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.

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.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Since Chris and Alyson have already read and reviewed this book, I'm not going to go in depth about the plot. I'm going to talk about the things I liked in bullet points, and then I'm going to take a nap.

Despite nearly constant profanity, obscenity, and scatalogical references in the first two thirds of the book, VGL still managed a large number of very poignant moments, which I won't enumerate here since I think Carlton is going to read this book.

- The writing itself was really good, although it took some adjusting, partly due to the things metioned in the previous point.

- You have no idea how strange of a book this is until you get to the last third. There's barely even a hint. I think that's a positive.

- This book is funny.

One of the most interesting aspects was the way that Vernon sees the world. Despite using language that would make Scocese blush, he's really nothing more than a naive innocent, caught in the middle of events much bigger than himself, manipulated by everyone around him, and thrust into situations over which he has no control. Somehow, Pierre manages to make Vernon both vulnerable and likeable.

The only downside is that VGL might be a little much for some people. Frank descriptions of sexual abuse and violence, along with making light of school shootings, is probably going to make this a poor choice for grandmothers or children.