It wasn’t always easy being Jonathan Franzen, the celebrated author of the bestselling novel The Corrections. Once he was a geeky guy who had trouble talking to girls and found more satisfaction in his chemistry set and his Tolkien books. He revisits those years in these autobiographical essays, which, on the face of it, range across subjects such as birdwatching, the Peanuts comic strip and learning German, but usually manage to be about something deeper.

Franzen is a superb observer. When it comes to clearing his dead mother’s house he catches a slight exultation creeping into the way he empties the photo frames, dumps the frames into shopping bags and shoves the photos into an envelope. This wasn’t just getting the place ready for the estate agent. In fact, “if somebody had pointed out my resemblance to a conqueror burning the enemy’s churches and smashing its icons — I would have had to admit that I was relishing my ownership of the house”.

Things aren’t much easier in the outside world, ruled by the all-importance of being popular — the great curse of being young. Going camping with a youth group, he remembers, “I wanted to toughen up my image and make myself more stupid.”

He tries to do this by continually exclaiming, “Son of a bitch!”, but the only social result is provoking his canoe mate to reply wearily, “Yes, you certainly are one.”

Ultimately, Franzen’s highly readable, slightly caramel-flavoured writing has something more important than just charm, and a couple of essays address themselves to the state of America, a crass society dragging the world into unwinnable wars. Franzen loves birdwatching, but has problems with it. It’s not a fashionable pursuit, for one thing. More than that, though, the birds themselves are all but doomed, like most of what is valuable about the planet: “The transformation of a quiet, sandpiper-friendly beach into a high-density population centre was such a novelty for us that we didn’t even have a category for the loss it represented.”

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