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. 

Yet more Tudor reading: "Dissolution" by C.J. Sansom

I have no recollection of buying this book, though I can imagine I might have done. Did someone give it to me? A thousand apologies if that was the case and the person who did so is reading this... (However, as you will see, it was appreciated!)

This is indeed yet more Tudor reading, in the footsteps of the Hilary Mantel's stunning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the contrasting non-fiction of Ian Mortimer and Peter Ackroyd, but in a different mode, for this is one from the "Crime Fiction (Historical)" department. This is certainly not to say that the author does not know what he's talking about, historically speaking, but that you would classify this as a high-class whodunnit à la Colin Dexter or P.D. James, rather as literary fiction in the Mantel mode. The publisher's blurb tells us as much, citing admiring comments from precisely those two crime luminaries. 

Something else I did not know about this book, but realised upon encountering one of those annoying sample-first-chapters-of-the-next-in-the-series at its end, is that, in true crime-fiction form, it is the first to feature a central detective character whose adventures span other novels. Our hero is Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer and (in this episode) special commissioner appointed by Thomas Cromwell (far less sympathetically portrayed than by Hilary Mantel) to investigate a murder in a south coast monastery. What ensues is a classic closed-system investigation, with Shardlake and his side-kick, operating in the hostile environment of a snow-bound monastery where not only murder, but also dissolution is in the air. 

Pre-revolutionary reading: "Pure" by Andrew Miller

Some books are not quite what you expect. Pure was on a list of books recommended to me by a man with form for recommending well-researched historical novels, often with a francophile slant (recent example: An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris; otherwise basically anything by Hilary Mantel), viz one Julian Priestley. So what was Pure? Well, a well-researched novel set in a Paris on the cusp of the French Revolution.

The odd thing about Pure, though, is that it doesn't feel like a historical novel. There is a creepy ominousness about it which gives it the feel of a ghost story, rather than the parable of a harbinger of a new rationalistic age it ostensibly is. Of ghosts there are none. Of the supernatural even less. But both seem to be lurking below the surface, in the pre-rational psyches of the even the most rational protagonists, and emerge not as paranormal manifestations, but as inexplicable violence, strange choices or hidden motivations. This hints, in the mind of a reader who knows what happened only five years after the events recounted in this novel, at how the rational revolution can go wrong, how the highest of ideals can merge with the basest of impulses.  Explicitly, we hear little of the impending Revolution, but it is constantly there in the juxtaposition of the scientific and the irrational mindset, talk of the party of the Future, whiffs of rebellion in anti-royalist street graffiti and the staging of Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro (one of my A level set texts coming to haunt me!), the bulldozing of popular sentiment by "enlightened" authorities and in an ultimate act of purifying violence by a hitherto inarticulate and mostly-unheeded subclass.

Mid-life reading: "The Guts" by Roddy Doyle

Exactly as I was supposed to, I picked this book up in Waterstones in Nottingham on a quick impulse, thinking: "I'll give that one a go". The cover gives you'll the clues: Roddy Doyle, the author; not one, but two references to The Commitments, and its protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte; as well as the life-affirming and triumphant citation from the Irish Post.

Why didn't they just put something like: this book is for 50 year-old men who twenty plus years ago loved Roddy Doyle's Barrytown novels but who are bit older now and need a dose of humorous reassurance  about that fact, not to mention about actually pretty nasty things that are starting to impinge on their lives, like bowel cancer?

Well, enter your (still, just) 50 year-old guy, who, in a considerably pre-blog era, devoured the three joyous Barrytown Trilogy novels - The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van - as well as the successive Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which, although undoubtedly less joyous, remain among the most powerful and memorable works of fiction I have ever read. I stuck with Doyle for one more, A Star Called Henry, but than drifted away, as I think many of Doyle's readers did. Perhaps it was he who drifted away.

But who more than me, and my like, to snaffle a copy of The Guts, with its promise of a nostalgic return to Barrytown and curiosity about how our fictional contemporaries are ageing?

So, now, having completed the book, do I feel like a victim of a marketer's ploy and the need of an author to cash in on past glories? 

In a word, no. 

The Guts perhaps does not have the crazed energy of the The Commitments but it does have the humour, the sense of place and the terrible language of its predecessor combined with, yes, a degree of subtlety and grounded wisdom which would not have been right for the younger Jimmy Rabbitte. 

Unflinching reading: "Levels of Life" by Julian Barnes

This is an odd book. It is in three parts. The first, The Sin of Height, is essentially an historical essay, relating the story of early ballooning in France, and in particular the exploits of Nadar, the first man to take aerial photographs. The second, On the Level, is a quasi-fictional account of a love affair between English balloonist and general Victorian man-of-action, Captain Fred Burnaby, and the renowned French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. It ends disappointingly (for him), when Sarah shies away from the marriage he was preparing to propose, but not before they have been ballooning together, relishing their love and their ability to soar over the people below.

These two sections, which are engaging to read, but strangely light, do prepare the ground for the third part of the book, The Loss of Depth, through parallels and metaphors of love, transcendence and loss, but, more than anything, they feel like a way for Barnes to pace himself, to work up to the searing, intimate, astoundingly honest account of his own grief at the loss of his wife. 

Julian Barnes' wife, with whom he spent thirty years of his life, was Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent. She died in 2008, just thirty-seven days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Barnes nursed her through her last days. The Loss of Depth is not however about the illness and death - in fact Barnes respects his wife's privacy and tells us little about her - but about his experience following her death. Every love story is a potential grief story, he writes early in the book, and his description of his grief at her loss is a testament to the depth of love he felt for her.