Not 'The Great American Novel', But Pretty Great Nonetheless: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections

I wonder if you had the same first encounter with "The Corrections" that I had. Weeks of hearing its praises sung by respected reviewers from coast-to-coast. An almost universal concurrence that if this wasn't indeed the Great American Novel, than at least it’s the closest we've come in years. Deducing that not only was it a post-modern masterpiece, akin to David Foster Wallace with more accessibility, but also a darkly comic vivisection of a modern midwestern family. Then, despite its status as a hardcover book and your self-imposed budget-induced embargo against such artifacts, taking the trip to the bookstore anyway so you too can join in on the fun. Only to be thwarted, once you got there, by the giant 'O' firmly stamped on the book's front cover. Did you walk out, empty-handed and head hung low, as I did? Sure you were being a snob but, by definition, not caring?

So now its one year later, and the 'O' is gone from the cover, replaced on the paperback edition by the more respectable assertions that "The Corrections" won the National Book Award and was a #1 National Bestseller. The whole Oprah fiasco, a tragi-comedy that probably didn't hurt sales or its status as an elitist manifesto, over and forgotten. The book is now safe for literary snobs to lap up with impunity.

So, once you've macheted through the hype and the scandal is the book worth the read? Oh, yeah. And then some.

Set in St. Jude, a fictional city in, I think, Ohio, but really more of a Midwestern Everycity, "The Corrections" is the story of the Lambert family. Father Alfred is slowly fading away, due to the onset of Parkinson's Disease. Mother Enid wants her family, which also consists of her grown children Gary, Chip, and Denise, to spend one last Christmas in their childhood home. These are highly intelligent but emotionally scarred people. These are the Royal Tenenbaums, these are Salinger's Glass family. As Enid's attempt at a reunion are consistently rebuffed, author Jonathan Franzen presents the reader with a portrait, a dramatic tableau, of each member of the Lambert family, the better to understand why they wouldn't want to come home for Christmas, but probably should anyway.

The book is divided up into long chapters, each focusing on one member of the Lambert family. It would seem to be a simple structure, one that even the most pedestrian reader could follow. But this belies the complexity within each chapter. Time, in Franzen's hands, is dynamic, as he jumps liberally back into each character's past, then slowly forward to the present. He does this with skill and precision, but also without fanfare. Careful attention must be paid, else a lazy reader will get lost. This technique allows Franzen to slowly build up the fabric of the Lambert family, as the reader sees patterns emerge within the lives of each character. It also helps that Franzen allows you inside the characters' heads, to see the world through their eyes, giving their internal dialogues a chance to be heard. What you see and hear, however, is not always pretty. Often times, these people -- like, I suspect, most of us -- are quite ugly in their private moments. You'll see how Alfred's dementia makes his life a confusing place, how oldest son Gary's depression creates in his home life an oppressive hell, how middle child Chip's obsessions and fantasies and masturbatory perversions do their best to ruin his promising teaching career, and how youngest child Denise's own confusion and anger conspire to ruin every relationship she has. Each character's thoughts, as they would themselves think them, are laid bold on the page. It's an intriguing and credible rhetorical technique that Franzen's skill as a writer pulls off perfectly.

The allusion to David Foster Wallace above was no mistake, for Franzen, on top of being a close friend of Wallace's, is perched only a few branches over from him on the post-modern literary tree. Although not as apparently prodigious as Wallace (a tendency to flaunt is that writer's Achilles' heel), Franzen lets his technique show far too often. Writing that strives to tear apart the seams of literary convention often times bores me. I prefer it when a writer just comes up with a stronger stitch. Franzen toes the line between these two tendencies.

When writing about Gary and his family, for example, Franzen uses an inordinate amount of exclamation points. Usually this would indicate a flaw in the author, that his limp prose must rely on punctuation to convey meaning. But Franzen, in full control of his prose and willing to show his skill at every turn, uses it to indicate something about character: that Gary and family, outwardly successful, are empty and dysfunctional on the inside. It's a less than subtle technique, though. At least the other characters wear their dysfunction under their sleeves; Gary's is right there in the punctuation. Less effective still is Franzen's use of that suddenly-tired modern literary convention, the e-mail conversation. Chip and Denise's dialogue would have been traded through lengthy, handwritten letters, doing yeomen's work marking the passage of time, if this novel had been written but ten years ago. Now, they just exchange half-formed thoughts, inside jokes, and not much content. Maybe that's the point (not maybe; I'd gather that is exactly the point), but it made for unenlightened reading. Neal Stephenson, in his long crypto-tome "Cryptonomicon", is the only writer I've encountered so far who has been able to effectively update this technique for the modern age.

More effective, however, is the way Franzen recasts familiar situations to suit the inner thoughts of the character they are happening too. Alfred's battle with overwhelming incontinence is told as if he were planning the safety inspection of a railroad (one of his duties before he retired). Denise's sexual technique is recounted as if it were a recipe for a particularly complicated dish (she's a cook by trade). These, and others just like them, are wonderful extended passages, where Franzen ably relates the inner and outer lives of these characters, allowing them to intertwine into one level of existence.

The inner lives of his characters are further complicated by his use of an omniscient and often times judgmental third person narrator. This technique is usually reserved for objective storytelling, presenting the facts as they lay. But Franzen's authorial voice has an intelligence and awareness all its own. Witness this little bit about Enid:

"'There's bacon, you like bacon,' Enid sang. This was a cynical, expedient fraud, one of her hundred daily conscious failures as a mother."

These are the narrator's words ("a cynical, expedient fraud"), not any one character's. Never afraid to take a stand, Franzen performs vivisection after vivisection on his unsuspecting creations, the better to understand them inside and out.

It also leads, quite neatly, into one of the novel's main themes. Enid, despite her protestations, is a dominant force in the Lambert home. She is duplicitous, judgmental, and oppressive. But instead of being ignorant of these facets of her personality, Enid is aware that they're there, even going so far as to nurture her mania. "I don't [know what they are]," she says, referring to some erotica she found that's related to Chip's new job. "I don't want to know," she admits, when pressed by Denise. An outsider, one not related and presumably immune to her subconscious tactics, would probably find Enid and pleasant but banal woman. Her family, on the other hand, finds her almost demonic. "I guess I should just never say anything," she complains to Denise at one point. "Just say things that are true," her daughter replies, defining the actuality and the potential of her mother in just those six words. It is Enid and her focused obsessions that drive the narrative forward. Her attempts to bring her family back to their childhood home are almost comical, given the fact that, as is observed early on, "the fiction of living in [that] house was that no one lived here." It was growing up in this home that causes Chip to remark, to a student of his blessed with a seemingly copasetic relation with her parents, that "children are not supposed to get along with their parents… There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person." This is a common adolescent argument, but one gets the feeling that Chip feels it more deeply than your average teenager -- and these words are spoken when he's in his thirties.

The other theme that dominates the novel is the American Midwest. Just as similar magnetic poles repel and opposite magnetic poles attract, the Midwest repels and attracts those that once lived there. Enid and Alfred appear stuck to their longtime home, unwilling to give it up for the sake of Alfred's medical care. St. Jude, after all, is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Their children, once they are of age, all flee for the east coast, reluctant to return lest they get stuck again. Gary sums up their collective feelings quite succinctly when he "[wishes] that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all mid-westerners 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." The Midwest is comforting as a reminder of a burdensome childhood that no one wishes to revisit. Or do they? Denise recognizes a pleasing midwestern quality in one of her lovers, clarifying that it "meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-minded."

Besides the ethereal themes above, the novel contains at least two rather dominant motifs. The first is a repeated use of C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia". The second is important enough to be granted a high status position as the novel's title.

Gary's boys, in the midst of a turbulent night between him and his wife Caroline, are excited to start reading "Prince Caspian". Denise, expressing love for a city she didn't grow up in, declares, "the urban vacancy of Philadelphia, the hegemony of wind and sky here, struck her as enchanted. As Narnian." But most apparent is a fictional anti-depressant drug named… wait for it… "Aslan". It's been years since I read "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe", but a friend of mine, who recently took an adult trip to Narnia, reminded me of the common belief that the books represented a biblical allegory, and that Aslan often is interpreted as a Christ-like figure. Now, there's not a lot of talk about religion in "The Corrections", which is a strange statement to make about a book dealing with a mother's attempts to gather her family together for one last Christmas. But that's probably because, "although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about [its] ornament[s] [i.e., her Advent Calendar]." Still, I suspect that with the "Aslan" drug, Franzen is making specific reference to Marx' oft-quoted maxim, "Religion is the opium of the people." Here, that metaphor is taken one step further: the pacifying forces of religion are found in pill form.

The second motif, less explicit but more tangible, is the corrections themselves. Chip must rush to his editor's office to make corrections on a screenplay. A young Alfred resolves to spoil Denise, like he didn't Gary and Chip, but the act of making love to his pregnant wife, of "squirt[ing] filth on [the baby inside] when she was helpless", was a first betrayal that Denise would later reciprocate. "What made correction possible also doomed it." Gary spends much of his time trying to make a shrewd stock investment, in a period of time where even the most proletarian investor was making money, never thinking of the inevitable built-in correction that will soon level the market out. Denise, in a typical moment of lucid self-awareness, attempts to correct herself, in order to please her mother. But it's the final correction that the novel is working towards. It's the last piece of the puzzle, the one that will ultimately determine the characters' fates. It's an emotional moment, which shocked me, coming at the end of a novel full of intentional coldness and repression.

Has Franzen written the Great American Novel? It's great, and it surely is American, but applying that three-word adjective to this tome at this point is a little hasty. I suspect, because it makes specific reference to pop culture icons of its time (Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Aniston, and Chloe Sevigny -- amongst many others -- are all name-checked here), it might not be relevant five or ten years down the road. Is it a darkly comic vivisection of a modern midwestern family? It sure is. Funny and tragic at once, Franzen is able to straddle the line between these two tones with remarkable ease. His book is truly insightful, mercilessly satiric, and endlessly readable. Not a book that will change the world, mind you, but still well worth the read.