aluminum extrusion and Piab valves, and a faint tingle of the bridge party era still hanging in the air, the tone suggests that there’s no shame in that.

Still, Franzen says he’s not planning on writing another autobiography again anytime soon.

“Hopefully,” he says, “after writing this book I’ll be so sick of myself I’ll never have to write another first-person piece again.”


Those who know anything about Franzen know of his contretemps with Oprah Winfrey. In 2001, after deciding that he appeared “conflicted” about being chosen for her book club, she disinvited him. Franzen was called all sorts of names, though “ungrateful” and “pompous” were usually high on the list. Since then, whether it’s because of jealousy at his success or because Franzen’s multi-layered sentences and precise but complicated distinctions don’t lend themselves to lickety-split journalism, his press has been a little cartoony, casting him by turns as “smug intellectual,” “rich, arrogant, mainstream novelist” or “likeable but awkward/hypersensitive writer guy.” Entertainment Weekly, in a 2002 profile, actually made a good case for his “sunny, silly” side, though the eagerness with which Franzen attempted to communicate this came through as a touch neurotic itself.

“Writers essentially isolate themselves,” Franzen says when asked if he thinks neurosis goes hand-in-hand with writing, “and spend hours every day away from other people, working in the dark—well, I like to work in a darkened room, anyway—trying to think about things everyone else is working hard not to think about. Well, gee, that’s going to make you a little neurotic, a little hypersensitive ... and that’s a surprise?”

As for being arrogant or insufferable, it’s telling that Franzen’s editor and agent—two relationships, at least for writers, that can approximate marriage in their intensity—have worked with him since the beginning (Franzen was Golomb’s first client) and neither offers the faintest hint that he’s hard to work with.
“I’m a big, big fan of him as a person as well as a writer,” says Galassi, adding that he’s worked with Franzen “on all of his books.”  Golomb calls him “a lovely person.”


What would Franzen’s books have been like, had he grown up on the East Coast?

Long pause.

“I—I can’t even imagine.”


“For how specific it is about the Midwest, it still is just so universal,” Golomb says of The Corrections. “There’s something about the Midwest—it’s the heart of America—and—this is going to sound so
fou-fou—the human heart, that Thanksgiving, and the Christmas—whether or not you celebrate those particular holidays, everyone knows what those homecomings are like. Everyone around the world has parents who are aging, siblings they’re entwined with, complications in their lives.”

Still, the blank canvas of the St. Louis suburbs (”the middle of the middle,” as Franzen describes Webster in the memoir) seems to produce more than its fair share of literary heavyweights.

“I don’t think this is so much the case these days, but F. Scott Fitzgerald leaving St. Paul and going to New York City—that’s a huge tradition,” Franzen says. “Some of the best American literature has been written by these authors who have left the Midwest; it’s essentially a literature of disappointment.”

Clayton drove young Billy Burroughs into the pages of dime-store pulp novels, inspiring him to lose his virginity in an East St. Louis brothel and then head to New York, where he sought the company of gamblers, petty thieves and dope fiends; but in the end, softened by the company of his cats, sorrowing over his failure to connect more profoundly with his son, his last diary entry declared love “the most natural painkiller there is” and, per his instructions, he turned his eyes home again and was buried in the Burroughs family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery. Though Williams never came back, later in life he admitted, “I had a very troubled adolescence. It’s not the city, I suppose. It would have occurred wherever I was.” Eliot didn’t return either. (Just as well: The site where his childhood home stood is now surrounded by warehouses and FedEx stations, with a commemorative marker that looks like a giant squashed penny, or a manhole cover.) But even he made peace with the Midwestern things that made him uncool—and a great poet: his work ethic, his willingness to embrace the bleak and the difficult.

“I graduated from high school and left St. Louis immediately,” Franzen says, “and lived in Philadelphia. I was coming from this very innocent, radiant place, where everyone I had known had been nice, but the people there were all cool, and I worked very hard for a very long time to be cool, too. This culture is so preoccupied with the pursuit of cool. The whole premise of the [new] book is a confession of how uncool I am. I’m finally realizing that I don’t have to be embarrassed about being nice.”