The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

by Jonathan Franzen

  THE LAST OF the novels I’d read in German in the fall, and the one I’d resisted most staunchly, was The Magic Mountain. I’d resisted it because I understood it so much better than the other novels. Its young hero, Hans Castorp, is a bourgeois from the flatlands who goes for a three-week visit to a mountain sanatorium, gets sucked into the hermetic strangeness of the place, and ends up staying for seven years. Castorp is an innocent of the sort who might position himself at the Brain end of a Heart/Brain continuum, and Thomas Mann treats him with a loving irony and monstrous omniscience that together drove me crazy. Mann, as Avery helped us to see, has every symbol worked out perfectly: the bourgeois lowlands are the place of physical and moral health, the bohemian heights are the site of genius and disease, and what draws Castorp from the former up into the latter is the power of love—specifically, his attraction to his fellow patient Clawdia Chauchat. Clawdia really is the “hot cat” that her name in French denotes. She and Castorp exchange glances seven times in the sanatorium dining room, and he’s staying in room 34 (3 + 4 = 7!) and she’s in room 7, and their flirtation finally comes to a head on Walpurgis Night, exactly seven months after his arrival, when he approaches her on the pretext of borrowing a pencil, thereby repeating and fulfilling his bold borrowing of a pencil from a Clawdia-like boy he had a crush on long ago, a boy who warned him not to “break” the pencil, and he has sex with Clawdia once and only once, and never with anyone else, etc. etc. etc. And then, because so much formal perfection can be chilling, Mann throws in a tour de force chapter, “Snow,” about the lethal chilliness of formal perfection, and proceeds to take the novel in a less hermetic direction, which is itself the formally perfect move to make.

  The so-German organizational consciousness at work here made me groan the way an elaborate and successful pun does. And yet at the heart of the book there was a question of genuine personal interest both to Mann and to me: How does it happen that a young person so quickly strays so far from the values and expectations of his middle-class up-bringing? Superficially, in Castorp’s case, you might think the fault lies with the little tubercular spot that shows up in his chest x-ray. But Castorp embraces his diagnosis so eagerly that you can see that it’s more like a pretext—“ein abgekartetes Spiel.”* The real reason he stays on at the sanatorium and watches his life become unrecognizable to him is that he’s drawn to Clawdia’s mons veneris, her so-called magic mountain. As Goethe put it, in his gendered language, “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan.”* And part of what so annoyed me about Mann’s ironic condescension to Castorp is its complicity in what seemed to me Castorp’s passivity. He doesn’t actively, restlessly abandon the bourgeois flatlands for an alpine bohemia; it’s something that happens to him.

  And happened to me, too. After the holidays, I went to Chicago and saw Tom, who was on his way to being a contractor and designer not unlike the one my father had imagined he should be, and I met his new girlfriend, Marta Smith, who was every bit as excellent as promised (and, indeed, less than a year later, became my mother’s most trusted daughter-in-law). From Chicago, I returned to school a week early and stayed in the apartment above the meat market where the French major lived. Here it immediately became clear that the French major and I were sick of each other, sick of nothing happening. Her housemate, however, the red-haired New Yorker, my competition, had broken up with her Cuban boyfriend, and I sat and watched old movies with her after the rest of the house had gone to bed. She was the smartest person I’d ever met. She could glance at a page of Wordsworth and tell you what Wordsworth was up to in every line. It turned out that she and I shared identical ambitions of putting childish things behind us, and that she, too, in her own way, was in flight from the flatlands. Before long, her voice was playing in my head around the clock. It occurred to me that my interest in her best friend, the French major, might never have been much more than an “abgekartetes Spiel.” The competition and I went to dinner at the house of an off-campus student couple, mutual friends of ours, whose taste in food and clothes we afterward deplored in an orgy of like-mindedness. The following day, after the mail came, she asked me if I knew a person in Chicago named Marta Smith. This stranger Smith had somehow got her hands on a copy of Small Craft Warnings, read a long short story called “Dismembering You on Your Birthday,” and spontaneously written to say she loved it. Marta knew nothing of my interest in the story’s author, and the timing of her letter’s arrival was like a mystical sign from a German novel of the sort I’d momentarily forgotten I didn’t care for.

  On the night of the competition’s twenty-first (3 x 7th!) birthday, on January 24 (1/24 = 1+2+4 =7!), which was twenty-one (3 x 7!) days before Valentine’s Day (14/2 = 7!)!, I came to her party with a pack of expensive Italian cigarettes as a present. The part of me that knew enough to fear enormous long-term complications was hoping that the two of us would just stay friends. But another, more important part of me must have felt otherwise (or so I later speculated, as Josef K. speculated that somebody “must have been” telling lies about him), because I was still on the couch with her at five the next morning, long after the party ended. When I apologized for keeping her up so late, the reply that issued from her infinitely soft, raw-cauliflower-tasting mouth was comforting and neat in the way that Mann was comforting and neat. “My idea of a perfect twenty-first birthday,” she said, “certainly didn’t include going to sleep before five.”

  ONE OTHER SCENE from that sort of novel.

  They’d been reading Freud intensively in the week before spring vacation. The little red-haired girl had a friend in the village center, a high-school teacher named Chloe, who had offered the girl and the boy the use of her apartment while she was on vacation. The girl and the boy were ready to do things in bed which were entirely new to the boy, if not to the girl, and which seemed to both of them too screamingly carnal for a mere hollow-core bedroom door to conceal from her housemates. So the two of them walked to Chloe’s apartment on a Tuesday afternoon, during a break between spring showers. The magnolia petals they bruised underfoot were beaded with rain. In the girl’s knapsack were bread, butter, eggs, gin, tonic water, coffee, cigarettes, and contraceptives. Chloe’s apartment was a dark ground-floor unit in a featureless brick low-rise that the boy had passed a hundred times and never noticed. Its rooms were half empty following the departure of a boyfriend whom Chloe had badmouthed to the girl until she’d finally found the courage to dump him. The girl and the boy made gin-and-tonics and went into Chloe’s bedroom. Even though they’d locked the front door and nobody else was in the apartment, it was unthinkable not to shut Chloe’s door behind them. To fall into bed in front of an open door was to invite a malevolent stranger to loom up in it while their attention was otherwise engaged; this happened in every teen horror movie ever made. The boy was still getting over his surprise that the girl wanted sex as much as he did, though why this had been such a surprise he could no longer say. He was just thankful for instruction. Nothing this girl could do to him was dirty. The room itself, however, was plenty dirty. There was a musty carpet-pad smell and a big yellow stain on the ceiling. Clothes of Chloe’s were hanging out of drawers, lying in a pile near the closet, hanging in a bulky mass from a hook on the hallway door. The girl was clean and fresh-smelling, but Chloe, whom the boy had never met, apparently was not. So it was dirty to be blown on Chloe’s dirty bed. A rain shower pelted the room’s only window furiously, behind a cheap and damaged plastic blind. The rain continued but was done before the boy and girl were. The sky was nearly dark when they got dressed and went out for a walk and cigarettes. In the west, a narrow panel of clear blue-green sky was visible between receding rain clouds and a warmly lighted college building. Even after cigarettes, the boy could taste the magic in his mouth. In his chest was a feeling of gratitude and embarrassment so large that he whimpered a little, involuntarily, every time his mind alit on what the girl had done for him and let him do.

  It was night when they returned to Chloe’s apartment and foun
d that somebody had been inside it while they were gone. The front door, which they’d been careful to lock, was now unlocked. At the end of the hallway, in the kitchen, which they’d left dark, they could see a light burning brightly. “Hello?” the boy called. “…Hello?…Hello!” There was no answer. Nobody in the kitchen. The boy asked if Chloe’s boyfriend might still have a house key. The girl, taking ice from the freezer for a gin-and-tonic, said it seemed unlikely, given that the guy had moved all his stuff out. “He also owes Chloe half a year of rent,” the girl said, opening the refrigerator, and then: “Shit! shit! shit!” The boy said “What?” and the girl said, “He’s been here! Somebody!” Because the bottle of tonic water, which the boy and the girl had left more than half full, was almost empty now. They looked at each other, wide-eyed, and peered down the dark hallway. The boy wished he’d turned a light on. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone here?” The girl was pulling open drawers, looking for knives. But Chloe didn’t seem to have anything larger than a steak knife. The girl took one of them and gave the boy another, and together they moved down the hallway, calling “Hello? Hello?” The living room was OK. So was the little study. But when the boy came to the bedroom door and gave it a push, the man on the other side of it pushed back. The man had a gun, and the boy grabbed the doorknob with both hands and wrenched it toward him and braced his feet on either side of the door, pulling as hard as he could against significant resistance. For a moment, he heard the man with the gun huffing on the other side of the door. Then nothing. The boy kept pulling with all his strength. Both he and the girl were panting with terror. “What do I do?” she said. “Go, go, go, get out,” he said hoarsely, “get outside!” She ran to the front door and opened it, looking back at the boy, who was still pulling on the doorknob. He was only eight steps away from her. He could be outside before the man with the gun got the door open and raised his weapon. And so the boy made his break. He and the girl flung themselves through the building’s lobby and onto the sidewalk and stood there breathing hard. It was six in the evening in a pleasant suburb. Commuters coming home from work, somebody shooting baskets across the street, a winter chill reemerging from the shadows. As the boy and the girl stood on the sidewalk, shivering in the chill, they felt at once sheepish and extraordinary, as if nothing of this sort had ever happened—could ever happen—to anyone in the world but them. From feeling this to getting married would be no scarier a dash than from the bedroom door to safety. “I suppose it’s fair to ask,” the girl said, shivering, “why exactly Chloe’s boyfriend would want to harm us.” The boy, too, wondered if perhaps the weight and the sounds on the other side of the door had simply been Chloe’s clothes, swinging on hangers. The world was becoming rational again. There would be a sticky pool of tonic water on the refrigerator’s bottom shelf, something funky with the front-door lock, a timer on the kitchen light. The boy and the girl would go inside together and put the Unconscious in its place.

  MY BIRD PROBLEM

  FEBRUARY 2005, SOUTH Texas: I’d checked into a roadside motel in Brownsville and was getting up in the dark every morning, making coffee for my old friend Manley, who wouldn’t talk to me or leave his bed until he’d had some, and then bolting the motel’s free breakfast and running to our rental car and birding nonstop for twelve hours. I waited until nightfall to buy lunch food and fill the car with gas, to avoid wasting even a minute of birdable daylight. The only way not to question what I was doing, and why I was doing it, was to do absolutely nothing else.

  At the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, on a hot weekday afternoon, Manley and I hiked several miles down dusty trails to an artificial water feature on the far margin of which I saw three pale-brown ducks. Two of them were paddling with all deliberate speed into the cover of dense reeds, affording me a view mainly of their butts, but the third bird loitered long enough for me to train my binoculars on its head, which looked as if a person had dipped two fingers in black ink and drawn horizontal lines across its face.

  “A masked duck!” I said. “You see it?”

  “I see the duck,” Manley said.

  “A masked duck!”

  The bird quickly disappeared into the reeds and gave no sign of reemerging. I showed Manley its picture in my Sibley.

  “I’m not familiar with this duck,” he said. “But the bird in this picture is the one I just saw.”

  “The stripes on its face. The sort of cinnamony brown.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a masked duck!”

  We were within a few hundred yards of the Rio Grande. On the other side of the river, if you traveled south—say, to Brazil—you could see masked ducks by the dozens. They were a rarity north of the border, though. The pleasure of the sighting sweetened our long tramp back to the parking lot.

  While Manley lay down in the car to take a nap, I poked around in a nearby marsh. Three middle-aged white guys with good equipment asked me if I’d seen anything interesting.

  “Not much,” I said, “except a masked duck.”

  All three began to talk at once.

  “A masked duck!”

  “Masked duck?”

  “Where exactly? Show us on the map.”

  “Are you sure it was a masked duck?”

  “You’re familiar with the ruddy duck. You do know what a female ruddy looks like.”

  “Masked duck!”

  I said that, yes, I’d seen female ruddies, we had them in Central Park, and this wasn’t a ruddy duck. I said it was as if somebody had dipped two fingers in black ink and—

  “Was it alone?”

  “Were there others?”

  “A masked duck!”

  One of the men took out a pen, wrote down my name, and had me pinpoint the location on a map. The other two were already moving down the trail I’d come up.

  “And you’re sure it was a masked duck,” the third man said.

  “It wasn’t a ruddy,” I said.

  A fourth man stepped out of some bushes right behind us. “I’ve got a nighthawk sleeping in a tree.”

  “This guy saw a masked duck,” the third man said.

  “A masked duck! Are you sure? Are you familiar with the female ruddy?”

  The other two men came hurrying back up the trail. “Did someone say nighthawk?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a scope on it.”

  The five of us went into the bushes. The nighthawk, asleep on a tree branch, looked like a partly balled gray hiking sock. The scope’s owner said that the friend of his who’d first spotted the bird had called it a lesser nighthawk, not a common. The well-equipped trio begged to differ.

  “He said lesser? Did he hear its call?”

  “No,” the man said. “But the range—”

  “Range doesn’t help you.”

  “Range argues for common, if anything, at this time of year.”

  “Look where the wing bar is.”

  “Common.”

  “Definitely calling it a common.”

  The four men set off at a forced-march pace to look for the masked duck, and I began to worry. My identification of the duck, which had felt ironclad in the moment, seemed dangerously hasty in the context of four serious birders marching several miles in the afternoon heat. I went and woke up Manley.

  “The only thing that matters,” he said, “is that we saw it.”

  “But the guy took my name down. Now, if they don’t see it, I’m going to get a bad rep.”

  “If they don’t see it, they’ll think it’s in the reeds.”

  “But what if they see ruddies instead? There could be ruddies and masked ducks, and the ruddies aren’t as shy.”

  “It’s something to be anxious about,” Manley said, “if you want to be anxious about something.”

  I went to the refuge visitor center and wrote in the log-book: One certain and two partially glimpsed masked ducks, north end of Cattail #2. I asked a volunteer if anyone else had reported a masked duck.

  “No, that would be our first this wi
nter,” she said.

  The next afternoon, on South Padre Island, in the wetland behind the Convention Center, where about twenty upper-Midwestern retirees and scraggly-bearded white guys were pacing the boardwalks with cameras and binoculars, I saw a pretty, dark-haired young woman taking telephoto pictures of a pair of ducks. “Green-winged teals,” I mentioned to Manley.

  The girl looked up sharply. “Green-winged teals? Where?”

  I nodded at her birds.

  “Those are wigeons,” she said.

  “Right.”

  I’d made this mistake before. I knew perfectly well what a wigeon looked like, but sometimes, in the giddiness of spotting something, my brain got confused. As Manley and I retreated down the boardwalk, I showed him pictures.

  “See,” I said, “the wigeon and the green-winged teal have more or less the same palette, just completely rearranged. I should have said wigeon. Now she thinks I can’t tell a wigeon from a teal.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell her that?” Manley said. “Just say that the wrong word came out of your mouth.”

  “That would only have compounded it. It would have been protesting too much.”

  “But at least she’d know you know the difference.”

  “She doesn’t know my name. I’ll never see her again. That is my only conceivable consolation.”

  There is no better American place for birds in February than South Texas. Although Manley had been down here thirty years earlier, as a teenage birder, it was a wholly new world to me. In three days, I’d seen fetchingly disheveled anis flopping around on top of shrubs, Jurassic-looking anhingas sun-drying their wings, squadrons of white pelicans gliding downriver on nine-foot wingspans, a couple of caracaras eating a road-killed king snake, an elegant trogon and a crimson-collared grosbeak and two exotic robins all lurking on a postage-stamp Audubon Society tract in Weslaco. The only frustration was my No. 1 trip target bird, the black-bellied whistling-duck. A tree nester, strangely long-legged, with a candy-pink bill and a bold white eye ring, the whistling-duck was one of those birds in the field guide which I couldn’t quite believe existed—something out of Marco Polo. It was supposed to winter in good numbers on Brownsville’s urban oxbow lakes (called resacas), and with each shoreline that I scanned in vain, the bird became that much more mythical to me.