The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

by Jonathan Franzen

  I was wearing my jeans and desert boots and wind-breaker, my antianxiety ensemble. In the church parking lot, thirty-five kids in denim were throwing Frisbees and tuning guitars, smoking cigarettes, swapping desserts, and jockeying for rides in cars driven by the more glamorous young advisors. We were going to Shannondale, a camp in the Ozarks three hours south of St. Louis. For a ride this long, it was imperative to avoid the car of Social Death, which was typically filled with girls in shapeless slacks and boys whose sense of humor was substandard. I had nothing against these kids except a desperate fear of being taken for one of them. I dropped my bags on a pile of luggage and ran to secure a place in a safe car with a mustached seminarian and some smart, quiet Congregationalists who liked to play Ghost.

  It was the season in Missouri when dusk crept up on you. Returning for my bags, I couldn’t find my dinner. Car doors were slamming, engines starting. I ran around canvassing the people who hadn’t left yet. Had anybody seen my paper bag? Five minutes into the retreat, I was already losing my cool. And this wasn’t even the worst of it, because it was possible that, even now, in one of the glamorous cars, somebody was reading my mother’s letter. I felt like an Air Force officer who’d let a nuclear warhead go missing.

  I ran back to my chosen car and reported, with ornate self-disgust, that I’d lost my dinner. But the mustached seminarian almost welcomed my loss. He said that each person in the car could give me a small piece of dinner, and nobody would be hungry, and everybody would be fed. In the gathering dark, as we drove south out of the city, girls kept handing me food. I could feel their fingers as I took it.

  On my only Boy Scout weekend, two years earlier, the leaders of the Bison Patrol had left us Tenderfeet to pitch our tents in steady rain. The leaders hung out with their friends in better-organized patrols who had brought along steaks and sodas and paraffin fire starters and great quantities of dry, seasoned firewood. When we young Bisons stopped by to warm ourselves, our leaders ordered us back to our sodden campsite. Late in the evening, the Scoutmaster consoled us with Silly Sally jokes that the older Scouts didn’t want to listen to anymore. (“One time when Silly Sally was in the woods, an old man said to her, ‘Silly Sally, I want you to take off all your clothes!’ and Silly Sally said, ‘Why, that’s silly, because I’m sure they won’t fit you!’”) I came home from the weekend wet, hungry, tired, dirty, and furious. My father, hating all things military, was happy to excuse me from the Scouts, but he insisted that I participate in some activity, and my mother suggested Fellowship.

  At Fellowship camps there were girls in halter tops and cutoffs. Each June, the seventh-and-eighth-grade group went down to Shannondale for five days and did maintenance for the church there, using scythes and paint rollers. The camp was near the Current River, a spring-fed, gravel-bottomed stream on which we took a float trip every year. My first summer, after the social discouragements of seventh grade, I wanted to toughen up my image and make myself more stupid, and I was trying to do this by continually exclaiming, “Son of a bitch!” Floating on the Current, I marveled at every green vista: “Son of a bitch!” This irritated my canoe mate, who, with each repetition, responded no less mechanically, “Yes, you certainly are one.”

  Our canoe was a thigh-fryer, an aluminum reflector oven. The day after the float trip, I was redder than the red-haired seventh-grader Bean but not quite as red as the most popular eighth-grade boy, Peppel, onto whose atrociously sunburned back Bean spilled an entire bowl of chicken-noodle soup that had just come off the boil. It was Bean’s fate to make mistakes like this. He had a squawky voice and slide-rule sensibilities and an all-around rough time in Fellowship, where the prevailing ethic of honesty and personal growth licensed kids like Peppel to shout, “Jesus Christ! You’re not just clumsy physically, you’re clumsy with other people’s feelings! You’ve got to learn how to watch out for other people!”

  Bean, who was also in Boy Scouts, quit Fellowship soon after this, leaving me and my own clumsiness to become inviting targets for other people’s honesty. In Shannondale the next summer, I was playing cards with the seventh-grader MacDonald, a feline-mannered girl whose granny glasses and Carole King frizz both attracted me and made me nervous, and in a moment of Beanish inspiration I decided it would be a funny joke to steal a look at MacDonald’s cards while she was in the bathroom. But MacDonald failed to see the humor. Her skin was so clear that every emotion she experienced, no matter how mild, registered as some variety of blush. She began to call me “Cheater” even as I insisted, with a guilty smirk, that I hadn’t seen her cards. She called me “Cheater” for the remainder of the trip. Leaving Shannondale, we all wrote farewell notes to each other, and MacDonald’s note to me began Dear Cheater and concluded I hope someday you’ll learn there’s more to life than cheating.

  Four months later, I certainly hadn’t learned this lesson. The well-being I felt in returning to Shannondale as a ninth-grader, in wearing jeans and racing through the woods at night, was acquired mainly by fraud. I had to pretend to be a kid who naturally said “shit” a lot, a kid who hadn’t written a book-length report on plant physiology, a kid who didn’t enjoy calculating absolute stellar magnitudes on his new six-function Texas Instruments calculator, or else I might find myself exposed the way I’d been exposed not long ago in English class, where an athlete had accused me of preferring the dictionary to any other book, and my old friend Manley, whom I’d turned to for refutation of this devastating slander, had smiled at me and quietly confirmed, “He’s right, Jon.” Storming into the Shannondale boys’ barn, identifying luggage from the Social Death car and claiming a bunk as far as I could get from it, I relied on the fact that my Fellowship friends went to different junior high schools and didn’t know that I was Social Death myself.

  Outside, I could hear tight cliques in desert boots crunching along on the Ozark flint gravel. Up by the Shannondale community center, in a cluster of Fellowship girls with wavy album-art hair and personalities that were sweet the way bruises on a peach are sweet, two unfamiliar tough guys in army jackets were calling and responding in high, femmy voices. One guy had lank hair and sufficient hormones for a downy Fu Manchu. He called out, “Dearest Jonathan!” The other guy, who was so fair he seemed not to have eyebrows or eyelashes, responded, “Oh, dearest Jonathan!”

  “Heh heh heh. Dearest Jonathan.”

  “Dearest Jonathan!”

  I turned on my heel and ran back into the woods, veered off into tree litter, and cowered in the dark. The retreat was now officially a disaster. It was some consolation, however, that people in Fellowship called me Jon, never Jonathan. As far as the tough guys knew, Dearest Jonathan might be anybody. Dearest Jonathan might still be up in Webster Groves, looking for his paper bag. If I could somehow avoid the two thieves all weekend, they might never figure out whose dinner they’d eaten.

  The thieves made my task a little easier, as the group assembled in the community center, by sticking together and sitting down outside the Fellowship circle. I entered the room late, with my head low, and crowded into the antipodal portion of the circle, where I had friends.

  “If you want to be part of this group,” the youth minister, Bob Mutton, told the thieves, “join the circle.”

  Mutton was unafraid of tough guys. He wore an army jacket and talked like a pissed-off tough guy himself. You made yourself look childish, not cool, if you defied him. Mutton oversaw the entire Fellowship operation, with its 250 kids and several dozen advisors, and he looked rather scarily like Jesus—not the Renaissance Jesus, with the long Hellenic nose, but the more tormented Jesus of the northern Gothic. Mutton’s eyes were blue and set close together below mournfully knitted eyebrows. He had coarse tangles of chestnut hair that hung over his collar and fell across his forehead in a canted mass; his goatee was a thick reddish bush into which he liked to insert Hauptmann’s cigars. When he wasn’t smoking or chewing on a Hauptmann’s, he held a rolled-up magazine or a fireplace tool or a stick or a pointer and slapped his opp
osite palm with it. Talking to him, you could never be sure if he was going to laugh and nod and agree with you, or whether he was going to nail you with his favorite judgment: “That is…such bullshit.”

  Since every word out of my mouth was arguably bullshit, I was trying to steer clear of Mutton. Fellowship was a class I was never going to be the best student in; I was content to pull down B’s and C’s in honesty and openness. For the night’s first exercise, in which each of us divulged how we hoped to grow on this retreat, I offered the bland goal of “developing new relationships.” (My actual goal was to avoid certain new relationships.) Then the group split into a series of dyads and small groups for sensitivity training. The advisors tried to shuffle us, to break down cliques and force new interactions, but I was practiced at picking out and quickly nabbing partners who were neither Deathly nor good friends, and I brought my techniques to bear on the task of avoiding the thieves. I sat facing a schoolteacher’s kid, a nice boy with an unfortunate penchant for talking about Gandalf, and closed my eyes and felt his face with my fingertips and let him feel mine. We formed five-person groups and inter-locked our bodies to create machines. We regrouped as a plenum and lay down in a zigzagging circle, our heads on our neighbors’ bellies, and laughed collectively.

  I was relieved to see the thieves participating in these exercises. Once you let a stranger palpate your face, even if you did it with a smirk or a sneer, you became implicated in the group and were less likely to ridicule it on Monday. I had an inkling, too, that the exercises cost the thieves more than they cost me: that people who stole sack dinners were in a far unhappier place than I was. Although they were obviously my enemies, I envied them their long hair and their rebellious clothes, which I wasn’t allowed to have, and I half admired the purity of their adolescent anger, which contrasted with my own muddle of self-consciousness and silliness and posturing. Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.

  “Just a reminder,” Mutton said before we dispersed for the night. “The three rules around here are no booze. No sex. And no drugs. Also, if you find out that somebody else has broken a rule, you have to come and tell me or tell one of the advisors. Otherwise it’s the same as if you broke the rule yourself.”

  Mutton cast a glowering eye around the circle. The dinner thieves seemed greatly amused.

  AS AN ADULT, when I say the words “Webster Groves” to people I’ve just met, I’m often informed that I grew up in a suffocatingly wealthy, insular, conformist town with a punitive social hierarchy. The twenty-odd people who have told me this over the years have collectively spent, by my estimate, about twenty minutes in Webster Groves, but each of them went to college in the seventies and eighties, and a fixture of sociology curricula in that era was a 1966 CBS documentary called 16 in Webster Groves. The film, an early experiment in hour-long prime-time sociology, reported on the attitudes of suburban sixteen-year-olds. I’ve tried to explain that the Webster Groves depicted in it bears minimal resemblance to the friendly, unpretentious town I knew when I was growing up. But it’s useless to contradict TV; people look at me with suspicion, or hostility, or pity, as if I’m deeply in denial.

  According to the documentary’s host, Charles Kuralt, Webster Groves High School was ruled by a tiny elite of “soshies” who made life gray and marginal for the great majority of students who weren’t “football captains,” “cheer-leaders,” or “dance queens.” Interviews with these all-powerful soshies revealed a student body obsessed with grades, cars, and money. CBS repeatedly flashed images of the largest houses in Webster Groves; of the town’s several thousand small and medium-sized houses there were no shots at all. For no apparent reason but the sheer visual grotesqueness of it, the filmmakers included nearly a minute of footage of grownups in tuxedos and cocktail dresses rock-and-roll dancing at a social club. In a disappointed tone, as if to suggest just how oppressive the town was, Kuralt reported that the number of tough kids and drinkers at the high school was “very low,” and although he allowed that a “minority twenty percent” of sixteen-year-olds did place high value on intelligence, he was quick to inject a note of Orwellian portent: “That kind of thinking can imperil your social standing at Webster High.”

  The film wasn’t entirely wrong about Webster High in the mid-sixties. My brother Tom, though not one of the film’s 688 eponymous sixteen-year-olds (he was born a year late), remembers little about his high-school years besides accumulating good grades and drifting in social backwaters with all the other nonsoshies; his main recreation was bombing around with friends who had cars. Nor was the film wrong about the town’s prevailing conservatism: Barry Goldwater had carried Webster Groves in 1964.

  The problem with 16 was tonal. When Kuralt, with a desperate grin, asked a group of Webster Groves parents whether a civil rights march wouldn’t maybe “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 sixteen-year-old in a civil rights march, cast Webster Groves as a nightmare of mind control and soulless materialism. “Youth dreams, we had believed, of adventure,” Kuralt voice-overed. “But three-quarters of these teenagers listed as their main goal in life a good-paying job, money, success. And we had thought that, at sixteen, you are filled with yearning and dissatisfaction. But ninety percent say they like it in Webster Groves. Nearly half said they wouldn’t mind staying here for the rest of their lives.” Kuralt laid ominous emphasis on this final fact. The most obvious explanation for it—that CBS had stumbled onto an unusually congenial community—seemed not to have crossed his mind.

  The film’s broadcast, on February 25, 1966, drew so many angry phone calls and letters from Webster Groves that the network put together an extraordinary hour-long follow-up, Webster Groves Revisited, and aired it two months later. Here Kuralt came as close to apologizing as he could without using the word “sorry.” He offered conciliatory footage of soshies watching the February broadcast and clutching their heads at the pompous things they’d said on camera; he conceded that children who grew up in safe environments might still become adventurers as adults.

  The core value in Webster Groves, the value whose absence in 16 most enraged its citizens, was a kind of apolitical niceness. The membership of First Congregational may have been largely Republican, but it consistently chose liberal pastors. The church’s minister in the 1920s had informed the congregation that his job was “clinical,” not personal. (“The successful minister is a psychoanalyst,” he said. “If that thought shocks you, let me tell you that Jesus was the master psychoanalyst of all time. Can a minister do better than follow Him?”) In the 1930s, the lead pastor was a fervid socialist who wore a beret and smoked cigarettes while riding to and from the church on a bicycle. He was succeeded by an Army combat veteran, Ervine Inglis, who preached pacifism throughout the Second World War.

  Bob Roessel, the son of a local Republican lawyer, grew up going to the church under its socialist pastor and spent his summers with an uncle in New Mexico who administered the Federal Writers’ Project in the state for the Works Projects Administration. Traveling around the Southwest, Roessel fell in love with Navajo culture and decided to become a missionary—an ambition that survived until he went to seminary and met actual working missionaries, who spoke of leading savages from darkness into light. Roessel went and asked Ervine Inglis, whose proclivities were Unitarian (he didn’t believe in the effectiveness of prayer, for example), if a person could be both Christian and Navajo. Inglis said yes. Abandoning the seminary, Roessel married the daughter of a Navajo medicine man and dedicated his life to serving his adoptive people. On visits to Webster Groves to see his mother, he set up a table at First Congregational and sold blankets and silver jewelry to raise money for the tribe. He gave barn-burning speeches on the greatness of the Navajos, telling church members that their Midwestern world, their shady lawns and good schools and middle-management jobs at Monsanto,
would be heaven to his other people. “The Navajos,” he said, “have nothing. They live in the desert with nothing. And yet the Navajos have something you don’t have: the Navajos believe in God.”

  In the fall of 1967, the church’s new associate minister, Duane Estes, gathered together sixteen teenagers and one seminary student and made a proposition: How would they like to form a group to raise money to go to Arizona over spring vacation to help the Navajos? Out in the town of Rough Rock, Bob Roessel was starting a “demonstration school,” the first Indian school in the country for which the Bureau of Indian Affairs would be ceding control to a local Indian school board, and he needed volunteers to work in the community. First Congregational’s old senior-high group, Pilgrim Fellowship, had lately fallen on hard times (this may have had something to do with the black Pilgrim hats its members were expected to wear at meetings). Estes, a former prep-school chaplain and football coach, jettisoned the word “Pilgrim” (also the hats) and proposed a different kind of pilgrimage, a football coach’s pilgrimage: Let’s go out in the world and hit somebody! He’d anticipated that a couple of station wagons would suffice for the Arizona trip, but by the time the group left for Rough Rock, a day after the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr., it filled a chartered bus.

  The lone seminary student, Bob Mutton, was there on the bus with all the clean-cut suburban kids, sporting big sideburns and wearing his outsider’s glower. Mutton had grown up in a blue-collar town outside Buffalo. He’d been a bad boy in high school, a pursuer of girls in the hulking ’49 Buick convertible that he and his father, a machinist, had fixed up. It happened that one girl whom Mutton was particularly chasing belonged to a local church group, and the group’s leader took an interest in him, urging him to apply to college. He ended up at Elmhurst College, a church-affiliated school outside Chicago. For a couple of years, he kept up his antisocial pursuits; he hung out with bad boys and he liked them. Then, in his fourth year of immersion in Elmhurst, he announced to his parents that he was going to marry a classmate, a working-class Chicago girl, and go to seminary. His father didn’t like the seminary idea—couldn’t a person be a Christian and still go to law school?—but Mutton felt he had a calling, and he enrolled at Eden Theological Seminary, in Webster Groves, in the fall of 1966.