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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
It has been suggested that Franzen is trying to drag American literary fiction back to basics, toward the character-based, big-canvas storytelling of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot. Of course somebody announces he is doing this every few years (it's almost always a he), but Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" and Kurt Andersen's "Turn of the Century," to cite two obvious examples, look like shallow-end dabbling by comparison. Wolfe and Andersen are broad-brush satirists whose central desire is to justify their own privilege and showcase their own brilliance; neither has anything like Franzen's moral intelligence or his ability to locate hidden meaning in ordinary places and ordinary moments.
Actually, I think the roots of "The Corrections" are closer to home, in a style of American novel that has come to seem backward since the 1960s. Franzen himself has cited Paula Fox's brilliant and cold-hearted "Desperate Characters" as an inspiration and probably would acknowledge John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom books as well. But those are glittering miniatures; to find novels like "The Corrections," we need to raid the dusty back shelves of the library for titles like Sinclair Lewis' "Dodsworth" or John O'Hara's "The Lockwood Concern." In truth, Franzen's opus about the Lambert family might have more in common with Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 bestseller "The Magnificent Ambersons" than it does with a recent literary doorstop like Don DeLillo's "Underworld."
If Franzen's handling of the book's difficult narrative balance between satire and realism is not always graceful, the Lambert family itself is prodigiously alive in either setting. By the midway point of "The Corrections" I had stopped regarding its members as fictional characters and thought of them as people I knew -- awkward, difficult and self-destructive people, to be sure. I wondered what trouble they were getting into when I wasn't around, and what would become of them after I left their world. They visited my dreams (although only once). They bothered me.
One way of understanding "The Corrections" is to say that it takes place in different levels or degrees of reality. Alfred and Enid live in the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude (a name no self-respecting American community would ever adopt), which appears to be located in the realm of satire, or perhaps archetype. In their house, with its empty backyard and its lengthening shadows, as we learn on the novel's first page, "the alarm bell of anxiety" has been ringing for years.
Alfred is a chronically repressed, relentlessly taciturn railroad executive who retired suddenly, several weeks short of a full pension. He spends his time doing nothing in a basement inhabited by dust-colored crickets that may or may not exist, slipping deeper into Parkinson's dementia every day. Enid is a bottomless reservoir of bourgeois neuroses and received opinions who, as one of her children puts it, thinks about Christmas the way other people think about sex. Her single-minded insistence that everybody come back to St. Jude for "one last Christmas" is the closest thing to a plot engine that "The Corrections" has.
Gary, Chip and Denise, the Lambert children, on the other hand, live in real cities of the East Coast, recognizable metropolitan America circa 2001. Communication between their sphere and St. Jude is problematic at best. Fired from his academic job after an affair with a freshman student, Chip struggles with an atrocious screenplay and contributes unpaid articles to a postmodern journal in New York called the Warren Street Journal. Enid willfully mishears this and tells her friends he now works at the Wall Street Journal. Based on cryptic remarks made by control-freak Gary, an investment banker who has inherited St. Jude's morality but not its aesthetics, Enid also becomes fixated on the idea that Denise, a gourmet chef in Philadelphia, is sleeping with a married man. This isn't true at all; she's sleeping with a married woman.
