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thinpartitions 's review for:
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
To start: I'm not a member of the Ideal Audience for this book. Much as I enjoyed--and "enjoyed" falls far short as a descriptor for the pleasure I hope to indicate--his gift for prose styling, I could not divorce myself and My Own Life Experiences from my reading of the plot itself.
Simply put, I found myself dreading quite actively any efforts to return to the book after I had put it down--having finished a chapter, having fallen asleep during my Last Words Before Midnight reading-in-bed ritual--and, in the end, had to leave off entirely. Friends who know me may not be surprised by my decision; a book that features a middle-aged man who views himself as a failed academic* and who (with his siblings) watches his parents succumb to the diminishing effects of the aging process = not quite the book for me, unless I'm looking for something that will (literally? figuratively?) hold down the accelerator while I follow Davis and Sarandon down the express route to the canyon's bottom.
All that said: there are times when I feel as if I've read this plot before, y'know? One of my grad school profs once noted that the "domestic family drama" represents the heart of American narrative--and, while he referred specifically to theatrical works, he could have pushed his claim to cover a wider spectrum of narrative. Even so, I found something about this particular version of that plot to be *unusually* familiar, such that the plot itself--even in tandem with Franzen's obvious stylistic graces--couldn't pull me past my own "reader-response." The fault may be mine, but it is what is.
I did, however, pass my copy along to A Good Home.
*Note: This shouldn't be taken as some veiled confession that I boinked a student and lost my tenured professorship. I've never been tenure-track, let alone held a tenured position, and I assure you, my students think of me as "old" and "round," both of which are impediments to assignations of any kind.
Simply put, I found myself dreading quite actively any efforts to return to the book after I had put it down--having finished a chapter, having fallen asleep during my Last Words Before Midnight reading-in-bed ritual--and, in the end, had to leave off entirely. Friends who know me may not be surprised by my decision; a book that features a middle-aged man who views himself as a failed academic* and who (with his siblings) watches his parents succumb to the diminishing effects of the aging process = not quite the book for me, unless I'm looking for something that will (literally? figuratively?) hold down the accelerator while I follow Davis and Sarandon down the express route to the canyon's bottom.
All that said: there are times when I feel as if I've read this plot before, y'know? One of my grad school profs once noted that the "domestic family drama" represents the heart of American narrative--and, while he referred specifically to theatrical works, he could have pushed his claim to cover a wider spectrum of narrative. Even so, I found something about this particular version of that plot to be *unusually* familiar, such that the plot itself--even in tandem with Franzen's obvious stylistic graces--couldn't pull me past my own "reader-response." The fault may be mine, but it is what is.
I did, however, pass my copy along to A Good Home.
*Note: This shouldn't be taken as some veiled confession that I boinked a student and lost my tenured professorship. I've never been tenure-track, let alone held a tenured position, and I assure you, my students think of me as "old" and "round," both of which are impediments to assignations of any kind.