JONATHAN Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Missouri.
The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adulthood with embarrassing and unexpected passions.
It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the Seventies, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America became a more polarised society.
Not an easy book to get on with - undoubtedly Americans would grasp the humour much more proficiently - but it clearly shows Franzen's talents.
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