The Corrections (original 2001; edition 2002)

The Corrections isJonathan Franzen's BIG book about family and life and culture and American Life.

It's one of those books that is so good so full of sharp writing and interesting thoughful insights that you are almost embarassed at the end to say you don't like it.

Well put me down as someone who doesn't like it.

The book is so big it's almost four books in one as Franzen introduces us in extreme close up to Alfred and Enid, typical American Mommy and Daddy in Nowheresville Middle America. We get a lot of them and Franzen zooms effortlessly back and forth in time. It's Slaughterhouse Five without the bombardments.

And we meet Chip the doofus ex college professor who has (or course!) the script for the next Great American Film going through one last rewrite in his typewriter.

And Gary the businessman success with his "I'm a jerk" apologetic look and his oh so manipulative wife and kids.

And Denise the Daddy's girl who fled to become a celebrity chef in Philadelphia.

("Oh, but committing suicide in Philidelphia is so redundant!").

Chip sleeps with a student and goes rapidly downhill. Denise sleeps with everybody - it seems - and can't get enough of flogging herself up and down and sideways. Gary sleeps only with his wife - and the descriptions of sex in this book could turn Casanova into a castrato.

And what's it all about, Alfie? The soulless American culture, capitalism, honesty and lying, family when it’s good and family when it's bad, sex and drugs and class and the death of the American railroad – it’s all in there.

(And Narnia Books. What has this guy got against Narnia books?) . And Lithuania. And women.

Making fun of gourmet restaurants and the minutia of academia – shooting fish in a barrel if ever fish were shot in a barrel.

It won a boatload of awards and almost got chosen for Oprah’s book club – make of that what you will.

Me I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.

Edit | More ( )

Franzen does a very bold thing in this book - he shows you the unlikeable underbelly of his characters first. That makes it an easy book to put down, dislike, shrug off. But as I persevered (after all, it was for a book discussion), the characters got more and more real and therefore knowable and therefore if not lovable, recognizable, and in some ways pitiable.

In one sense the book is a discourse on the falsity, the trap of the 'American dream' as a standard of how one's life should go. Assumptions, other people's real and imagined opinions, the absence of expressed love all create a soul-destroying life for the parents and children of this story, a story of an unhappy marriage and the unhappy children it produced, the story of an era where it was only permissible to be remarkable in approved ways.
Enid and Alfred are mismatched in the most intimate parts of their life together; Alfred falls apart from Parkinsons and dementia; the seemingly stable lives of their children come apart in self-destructive acts.

But the book isn't called 'The Corrections' for nothing. Everyone is making course corrections, or trying to, from the first pages, and as I came to be involved with their sometimes awful, sometimes funny plights, I wanted them to find a course correction that would work.

Several people in my book group were reading this for the second time, and they all found they enjoyed it more for having read it before. A sign of quality, surely ( )

A few years ago, Franzen made a stir when he rebuffed Oprah, saying that he did not want to appear on her lauded reading list. Off-put by his haughtiness, I was prepared to dislike his book. But Corrections is compelling. Through lyrical language and alternating points-of-view, Franzen re-creates a nightmare that most of us eventually experience: the steady decline of an elderly parent. Some passages are pure poetry--I wanted to lift them from the page and savor them in isolation. Of course, this is not a warm-fuzzy Hallmark story or Oprah movie -- After all the exhaustion, frustration, and unsavory emotions, there can be no happy endings. Yet, in the midst of raw nastiness, there's incredible human dignity. The Corrections is a story of imperfect people, perfectly told. ( )

literary blah blah ( )

very good ( )