The confessional mode in literature has an uncomplicated appeal for both writers and readers: the unburdening of guilt, vicarious or otherwise. But as Tobias Wolff cautioned in his mordant memoir of military service during the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh's Army: 'Isn't there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?' Jonathan Franzen's memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon cancer, his widowed mother, Irene, has died. The youngest of three brothers who've fled the Midwest for 'coastal lives', Franzen is delegated the task of returning to St Louis, one summer night in 1999, to arrange the sale of her house. When he gets there, Franzen supposes that the first step is to 'depersonalise' the house before the realtors come to see it: no small task, since 'each windowsill and each table top was an eddy in which inexpensively framed photos had accumulated.' In one such photo he sees himself

LRB 2 August 2007 | PDF Download