Outside Reading: Reflective Essay

Jonathan Franzen uses his personal experiences, written with humor, regret, and lessons learnt to explain a decision he has made, a code to live his life by. In his reflective essay for the New Yorker, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, he tells of how he decided to live within his means.
Franzen opens with an anecdote, common in reflective essays. Franzen makes it clear that the force behind all his actions is his poor wealth, as an almost desperate writer, this plays a part in the lessons learnt from his reflection. The essay takes place in the past; opening with “In the early nineties,” however, Franzen avoids any passive tense. Through a series of stories Franzen tells of his poor experiences house-sitting. “The first house I sat belonged to a professor at my alma mater”, immediately he saw all the outweighing downside to his new occupation, realizing “it’s in the nature of a borrowed house that its closets will be hung with someone else’s bathrobes, its refrigerator glutted with someone else’s condiments, its shower drain plugged with someone else’s hair.”  The point of the reflection was not, however, that it is an uncomfortable situation to live in someone else’s home. Though, this was all necessary to develop Franzen’s light-hearted tone and disappointed voice. The precedent that house sitting is bad must also be set. Only after Franzen had grown tired of living in another’s home was he told “This is my house, Jonathan.”
            At the next house, “the grand stucco house of two older friends, Ken and Joan, in Media, Pennsylvania”, Franzen reasserts, almost as an excuse, that he had “less than no money at all”.  Continuing with the comic tone he mocks his hosts “Ken gently chided Joan for having “bruised” with melting ice”, and states “The only thing I had to do to earn my keep in Media was mow Ken and Joan’s extensive lawn. Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities.” The most valuable thing stated by his hosts was that they always live beyond their means. Franzen takes this as advice. Implementing this advice comically, “by way of following Ken’s example of living beyond one’s means, I delayed the first mowing until the grass was so long that I had to stop and empty the clippings bag every five minutes” however perhaps seemingly comic, this turned out to be the catalyst for the change and revelation in Franzen’s life. “I delayed the second mowing even longer. By the time I got around to it, the lawn had been colonized by a large clan of earth-burrowing hornets”; the following anecdote contains the essay’s message. “Ken told me that I needed to visit the hornet homes one by one after dark, when the inhabitants were sleeping, and pour gasoline into the burrows and set them on fire.” With this advice Franzen almost burnt himself out of house and home, and he reflects “and the home wasn’t even mine”. The terrifying experience jolted Franzen. After much anticipation Franzen tells us what was learnt in punch-line-like format he concludes, “However modest my means were, it was seeming preferable, after all, to live within them.” Using short sentences, he bluntly ends with “I never house-sat again.” Lesson learnt.