Great American reading: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s stellar reputation - in 2010 Time Magazine featured him on its cover alongside the headline “Great American Novelist” - is based on two hefty novels, The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). Chronologically speaking, I read them in the wrong order, tackling Freedom at the time of its publication, but only coming to The Corrections now, 14 years after it first appeared.

Actually, not the cover of my edition,
which featured an armchair, for reasons
you will discover if you read it.

Freedom mightily impressed me. Yes, I too used that phrase, the Great American Novel, for that, at least without the capital letters, is what Freedom indisputably is. It was maybe because of Freedom however that I kept The Corrections on the shelf for so long. Some trepidation came from its sheer length. Freedom was big, and took me a long time. So is The Corrections, and as you may have noticed, it is an inordinately long time since the last post on this blog. But there was a bit more to it than that perhaps. I maybe feared a let-down: could The Corrections be as good as Freedom? Would it place similar demands on me? Did I need another such book in my life, even if it was as good as Freedom? Hmm. Maybe somewhere inside me there was a feeling that you only need so much Franzen…

So how did it work out, the plunge into the second (albeit first) of Franzen’s mega-novels. 

First things first, yes, it’s a Great American Novel. But this time round that expression is more ambiguous than when I used it in the Freedom post. What is great about it (again) is its depth, range and ambition. Franzen takes on America: its society, its mores, its neuroses and its dysfunction. As with Freedom, it is however done through the unbelievably close observation of a family, both as a family and as five disparate individuals. There is a sense of unease in the novel, a tinge of a society on the brink of something bad - a “correction” perhaps worse the comparatively gentle economic one remarked at the end of the book. Many reviewers have noted that the book predates (just), but somehow also anticipates the more anxious post-9/11 America. 

How this works isn’t quite clear to me. The Lambert family, whose story this is, stand for many bigger things for sure. Albert, the buttoned-up patriarch, now afflicted by Parkinson’s and the onset of a searingly-depicted dementia, was a (admittedly rather joyless) product of the old, mid-century mid-West America of hard work, industry, and thrift. His aspirational wife, Enid, yearns for one last family Christmas, animated by traditional values and attended by their three grown-up children (and, hopelessly, by their families, imagined or not). Meanwhile, the three aforesaid children, struggle (in chronological order) with (1) incipient depression and alcoholism generated by over-achievement and an overly perfect all-American family (Gary), (2) the disorientation of the stupidly disgraced academic, survivor (just) of the raw capitalism of recently liberated Eastern Europe (Chip), and (3) the Weltschmerz of the superficially successful, but ambiguously sexually-driven über-cook catering for the monied classes of a post-industrial world (Denise). The story, successively focusing on each member of the family, takes us via the crumbling midwestern family home, an alienating Manhattan apartment, a senior-ridden Scandinavian cruise ship, post-industrial Philadelphia, the wild post-communist badlands of Lithuania, and back to the ancestral Mid West, in the shape on the fictional city of St. Jude.

Phew! It’s all here, in this book. The now not-so-topical crisis of excruciatingly affluent late-capitalist America, the descent into technology-driven self-referentialism, the narcissistic self-indulgence of the monied classes, the wild dependence on quick fixes, not least in the form of miracle drugs, the self-delusion of the aspirational middle class, the decadence of Generation X.

It’s a heavy meal, but a satisfying one, even if it can - let me be honest - be annoying at times. 

Three specific things I have to say about this book:

First, the craftsmanship of Franzen is extraordinary. Sentence after miracle sentence just blow you away with sheer linguistic panache. Did Franzen take over a decade to write this because he had to hone every sentence to the point of sheer perfection? Probably not, but so many sentences left me in awe, producing a simple mental “wow” in response to an amazing turn of phrase that the hypothesis bears consideration.

The Über-novelist.

Second, and this is personal, Franzen’s depiction - his internal imagining - of dementia and hallucination, is devastating. What might it be like to inhabit a brain gone wrong, playing cruel tricks on its owner, stripping him of dignity, self-respect, indeed any reliable connection with the world? Well, read it here. If anyone close to you is going through anything like this, this depiction is nigh unbearable. 

Third, on a more critical note, many might feel that Franzen’s depiction of post-Soviet Lithuania as a Wild-East gangsterland is - um - a little harsh. I can imagine the reactions of Lithuanian friends. OK, it is all subservient to the greater purpose of the novel, but just because a country is small and far away, doesn’t mean it’s OK to play quite so fast and loose with your research, does it? Maybe it’s a déformation profesionnelle making me oversensitive on this point? 

Whatever, make no mistake, this is a major work and a great novel. If you read it, and I could hardly recommend otherwise, you should know that you will need staying power, bu that, if you have it, you will end up having read a Great American Novel. If you are a Franzen newbie and have limited supplies of energy, I would say two things: 

First, stay with it, it’s worth it.

Second, If you can only face one, read Freedom first. You’ll be back to The Corrections sooner or later, to be sure.