Does Michiko Kakutani have trouble with despair? Specifically, understanding what it might be like to be caught in it? Her self-congratulatory review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone would seem to suggest that this is so, which would be an unfortunate deficiency in a critic of literature. She also seems not to have been following the progress of the essay over the past twenty-odd years. She writes:

There are two extended riffs in this volume where Mr. Franzen momentarily puts aside his fascination with himself to give the reader some wonderfully observed musings on two subjects that have long preoccupied him: Peanuts cartoons and bird-watching.

I’d like to see her attempt “musings” as “wonderfully observed” as those in “My Bird Problem” and “The Comfort Zone” (both of which first appeared in The New Yorker). She continues, pointlessly, “Indeed the young Mr. Franzen comes across as less of a Snoopy — ‘the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook’ — than as a kind of mean-spirited Lucy on steroids.” Must authors be Snoopys? I’d rather read Lucy’s memoir, msyelf. Let’s not forget that her review of Nick Hornby’s comically unsettling novel A Long Way Down lacked both depth and empathy in the extreme. She writes of Franzen’s book, “Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.” It is simply impossible to view any art, in particular contemporary nonfiction, without the ability to answer that question.