03 The Corrections Jonathan Franzen

Meet the Lamberts, and go home for Christmas this year.

Chip - Golden boy, prick of a brother, and a pedophile

Denise - Home-wrecker, chef, sexual deviant

Gary - Family man + hater of his family = depression

Enid - Oppressed Midwestern wife, just wants one more Christmas in St. Jude

Alfred - Pater familias, dementia stricken, hero

I know that Mr. Chilton has read, reviewed and dismissed this novel. I have found it worthy, and I look forward to reading the next book with which Chris finds fault. Franzen has a style that isn’t his alone, but he has mastered it. I’m not a lover of the sentence. And I don’t like reading authors that put massive amounts of importance on each sentence they write. Franzen lets his prose flow like the true storyteller he is. The dialogue is real and believable. Each of the Lambert’s has their novella woven together in a page-turning family drama. Franzen makes the reader root for each of them, but all of them are less than admirable characters. I hope to read Freedom this year. What follows requires a spoiler alert, but seeing as most have already read it…

Chip is considered a wise, focused, and free child that was born during the good times of the Lambert history. In reality he is a failure. He can’t have a healthy relationship, he can’t keep a job, and he’s writing a screenplay that will forever be rejected due to his motivation for writing it: revenge. The entire family respects him though, and this affords him endless love and admiration. He accomplishes this by never telling them the truth, but even if he tried to tell the truth the parents and siblings would find a way to turn his admission into a positive. I love Chipper, he is doomed, but there is hope for that screenplay after all.
Denise is the confused youngest child and only daughter. She makes poor sexual decisions throughout her story and each ruins someone’s life. Her virginity is taken by an older, married man that is a subordinate to her father at work. Her first marriage springs from a work relationship but ends in lesbian exploration. And her ultimate relationship in the story consists of a heterosexual married couple; she fucks them both. Denise does have a conscious, and I love Denise, but she is a home-wrecker and disappointment to all she touches. A damn fine chef, and there is always a need for sustenance.

Gary is my least favorite of the five. All he loves becomes all he hates. He is spiteful and not the least bit redeeming. His depression affects his marriage and relationship with two of his three boys. An effort to appease his mother by showing up for Christmas only results in his judgment of the status of her existence and his father's decline.

Enid is taking care of Alfred. She hates her responsibility and needs help. Her lack of culture is masked by a love of Europe, but she only loves what she cannot have and there is little optimism for how her life will turn out. She sees her family creating their own lives as a sign to make one last effort at a family Christmas, a holiday that for her is a symbol of happiness from a time she wishes she could return.
Alfred is a hero. He is losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, but he takes care throughout his life to do the right thing. His depression comes from his inability to do things for himself. Early in life he finds release by experimenting in his basement. Late in life he finds freedom by napping in a chair. His quiet sadness is a hallmark of his generation. Never complain. Always support. He is my own grandfather and father wrapped in one.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

"The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself."

The Corrections is intense, well written and although more than 600 pages, it is so compelling that it becomes a fairly quick read. This book has been reviewed twice by both Brent Waggoner and

Chris Chilton, each making references to Carlton. I don't have anything further to add to their reviews, except that I enjoyed the book and was only occasionally made uncomfortable by the numerous sexual situations. Wikipedia has this to say about the book, and the drama surronding its fame, "The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction."

""So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's
nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said. "

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Here is my 62nd, and most likely final, book of the year, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Here is a review of the same book by Brent.

For those of you too lazy to click the link (Carlton), here is a plot summary: The Corrections follows the Lambert family as it deals with the quickly deepening Alzheimer's of its patriarch, Alfred. Five major narratives are weaved together: Alfred's, his wife Enid's, their sons Chip and Gary's, and their daughter Denise's. Chip is a former university professor disgraced by an affair with a student who gets involved with a complex scheme by a Lithuanian politician to defraud American investors. Gary is a wealthy but intensely unsatisfied broker whose family life is like a battlefield. Denise is a restaurant chef dealing with her sexuality.

On the surface The Corrections is very boring; most of the issues at hand are commonplace to the point of being uninspired. But Franzen imbues them with a deep wit and cautiously observed meticulousness that lends them the fullness of realism, tracing each character's life from early childhood. The Corrections has an epic sweep to it; it endeavors to capsulate five lives in five hundred pages and does pretty well.

I liked The Corrections, but I didn't really love it. For one, it reminded me of too many other books--White Noise, Disgrace, Money, Absurdistan--at different points, but each isolated part didn't really measure up to the work that it reminded me of. Furthermore, Franzen's prose is extremely bloated--some sentences ramble on for half a page. Here's a sample:

It was the alarm bell of anxiety... By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound.

It isn't that this style doesn't work; to the contrary, the way that it pyramids upon itself accurately reflects, I think, the jagged but connective nature of human thought and experience, which Franzen seeks to capture. But at times it can often be straning. Information in The Corrections comes at an overload pace, and because the phrasing can be so ungainly it seems anything but effortless. It's as if you can hear Franzen typing--as opposed to say, someone like Cormac McCarthy, whose sentences are so carefully composed and minimalist that they seem to exist absolutely and without a creator. Franzen's style works for the purpose; but to me it wears out its welcome.

Still, I enjoyed the book. If I hadn't known how much Brent liked it already, I probably would have recommended it to him because it has that quirky, true-to-life feel that seems to me in Brent's own style.

Postscript: I forgot another thing that bothered me about the book. There are lots of references to modern pop culture, but Franzen seems to be of two minds: at one point, he references a "famous director," but at another point, he namechecks Stephen Malkmus. One style suggests that Franzen wishes to strip temporal reference points from his book in order to give it the tone of timelessness; the other suggest that Franzen wants to act as a testament to his own place and time in the universe. Choose, dammit.

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

Like the other collections of essays I've reviewed this year, How to Be Alone doesn't lend itself to easy reviewing. It's made up of a series of essays that Franzen wrote between 1995 and 200o-something, and they cover topics ranging from his father's slow descent into Alzheimers, to some of the unbelivable oversights of the US Postal Service, to the ubiquity of sex-help books.

I found the essays in the collection quite moving and interesting for the most part. The running theme throughout is a loss of privacy and personality in a modern world, but the essays rarely seem curmudgeonly. The exception is his essay on literature in which he direly predicts that the novel will be virtually extinct within a few years, a bit of a paranoid reaction to have immediately before hitting it big with The Corrections. And, speaking of that book, the first essay about his father's disease makes it clear just how personal much of that work was. My favorite essays, however, were the one about the derelict postal service in inner city Chicago, and 'Reading in Bed,' the bes essay on sex in the public life that I've read.

If you enjoy essays (or if you liked The Corrections, as I did) you'll probably enjoy How to Be Alone. At least check out 'Reading in Bed.'

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is probably most famous for the brouhaha that occurred when Oprah selected it for her book club. Franzen made some unflattering comments about Oprah's audience and that ubiquitous sticker, and Oprah retracted her invitation for him to appear on her show. The Amazon reviews for The Corrections are split almost exactly between 1 and 5 star reviews, with many of the 1 star reviews mentioning Franzen's slight of Oprah and barely commenting on the work itself. Even Carlton, a huge fan of the greatest woman who has ever lived, dismissed the book after reading it because of what he termed Franzen's "inappropriate comments." I ask you, how is a book like this supposed to get a fair reading? Well, by being read, of course.

The plot of the book is rather simplistic on its face. Alfred Lambert is suffering from progressive dementia brought on by Alzheimers. Enid is his put-upon wife. Their son Chip is a disgraced college professor turned slacker. Their other son, Gary, has been financially successful but feels like an outsider in his own family, due partly to his clinical depression and partly to his shewish wife, and their divorced daughter Denise, who is experimenting with lesbianism. The storyline in the Corrections takes place mostly in the past, showing how each member of the family arrived at their current state and ultimately culminating in the family's last Christmas reunited. I won't say much about their eventual decisions and the results because Chris is reading the book and I don't want to spoil it.

This year, I've read more postmodern literature than ever before, and The Corrections seems to fall in that class. Most notably, I detected echoes of Delillo's White Noise. Many of the trademarks of pomo lit are here: the trivialization of the personal, the degeneration and reinvention of traditional roles, and the isolation and impersonality of the modern world. What was more surprising to me is the heart present here. Although there are elements of nihilism in The Corrections, the tone of the book overall is fun and incisive, and the characters, though deeply flawed, aren't emotionless caricatures. I wanted Chip to come home for Christmas, for Gary to reconnect with his family, and for Denise to succeed in something, and the book wants them to as well.

I am curious about why postmodern writers seem to have a fixation on bodily functions. There were two or three passages in the book about Alfred being tormented by a small chunk of fecal matter. I don't think that happened in any of the other books I read this year.