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No doubt future literary critics will establish the precise coordinates for Jonathan Franzen's discomfort zone. Until they do, we'll have to trust Franzen's version.

As a title, The Discomfort Zone evokes the messy sensitivity one imagines essential to writing a magnum opus like The Corrections, Franzen's 2001 National Book Award-winning novel. And while it's an engaging, well-wrought memoir, discomfort plays a minor role aside from the author's self-consciousness.

Franzen had a solid middle-class Midwestern upbringing, went to a fancy private college and came of age in big cities. Fans will appreciate the insight into his early life. Webster Groves, his hometown, brings to mind St. Jude, the fictional town in The Corrections. When Franzen tells of returning home to sell his deceased mother's home, he roots around in the freezer and notes that "mother had been good about labeling food with the date she'd frozen it," including a nine-year-old beef brisket -- something Enid from The Corrections might've done.

Franzen recounts his experiences with Fellowship, a Christian-hippie group that helped shape his teenage experience, and he revels in retellings of fairly wholesome pranks that suggest a well-adjusted teenager. He also offers a few plumbs from his intellectual development -- the influence of Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip and, in college, of German language and literature -- and expresses his concern over global warming, especially as it manifests in his hobby of choice, which is birding.

The acute discomfort of the book mostly shows up in his portrayals of family interactions and, for entirely different reasons, occasional assertions that come off as naïve, if not ridiculous, such as this one: "Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom." Of course, this is a quibble. More typically, Franzen artfully weaves together the strands of his life, reflecting the humanity that courses through his best fiction.