It is not possible to be unimpressed by this novel, if for no other reason than Jonathan Franzen’s metaphoric virtuosity and linguistic invention. However, I would not recommend this book for the aspiring writer; it just sets to bar too high. You will come away despondent, knowing that it would be impossible to measure up, as you plod along producing your own pale, delusional, weekend-watery prose. If Franzen lived in another time, another century, you could take solace; telling yourself contemporary writers lack the patience or courage or education or vocabulary or chutzpah to be this good. But Franzen is a contemporary; he’s an Olympic bar-setting literary decathlete with a remarkable vocabulary and the dexterity to make it look easy.
Besides being a spectacular read, ‘The Corrections’ is also extremely funny. Pick up the book at practically any point and start reading… you’ll see what I mean. Here, watch this… [Honestly, I just picked a passage at random!] OK. Let me set the scene. Early in the book, Chip’s sister, Denise, is talking to Chip outside his New York apartment building while their parents, who just flew in from St. Jude (a comfortable Midwestern town outside of Chicago) on their way to a Fall foliage cruise to the Canadian Maritimes, are waiting for Chip to serve them lunch. But Chip has other plans—no, wrong word. Not plans, he’s not into planning. He’s completely untethered by now; call it “acting on testosterone-driven impulse.” He is in hot pursuit of his girlfriend who was moving out just as he arrives home from the airport with his parents. (She hoped to have made her escape before they arrived.) Explaining to Denise how his girlfriend has been led astray by therapy, (rather than Chip’s odd behavior) Chip says this:
“I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed. I’m saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’ A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy you’re buying into buying. And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant.”
Denise closed one eye and opened the other… [And so on.]
In case you missed it, let me say that at this stage in the story, Chip is adrift in the world and in need of a good slap up the side of the head, which Denise, his younger sister, having herself recently derailed a meteoric career as a chef in Philadelphia, fails to deliver. She hands him cab fare instead.
And here’s one of my favorite outbursts (not picked at random): Again let me set this up. Chip is now working in post-Soviet-beyond-redemption-corrupt Lithuania for a colorful character named Gitanas (deserving of his own book,) who has developed a scheme to bilk American investors by setting up a website called Lithuania.com. Eventually – predictably – competition for “most corrupt” degrades into “most ruthless.” Gitanas has the appetite for the former, but not the later. In the midst of this deflationary spiral there is an election. But let Franzen finish setting it up himself –
On a very gloomy Sunday morning, Lichenkev and his slate of smugglers and hit men on the Cheap Power for the People Party ticket claimed 38 of 141 seats in the Seimas. But the Lithuanian President, Audrius Vitkunas, a charismatic and paranoid arch-nationalist who hated Russia and the West with equal passion, refused to certify the election results.
“Hydrophobic Lichenkev and his mouth-frothing hellhounds will not intimidate me!” Vitkunas shouted in a televised address on Sunday evening. “Localized power failures, a near-total breakdown in the communications network of the capital and its environs, and the presents of roving heavily armed ‘constabularies’ of Lichenkev’s hired mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhounds do not inspire confidence that yesterday’s voting reflects the stubborn will and immense good sense of the great and glorious immortal Lithuanian People! I will not, I cannot, I must not, I durst not, I shall not certify these scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic national parliamentary election results!”
Talk about civility! (John Boehner, you mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhound you! Mitch McConnell, you scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic excuse for a Senate minority leader. Wow! … OK. Enough random – and not so random – sampling.)
Let me step back a bit. This is a story about a wildly dysfunctional family. (My wife, Joan, say, “Why would you write about any other kind”? Good point.) Enid and Alfred Lambert set off on a Fall foliage cruise on some Norwegian cruise line up the east coast to the Canadian Maritimes. Alfred, suffering from Parkinson’s and progressive dementia, has been retired from his job as an executive at a Midwestern railroad for ten years and has spent the intervening years in his big blue chair in the basement. Their home is slowly disintegrating around them. Enid, who arranged this cruise and has paid for it from her own stash, takes care of Alfred more out of duty than love. As Alfred’s condition degrades, Enid sees their lives spinning out of control but is powerless to do anything about it, so she fixates on something she thinks she can control, Christmas in St. Jude. If only. (Even as he is slipping in and out of dementia, Alfred still holds the cards.)
Meanwhile, their three grown children, Gary, Chip and Denise have gone off to make lives for themselves, each in his or her own uniquely dysfunctional way. Gary, in his early forties, and living in a trendy Philadelphia suburb, is an investment banker whose wife, Caroline, a masterful, psychologically intimidating manipulator, sets the terms of their marriage and their parenting. Gary functions best at the office. The hilarious interplay between Gary, Caroline and their young three boys will, alternately, make you laugh and cringe. Caroline indulges – in fact – encourages the boys’ every whim. Powerless to stop her, poor Gary is trapped between his own timidity and his beautiful wife’s Quaker inheritance. Any time Gary raises an objection, Caroline suggests he’s in need of psychotherapy, thus turning every disagreement about raising their children into Gary’s having to defend his sanity; sanity he frequently has reason to doubt. The oldest of the three Lambert children, Gary’s the most responsible.
Chip. Ah Chip… at thirty-nine, Chip is an ex-tenure-track English professor recently fired from a New England college because he got a little too close in a carnal way to one of his students, a precocious, hedonistic young senior who pursued him aggressively and then ditched him. His transgression, which turned him into a drug-addled sex-obsessed borderline-stalker, came to light about the same time his mentor the Dean died and his chief rival for tenure published her book. (Chip, certain he was on the fast track, had neglected this essential requisite of academic life.) Unhinged and unemployed, he goes down in flames. He relocated to New York to write an absurd screenplay (with a pedantic opening monologue that runs forty minutes,) and works odd jobs for which he is eminently overqualified, except that he is far too distracted to show up for work. A stroke of luck, in a manner of speaking, occurred immediately after the scene in front of his apartment building with Denise, when he is introduced to the colorfully fatalistic Lithuanian entrepreneur, Gitanas, the soon-to-be ex-husband of the woman who just left Chip (yes, this does gets hilariously complicated) and who, magnanimously (since Chip’s affair with Gitanas’s wife now seems to be past tense, and because Chip is the only prospect), offers Chip a job as the web marketing director of his new ethically challenged venture, Lithuania.com. Chip, who had to borrow the cab fair from Denise and, in all probability, would have to walk home in the rain, has little choice but to accept the job and the generous cash advance offered. Chip and Gitanas fly, that very evening, to Vilnius.
Then there’s Denise. At thirty-two, Denise is the youngest. At the outset, she appears to be the rock of the family, the successful chef of a trendy Philadelphia restaurant, “The Generator,” which her newly minted millionaire boss builds into a recycled Philadelphia power plant, complete with massive power generator. Were it not for Denise’s sudden discovery of a blooming, obsessive, and irresistible preference for having sex with women, especially her boss’s wife, things might have turned out better for Denise. Eventually, Brooklyn claims her, but the path to Prospect Park was somewhat twisted.
These four stories – Enid and Alfred’s, Gary’s, Chip’s, and Denise’s – are told in parallel, culminating around Christmas in St. Jude, attended by Gary sans familia (early on, Caroline had extracted a promise never to have to attend a Christmas in St. Jude, a promise to which she held firm), Denise the least alienated of the three, and Chip, who flies in from Lithuania and arrives broke, under the dark cloud of Gary’s disparaging doubts on Christmas morning, just a few hours before Gary has to fly back to Philly.
Nestled deep inside this brilliant comedy is hidden a more serious literary mission. The title, “the Corrections” provides the clue. Think of a stock market or housing market ‘correction.’ Now back off to, say, thirty thousand feet. This is a story about generational ‘correction’ in a nation and a world that has changed, is changing, dramatically, wrenchingly, from one generation to the next. Here, the Lambert progeny are set adrift from the comfortable shores of Midwestern life onto a sea without a map or compass, left to stumble about finding their own way, without the advantages of either a trade union or good ol’ American nepotism, vainly grasping at anchors of stability that their parents’ generation, and most generations that preceded them, took for granted. But here, the parents are adrift too—Literally, at sea. Their Fall foliage cruise serves as a metaphor for their life in retirement; experienced in isolation, one from the other, but tied together in a financial lifeboat or straightjacket, take your pick. Then there’s Chip. The desperation of Chip’s Lithuanian adventure illustrates the extent to which he is adrift. Lithuania, cut adrift from the former Soviet Union, serves both as metaphor and as a reflection of the chaotic and corrupting reality with which younger generations must contend. We Americans like to pretend the only thing you need to succeed is a vision and ambition. But as automation finally fulfills its promise of rendering human beings superfluous, and the few jobs that are left go offshore to the lowest bidders, it will take more than an exciting new technology to reinvigorate the world economy. But, this book is not a commentary on the state of our economy; it’s a book about how the accelerating pace of change, from generation to generation, tends to pull the rug from under anything resembling stability; leaving it its place a constant state of upheaval into which each generation stumbles, able to rely less and less on strategies that served the last, left to totter forward in the dark alone, sometimes (if you have a taste for bewildering irony) with great comedic affect.
Jonathan Franzen’s latest book, ‘Freedom,’ came out last summer. I very much wanted to read that when it arrived at the bookstore. But before I did, I decided to read at least one of his earlier books first, then to read his latest to see how he has changed in the intervening years; to see how a writer might learn from an earlier work, and how (or if) that is reflected in his later works. Of course, with a writer as accomplished as Franzen, this might be as good as it gets and everything that follows is of equal quality, just pointed in a different direction.
So, now that I’ve sampled Jonathan Franzen’s work, I’m ready to see the effect of nine years passing. Bring in on. Bring on ‘Freedom’!
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