Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In my experience, when things start to crumble in the original home, when the parents start to have problems, it will seldom happen at a time when everything is just sailing along smoothly in the lives of children. For some perverse reason, the call from the hospital or wherever will almost always come at the most inconvenient, the worst possible time. There's some absolute freak-out event going down in the children's lives as well. That was the structuring principle for "The Corrections," each of the children freaking out for reasons of their own at just the wrong time, just as the roof is caving in back in St. Jude, where Enid and Alfred live. Denise, who's managed to make it through her 20s working hard and also keeping the lid on as her father did, she hits 32 and suddenly it doesn't make any sense. Nothing has been examined and everything is chaotic. And she does have to loosen the lid because it's no longer an option to do what repressed people of 50 years ago did.
Probably my favorite character in the book is Enid, who starts out being the kind of mom you grate your teeth over, and then just keeps unfolding in so many surprising ways until she becomes almost a towering, tragic figure in some way.
The funny thing is that she's the one character who, although she changes a little at the end, it's more like the book and the world change around her. What initially seem like ridiculous fantasies of hers and a really grating inability to face the reality of what's happening with her husband and her children remain largely unchanged, but that comes eventually to seem like a life-saving skill. The capacity to retain hope in the face of bad reality I think is a lovely thing. She's my favorite character, too, for those reasons. She wants something, lots of things. And I think people who want and are able to hope are the really great people of the world.
I have to ask, what's with the Narnia theme? It seems like it crops up over and over.
Hey, I like motifs as well as the next writer. Do you want me to do a little Cornell visiting lecture on themes of the book?
Just that theme.
But it ties in with all the others!
By all means, then, let's roll out the Cornell lecture.
OK. Well, let's first step waaay back and talk about the devaluation of adulthood in the country we live in. The commercial devaluation of it: So much cultural product is now aimed at children. The very basis of a consumer culture is to consume like kids, don't be restrained and so on. You don't call an older person Mr. Smith, you call him Joe now. It's like the whole country's been handed over to kids and you never have to stop being a kid. It's a social phenomenon that I was consciously engaging in the book. Now, I'm just going to set that on the back burner and let it simmer on low while we tend to the Narnia question.
The response of pretty much every character in the book to the pressures under which they find themselves is to pretend the pressures aren't there or to act out in some way, but just basically to avoid the reality. Over and over in the book I saw these various enchantments. You get stuck for years thinking that you're one way and then overnight the spell was broken and you see how things really are. That was something I was applying pretty much to every character and it's a model firmly set in my own imagination by the Narnia books. This idea of an alternate, childish universe that's parallel to and intermittently accessible from the everyday adult world is one that has resonance for me as just a feature of our psychology. You slip into this fantasy world and it's not always a bad thing. Enid lives in fantasy much of time and that's a good thing.
