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3.74 AVERAGE
3.74 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
funny
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
3.5 rounded up. This reminded me of those family drama Christmas movies, you know the ones, where everyone is dysfunctional in their own nuclear families and they struggle until they all get together in the end at Christmas. Then they're still struggling but mom sits back with a glass of wine and watches the dysfunction with a smile. That's not exactly what happens here, but same vibe.
Ugliness is on top billing of the marquee, on full display with Franzen's "The Corrections". Franzen deconstructs a midwestern family through a lens of ennui, disgust and indignity. The book is divided into the lives of the patriarch, his wife and his children, and all get lassoed into some life crisis: pharmaceuticals, affairs with a married man (and his wife!), and collusion with a Eastern European thug.
My problem is not the subject mattter, but more so how Franzen belittles his characters. Every description and action shows a little more of the family's shame or how little they can do to change anything. Further, the length of the book is not warranted. He could have easily edited this down to get to the core essence. We whallow in the misery for far too long, and too little value is give.
My biggest grip is how little change see in attitudes, plot or story structure. I can discern the unique characters of Chip or Gary, but they all generally have a defeatist attitude, and we only see them at their worst.
Overall, I don't recommend reading this novel.
My problem is not the subject mattter, but more so how Franzen belittles his characters. Every description and action shows a little more of the family's shame or how little they can do to change anything. Further, the length of the book is not warranted. He could have easily edited this down to get to the core essence. We whallow in the misery for far too long, and too little value is give.
My biggest grip is how little change see in attitudes, plot or story structure. I can discern the unique characters of Chip or Gary, but they all generally have a defeatist attitude, and we only see them at their worst.
Overall, I don't recommend reading this novel.
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn’t know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth.
How can you distinguish the people when everybody pretends to be the same?
My first Franzen, and he got me with that first, soaring and ominous sentence: “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.” I was expecting a festive celebration of language and psychology, but that it was to be as astounding as it ended up being was beyond my expectations. Gritty, bitter and sad, dizzyingly hopeless. Life lived and lost.
I count myself lucky to have read the book now, 15 years after publication. The dust has settled, and while everyone first thought it was the best thing ever, and after a while thought it must be the worst thing ever, what's left now is the book itself.
Having John William's Stoner (1965) fresh in my mind, it was easy to find in that work an apparent precursor to Franzen's work. There’s the same direct and cruel honesty, so much so that the characters are so strongly non-idealized, a degree of which is needed for their likability, that they become — well, they become very real, instead, so real that one starts to believe them when they reason, believe that they do what they do because it makes sense to them, or that they’re trying, really trying. Franzen’s characters, the family in the epicenter, are inchoate and hardly make sense even to themselves and their relationships are dysfunctional and illusory. They prevaricate when they think they’re lucid, and they flaunt in their earnestness. Their perfidiousness is obvious to all except themselves. Each person is more squalid than the next, and they really can’t see the mote for the beam.
And if it weren’t so, The Corrections wouldn’t be the marvelous book that it is. All the characters fight for agency and meaning, attrition their great nemesis as they yearn for acceptance, love and success in their own terms. Franzen doesn’t make them to be blameless in their plight, far from it, which only enables him to truly reveal their humanity and humaneness, since this is not morality Franzen lays before us in plain words. There’s no golden rule or a way out. The crux is in the plaintive pattern of social distrust, instead, and entropy, and the inherent irrevocability of it all. When we wonder with Alfred how “it was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world,” we also acknowledge it to be only partially true. The world turns and there is no new dawn, merely darkness and oblivion. It merely ends, and the rest is silence.
It is this lack of apparent catharsis that lends substance to the story. It makes it real, in fact painfully so, but Franzen’s affable style and keen eye for the comic in the tragic turns a tale that could have been unreadably depressing into a glowing, near-prophetic elegy, stately and brilliant, even life-affirming with its anxiety-ridden heart. Indeed, Franzen’s keen ear for comic timing and his stunning skill with the written word make this enjoyable, in fact mostly hilarious, and far from a burdensome “intellectual” reading exercise. (I know many people will have found the book just that, but I just can't relate to them this time.) Not that there isn’t any kind of change, mind, but in Franzen’s hands the cathartic realizations of his characters are the corrective measures implied to in the book’s title, not an all-encompassing solution for a decidedly successful turn of events. The universe doesn’t neatly fold into their hands, and adaptation is their only choice as the path keeps on swirling into the distance.
I marvel at Franzen’s wisdom, clarity of thought, mastery of language and ultimately, the ability to sit quietly and perceive what his characters are doing and why. The Corrections is, for me, everything I look for when reading fiction.
30 June,
2016
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
funny
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I read this book to better understand why we hate Jonathan Franzen. I wasn’t expecting to like it, both because my impression of the author has been unfavorable and because I don’t typically like Critically Acclaimed Contemporary American Fiction. Sure enough, I didn’t like it. But it’s really a good novel, largely because of how unlikeable it. The whole thing is aggressively unpleasant. The world of this novel is dreary and intensely grey. My favorite passage made me viscerally anxious—an uptight eldest son tries to plan Christmas with his mom on the phone as his wife and kids demand his attention. Immediately after comes the icing on the cake; discussing money, they all switch to a more fluent, candid register. The novel centers on these essential tensions in a repressed, Midwestern, suburban family and the ways that they’re sublimated. It’s appropriate that the prose matches this, but, again, it’s not pretty.
In trying to sort out my thoughts about the novel, I read a somewhat famous essay by Franzen that was published in Harpers’ in the late 1990s. In the first two acts, he drones on and on, blaming television for how novels were better in the good ol’ days—an insight he came up with at the wizened old age of 32. He tells of how an undergrad made a comment to him, skeptical of reading a novel “linearly.” This prompted him to draft an essay titled “My Obsolescence.” This is the navel-gazing martyr that I had gotten a glimpse of in interviews. As it turns out, it’s also a literary device. He introduces the reader to a detestable version of himself—depressed, supercilious, and prematurely ornery. (And, yes, he complains about the excesses of political correctness.) Then he introduces research about who reads novels and why, finally coming to terms with his loneliness and despair about the state of the world. But even at the end of this hero’s micro-journey, the advice he quotes from a weary Don Delillo offers a palpable contrast—a mature novelist versus an anxious mess who’s managed to tire himself out.
The Corrections does a similar thing with Chip, the main character. (The prose also follows the quantity AND quality approach.) There’s really nothing to like about Chip. By the end, while the novel avoids the maudlin ending it knows it can’t allow itself, Chip has become a more respectable version of himself. He has shaped up and softened up, confirmed by the loss of the cast iron rivet he put in his ear at the beginning--one part self-acceptance and two or three parts self discipline. This is all well and good—and Franzen actually pulls it off—but the character is barely disguised as a voodoo doll whom the author shapes out of his own insecurities. The world of Franzen is a big pity party, and it can’t help but leak into his fiction.
The Corrections won the National Book Award and sold 1.6 million copies. He gained some notoriety—and his book got a sales boost—when he complained in an interview about being picked for Oprah’s Book Club. He achieved both critical and commercial success, but he seems plagued by a fear that the cool kids won’t like him. (In the Harper’s essay published years before The Corrections, he mentions wanting to convince his brother that he’s a better writer than Michael Crichton, which seems like an obviously futile exercise borne out of a weird hang-up with High Art.) On one hand, that kind of sore winner mentality is aggravating. But on the other, maybe eventually he will become the writer that he wants to be. Maybe he knows what he’s capable of—and he’s undeniably talented. But in The Corrections, he’s not there yet. He produced a postmodern novel but with the edges sanded off. Like with his Harpers essay, he seems to thrive at articulating conventional wisdom in a literary and precise--but not trenchant--way. While the titular corrections are the solutions of modernity, and the conflicts come from the unintended consequences of these easy answers, his novel relies on a subtle kind of deus ex machina to redeem the errors. The novel shows a glimpse of the world bigger than the living room of a dysfunctional Minnesota family, yet Franzen's WASP modesty and self-loathing keeps him from getting flamboyant with it. Consequently, his vignette of Lithuania goes from a fun critique of neoliberalism to an Eastern bloc caricature. His hints at queer sexual identities and relationships usually come out sideways, such as when Denise briefly imagines kissing her mom with tongue. And, most frustratingly, he serves up irony without humor. As he puts it himself in his Harpers essay, “I think there’s very little good fiction that isn’t funny.” I agree.
I’m done with Franzen for the foreseeable future, at least until he makes another outrageous statement in an interview. I don’t necessarily love how he’s become a punching bag for a younger generation of readers and writers, but that’s his problem. If he ever becomes a Michael Crichton fan, however, I’d be very interested in reading what he comes up with.
In trying to sort out my thoughts about the novel, I read a somewhat famous essay by Franzen that was published in Harpers’ in the late 1990s. In the first two acts, he drones on and on, blaming television for how novels were better in the good ol’ days—an insight he came up with at the wizened old age of 32. He tells of how an undergrad made a comment to him, skeptical of reading a novel “linearly.” This prompted him to draft an essay titled “My Obsolescence.” This is the navel-gazing martyr that I had gotten a glimpse of in interviews. As it turns out, it’s also a literary device. He introduces the reader to a detestable version of himself—depressed, supercilious, and prematurely ornery. (And, yes, he complains about the excesses of political correctness.) Then he introduces research about who reads novels and why, finally coming to terms with his loneliness and despair about the state of the world. But even at the end of this hero’s micro-journey, the advice he quotes from a weary Don Delillo offers a palpable contrast—a mature novelist versus an anxious mess who’s managed to tire himself out.
The Corrections does a similar thing with Chip, the main character. (The prose also follows the quantity AND quality approach.) There’s really nothing to like about Chip. By the end, while the novel avoids the maudlin ending it knows it can’t allow itself, Chip has become a more respectable version of himself. He has shaped up and softened up, confirmed by the loss of the cast iron rivet he put in his ear at the beginning--one part self-acceptance and two or three parts self discipline. This is all well and good—and Franzen actually pulls it off—but the character is barely disguised as a voodoo doll whom the author shapes out of his own insecurities. The world of Franzen is a big pity party, and it can’t help but leak into his fiction.
The Corrections won the National Book Award and sold 1.6 million copies. He gained some notoriety—and his book got a sales boost—when he complained in an interview about being picked for Oprah’s Book Club. He achieved both critical and commercial success, but he seems plagued by a fear that the cool kids won’t like him. (In the Harper’s essay published years before The Corrections, he mentions wanting to convince his brother that he’s a better writer than Michael Crichton, which seems like an obviously futile exercise borne out of a weird hang-up with High Art.) On one hand, that kind of sore winner mentality is aggravating. But on the other, maybe eventually he will become the writer that he wants to be. Maybe he knows what he’s capable of—and he’s undeniably talented. But in The Corrections, he’s not there yet. He produced a postmodern novel but with the edges sanded off. Like with his Harpers essay, he seems to thrive at articulating conventional wisdom in a literary and precise--but not trenchant--way. While the titular corrections are the solutions of modernity, and the conflicts come from the unintended consequences of these easy answers, his novel relies on a subtle kind of deus ex machina to redeem the errors. The novel shows a glimpse of the world bigger than the living room of a dysfunctional Minnesota family, yet Franzen's WASP modesty and self-loathing keeps him from getting flamboyant with it. Consequently, his vignette of Lithuania goes from a fun critique of neoliberalism to an Eastern bloc caricature. His hints at queer sexual identities and relationships usually come out sideways, such as when Denise briefly imagines kissing her mom with tongue. And, most frustratingly, he serves up irony without humor. As he puts it himself in his Harpers essay, “I think there’s very little good fiction that isn’t funny.” I agree.
I’m done with Franzen for the foreseeable future, at least until he makes another outrageous statement in an interview. I don’t necessarily love how he’s become a punching bag for a younger generation of readers and writers, but that’s his problem. If he ever becomes a Michael Crichton fan, however, I’d be very interested in reading what he comes up with.