The Corrections: A Novel
by Jonathan Franzen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan FranzenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-01
ISBN: 0312421273
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Picador
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780312421274
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Corrections: A Novel
Book Review: Real fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
I was trying to figure out why some reviewers don't like this rather extraordinary novel. At first I thought it was the "American Beauty" thing, you know, the desecration of middle America through satire that the Heartland will not tolerate in either Oscar-winning movies or attempts at The Great American Novel (such as might be mentioned on Oprah). Then I thought it was the sheer length of Franzen's tome (as one reviewer so succinctly and dryly observed, "He left nothing out") and his "Look Ma, I'm writing" grandstanding. But along about page 370 or so I realized the truth: yes, it is some of the above, but more than anything it's the sexuality and especially the sexual portrait of Denise Lambert that some people don't like.
Did Franzen come up with a living, breathing Portrait of the Lesbian as a Young Woman? I don't think so. I don't think that Denise's character and her sexuality were properly integrated. He has Denise learn her attitude or "technique," if you will, from three different older men, a somewhat crude threesome that no self-respecting Sappho would imitate even for contrast. Her "childlessness," (that Enid frets over) is a result of being involved with the wrong men.
Additionally, while circumspect and careful to avoid the grossest of crudities in his recollecting of human sexuality, Franzen nonetheless sometimes shows a distinct lack of sensitivity.
Furthermore, the depressing story of Alfred Lambert, particularly his physical and mental decline told in excruciating detail, made us wonder about the purpose of life and left us more than a little afraid for ourselves when contemplating our declining years.
Could Franzen have used a better editor? Perhaps. But what editor would have the confidence to trim a Great Artist in the Making? Editors today are largely acquisition experts and salespersons. Today's novelist is essentially alone. Maxwell Perkins died a long time ago.
Okay, what is the strength The Corrections? (Incidentally the title refers to not only to the Heartland of America in need of corrections scenario that Franzen so well chronicles, but with the coming "correction" in the stock market, and the corrections that Enid urged on everyone including herself, and finally the correction of life itself with death.)
Franzen's strength is in his vivid and consistent characterizations, his complete narrative control, his sharp dialogue and his inner monologues, as right as rain, and his veracious social and cultural detail. He recalls the spats of domestic infighting so vividly that we feel we are there (perhaps again). He can take both sides in equal appreciation and then show us in commentary and steams of consciousness just how delusive are the combatants, just how blind they are to their narrow-minded, selfish behaviors.
For example, Gary and Caroline are arguing about whether they should go to his parents for Christmas (the main plot line of the novel). Caroline faults her mother-in-law: "...as soon as I leave the room she's going to...take food from the trash and feed it to my children-" At the same time she tells Gary he is clinically depressed and needs to seek treatment. Meanwhile Gary sneaks gin and obsesses with control issues. He feels laughed at in his own home (and he is). It is all a battle for the upper hand, domestic politics at the front, which means in bed, at the dinner table, using the kids as allies, blaming the in-laws for the bad nurturing and the flawed genetic input. In other words, life at home next door.
Naturally this will not sit well with some people. Life seen up close and full of warts is not the sort of thing that many people want in their fiction. They want to be uplifted and made glad. If they wanted gross reality and the sheen rubbed off they'd go see an art film or visit THEIR in-laws. So I can understand how some people feel that a sign reading "this way lies depression" ought to be affixed to this novel; indeed Franzen's characters leave us uninspired and a little sad realizing how close we are to them. They achieve a superficial level of self-awareness and then stop. Cold. (Do we do that?) They are the blind, and Franzen has cleverly persuaded us that we the readers are the sighted.
There's a lot of sex in this novel, but then again there's a lot of sex in human beings, whether we like it or not. Franzen's technique is to employ an unsettling honesty. His inner monologues with Chip and Gary may seem excessive, but if we can recall ourselves at thirty-something we know that sexual obsession was always just beneath the radar of overt consciousness, occasionally rising bodaciously to the surface.
In the final analysis I think that Franzen tried to do too much. Some of his readers are annoyed that they had to read such a long novel, and "had to" is appropriate because Franzen's narrative is compelling. We want to finish the book because his characters are interesting and we want to find out what happens to them. This in itself is a great triumph for a novelist. I just think that Franzen could have spared us most or all of (for example) Denise's sexual misadventures. The satire of the seniors aboard the cruise ship was fine and the Lithuanian and biomed excursions familiar but tolerable. The long drawn-out decline and fall of Alfred and how it affected his family, especially his wife, was really the emotional and thematic heart of the novel: We are flesh; partly sighted, partly blind; we decline, decay, lose our faculties and expire. Rhyme or reason notwithstanding.
Read this book. You may like it, you may not. Regardless, it will be hard to deny that this is a genuine novel, an all-too-rare attempt at going inside the human psyche to reveal something psychologically real. As I like to say, "What could be truer than fiction?" Real fiction, that is.
Summary of The Corrections: A Novel
Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.
All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye:
Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo
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