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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
When we first meet Chip, he seems like the novel's most plausible protagonist: He's urbane, well-educated, handsome and on the go. But he's also a feckless deadbeat hipster with leather pants and a steel earring, who steals bartenders' tips and humps his couch on lonely evenings, imagining he can still smell illicit traces of his ex-girlfriend on the upholstery. Essentially he bails out on us too; he can't even be trusted to be the hero of a satirical novel and runs off to Lithuania with a guy who looks almost exactly like him, leaving his parents stranded in his Manhattan apartment.
In fact, any of the three kids could be the protagonist of a novel and each, in this novel, is found wanting. Battling his own slide into alcoholism and depression, uptight yuppie Gary fights bitterly with everyone: his stubborn dad, his hysterical mom and his wife, Caroline, a veritable Jedi master of passive-aggressive behavior. (After reading the Gary-and-Caroline section, easily the book's most painful, I guarantee you'll never eat mixed grill again.) Sexual confusion notwithstanding, Denise is by far the most well-adjusted of the three, but she can't keep a relationship going (with a man or a woman) and begins to understand that she enjoys hurting other people.
How did they get this way? Franzen takes us back and forth in family history to show us Chip forced to sit at the dining room table deep into the night under orders to finish his liver and rutabaga, or Denise's tragicomic teenage affair with a man who works for her father. But these aren't answers, or psychological explanations, at least not any more than the farcical present-day cruise-ship detour during which Alfred begins to hallucinate that a vengeful turd is persecuting him.
If Chip's escape with a doppelgänger to a distant and nearly mythical country where he works, in his words, as "Vice President for Willful Tortious Misrepresentation" for an Internet scam operation, is not sufficient indication that "The Corrections" has a strange symbolic dimension, there are plenty more. Everything and everyone in the book seems to be connected by a subterranean web of money and coincidence.
The law firm where Chip does temp work is also the one that pays Alfred $5,000 for an invention of his that may help cure Parkinson's (from which he suffers). Denise's lover's brother is in prison for assaulting the president of the company whose money makes Denise's dream restaurant possible. The venture capitalists who force Alfred into retirement have endowed buildings at the college that fires Chip. A film director supported by Denise's boss makes the only American film to open in Vilnius while Chip is there. There are several other minor skeins of coincidence, but running under the book like a muttering river is an obsession with C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, surfacing most notably in the euphoria-inducing, libido-enhancing drug called Aslan, with which both Chip and Enid unwittingly experiment.
Whatever he means by this, Franzen is not Lewis, and his version of America, although fantastical in some respects, is a long way from Narnia. From Alfred inspecting railroad bridges in rural Ohio to the interior life of Gary and Caroline's tormented marriage as it descends from cruelty into open warfare to Chip's orgiastic romps with a disturbingly well-adjusted freshman in a defranchised Comfort Inn, Franzen is a connoisseur of reality in its infinite shadings. Throughout this book, some of his best prose comes when he's describing moments and places in which nothing is happening.
When Chip is abandoned by his freshman lover at the end of the affair that will cost him his academic career, he finds solace at a freezing Connecticut minimart, on Thanksgiving Day, in "the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce ... The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled ... And a 99-cent Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sans serif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s."
These images of unspectacular, dogged competence are surely meant to suggest Alfred, the emblem of all such things in Chip's life and a man who despite his pigheadedness and dementia is the moral fulcrum of Franzen's universe. As Chip understands all too well, Alfred loves him to distraction and will never be able to tell him so, and Alfred is also the most important of the many things in Chip's life that Chip is avoiding.
"The Corrections" is a novel full of information, almost in the manner of a mystery or a thriller: information about financial markets and nylon stockings and neurological disease and restaurant management and imaginary revanchist Lithuanian political parties. But as we bounce from one Lambert to the next, we pick up other kinds of information, the kind Chip gleans at the minimart. It's a less reliable variety: bits and bytes of personality and emotion, fragmentary ideas about why this family (and the country, the world, around it) got so badly damaged and what if anything can be done about it.
Our task, like that of the Lamberts -- like that, arguably, of everybody in America -- is to make the best of the information we have, always necessarily incomplete. In a funny, sad and lewd scene of marital sex, Alfred reflects that having a child offers an "opportunity to learn from one's mistakes and make corrections," but also that the very thing that makes such correction possible, human desire, also dooms it. I don't think Franzen endorses Alfred's puritanical morality, but he may agree that the Lambert family's attempts at correction, like so many efforts at human improvement, have often undercut themselves or gone in unintended and sometimes ridiculous directions. Which is not the same as saying we should quit trying.
