The Discomfort Zone

The stories Franzen tells in "The Discomfort Zone" bring together elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity,his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.