Jonathan Franzen weaves avian interest into collection

Jonathan Franzen — the literary provocateur, Oprah Winfrey antagonist and author of well-reviewed novels of Midwestern life (“The Corrections,” “Freedom”) — has another, more rarefied passion: birding. His sometimes overbearing obsession with all things avian is one of the unifying motifs of his new collection of essays and reportage.

The best of the short pieces in “The End of the End of the Earth” is the title essay, which braids Franzen’s memories of his beloved Uncle Walt with an account of a luxury expedition to Antarctica with his brother. The link between the two narrative threads is Franzen’s inheritance from Walt, which enables his splurge on the trip.

Inevitably, there are birds in the essay — mostly penguins, and notably the rare and magnificent emperor penguin that Franzen, heroically, has spotted from the ship’s observation deck. Interrupting another adventure, the captain steers the ship to the penguin’s location. The camera-toting passengers disembark and crowd around the imperial bird that, Franzen writes, “faced the press corps in a posture of calm dignity.”

Later, accepting the thanks of his fellow travelers, the resolutely contrarian Franzen — a social media skeptic who refrains from trip photography — experiences an epiphany. “I finally had an inkling of how it must feel,” he writes, “to be a high-school athlete and come to school after scoring a season-saving touchdown …. I wondered if, all my life, in my refusal to be a joiner, I’d missed out on some essential human thing.”

Even richer than the

‘The End of the End of the Earth’

By Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $26 Antarctic travelogue, however, is Walt’s story, of an unhappy marriage, a tragic loss and a redemptive latelife love. A man of warmth and zest, he is the husband of Franzen’s father’s sister, Irma — a cold, obsessive woman who veers into dementia after their daughter’s fatal car crash. Walt has affairs but never divorces his wife.

After the death of Franzen’s father, Walt and Franzen’s mother discover a blissful mutual affinity. That grace, “the joyous surprise of that,” is fleeting, but it affects Walt — and Franzen — profoundly.

Franzen’s glimpses of global birds often are similarly fleeting. He compulsively keeps annual lists of his avian sightings. In “Missing,” his aim is to see “every endemic bird species on two islands, one Greater Antillean and one Lesser, in the seven days I had at my disposal.”

Beyond his lists, Franzen is stirred by birds — their haunting mix of grandeur, fragility and exquisite adaptability. He is disturbed by climate change, but more so by the human threats to their existence.

“Every year … hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport and general amusement,” he writes in “May Your Life Be Ruined.” “The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat.”

For this report, he takes readers to a wild-bird market in Egypt, encounters unrepentant cormorant hunters in Albania and travels with Bedouin falcon trappers who mutilate smaller birds to entrap their prey.

In “A Friendship,” he rues that he once declined Vollmann’s invitation, to him and the writer David Foster Wallace, to camp along the Salton Sea. The sea, “a dying lake in the desert east of San Diego, is one of the foulest-smelling and least camping-friendly places in the country,” Franzen explains.

Only later does he discover that it is also “one of the country’s premier birdwatching sites.” After Wallace’s 2008 suicide and the unraveling of Franzen’s friendship with Vollmann, that is not his only regret. “I wished that I could step, for a few days, into an alternate universe in which I camped there with my two gifted friends,” he writes, “a universe in which both of them were still alive and might start their own friendship.” It’s an instance of grace that Franzen let slip from his grasp.

Julia M. Klein, a cultural critic and reporter in Philadelphia, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. “Whose Boat Is This Boat? Comments That Don’t Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane” by the Staff of “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert

Last

(Simon & Schuster, $14.99)

week: —