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arthistamine 's review for:
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Let this one settle in for a night before writing a review. Freedom was my very first Franzen novel, earlier this summer where I devoured the first half and then felt like I was slogging through the rest. I had the reverse experience with The Corrections. The first half felt dizzyingly dense and strenuous and then suddenly the impossible tapestry that Franzen weaves at the beginning begins to unspool into some of the most engaging, rich, and heartbreaking narrative I’ve ever read.
The Corrections truly solidified for me around the original Lambert family dinner, the one with Denise in utero. The dynamics that stretch from the beginning and all the way to the end play out in one mundane middle American family dinner.
So what are the “corrections?” There’s Chip’s corrections for his truly god-awful sounding play, there’s Enid’s correction of her husband and children’s seeming misalignment with her ideal vision for a family, there’s Denise’s correction for the neglect she faced as the youngest, Gary’s correction of his own familial reenactment of his functionally dysfunctional childhood. And then there the correction of Alfred, the sun-downing and miserably misunderstood patriarch of the Lambert family. Alfred’s correction is a cover up of transgression that crossed his family life and his work. But there’s also the way that everyone seeks to correct Alfred’s Parkinson’s diagnosis and dementia. He ends up in what feels like an actual correctional facility (the coy euphemism the US uses to describe prisons), under custodial care that is worse than death.
In this way, correction also connects to incarceration, to the various levels that the penitential and punitive play out in our lives. Without explicitly stating it, I think Franzen is questioning the forms of imprisonment (again on more registers than I could account for in this review) we’ve created for other people and the ones we impose on ourselves. It’s then almost too fitting that Franzen next novel would explore the conceptual antithesis to imprisonment: Freedom.
The Corrections truly solidified for me around the original Lambert family dinner, the one with Denise in utero. The dynamics that stretch from the beginning and all the way to the end play out in one mundane middle American family dinner.
So what are the “corrections?” There’s Chip’s corrections for his truly god-awful sounding play, there’s Enid’s correction of her husband and children’s seeming misalignment with her ideal vision for a family, there’s Denise’s correction for the neglect she faced as the youngest, Gary’s correction of his own familial reenactment of his functionally dysfunctional childhood. And then there the correction of Alfred, the sun-downing and miserably misunderstood patriarch of the Lambert family. Alfred’s correction is a cover up of transgression that crossed his family life and his work. But there’s also the way that everyone seeks to correct Alfred’s Parkinson’s diagnosis and dementia. He ends up in what feels like an actual correctional facility (the coy euphemism the US uses to describe prisons), under custodial care that is worse than death.
In this way, correction also connects to incarceration, to the various levels that the penitential and punitive play out in our lives. Without explicitly stating it, I think Franzen is questioning the forms of imprisonment (again on more registers than I could account for in this review) we’ve created for other people and the ones we impose on ourselves. It’s then almost too fitting that Franzen next novel would explore the conceptual antithesis to imprisonment: Freedom.