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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Amid the media fizz, the novel of the year is a brilliant but strangely old-fashioned story of an intensely real family facing the perils of life in America.
Sep 7, 2001 | Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" arrives amid so much fanfare -- most of it surface noise for which the author himself cannot be held responsible -- that it's hard to remember that there's a book somewhere underneath it all. If it were possible to strip away the breathless blurbation, the vapid magazine profiles and the envious cocktail chatter (although of course it isn't), we'd be left with an ingenious update of the old-fashioned Anglo-American social novel: an ironic family chronicle, by turns comic and sober, that seeks to measure the strength and density of the moral weave enfolding its characters.
Actually, the overly juiced hubbub surrounding "The Corrections" is not unlike something that might happen in the more satirical reaches of "The Corrections" itself. Here we have a dark, even scathing book about family power struggles, sharply critical of capitalism and of our therapeutic culture, which offers its characters only a qualified and limited redemption and promises nothing better than madness and death at the end of life. It becomes the unlikely object of a fizzing media frenzy whose superficiality alienates the very people most likely to admire the book. I've had three literate-minded friends in the past two weeks, when told I was reading "The Corrections," roll their eyes and make snorting noises: "So -- is it the Great American Novel or what?"
Well, perhaps not, and in any case that phrase should never be written or uttered by anyone. But "The Corrections" is a lumpy, strange, singular work, very much of this moment even as it harks back to a kind of American novel long deemed extinct. Its portrayal of American family life sometimes seems cruel and unforgiving, yet the sheer amplitude of its vision implies a kind of sympathy, or at least understanding. First and foremost, Franzen's saga of Alfred and Enid Lambert, and their three grown children's attempts to "correct" for the emotional suffocation of their Midwestern household, buzzes with life. It's a vivid reading experience of tremendous texture and dimension, a masterwork of observed detail. It's not always likable, but it's real.
Franzen is a peculiar case among American writers. Within the literary world, he is often linked with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, yet he is decidedly the least famous of the four, and is better known for a single magazine article than for his previous novels. The New York Public Library has no circulating copies of his second novel, "Strong Motion" (1994), and does not seem to acknowledge the existence of his first novel, "The Twenty-Seventh City" (1987), at all. (It's actually there, filed under "Frantzen.")
His literary reputation rests at least partly on "Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels," an impassioned manifesto published in Harper's in 1996. In it, Franzen argued that literary fiction was dying but that America still had room for socially committed novels with compelling characters that didn't bore the pants off readers accustomed to the pace and tone of Hollywood entertainment. The article -- which partly seemed like self-excoriation and partly like a memo to idols like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon -- caused a great deal of bruised reflection in literary circles. "The Corrections" is bound to be viewed by some readers as Franzen's other shoe finally hitting the floor, five years later.
