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ndoth 's review for:
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
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.