The Corrections

The ending is darkly realistic. Alfred dies but Enid is not grieving. Instead, she is looking forward to life. Time is short because she is already 75. Seems cruel but that is life. And I think most of the readers will support her. That is the success of Franzen. He makes the characters alive and real. He spends a lot of time dwelling on them, sometimes too much (like Alfred's turd episode). But this gives them well-rounded personalities. You don't hate even the worst of them like Gary and Caroline. You probably wish you can give Gary a tight slap, especially when he spoils their Christmas dinner, but he does have his parents' best interests at heart. And we find that Alfred has his children's interests at heart too. Alfred left his show more company on the brink of retirement for Denise's sake, and he did not even chastise her for her dalliance with a much older man, only telling her in his demented state to have fun but be careful. This was such a touching moment I cried buckets. Enid had her moment too when she decided to unfriend Bea because of the latter's views on lesbianism (parents do know their children best). There were hilarious moments too. For example, Chip hiding the salmon in his pants, and only the readers know the unconventional route the salmon took. I must also make mention of the dialogue, which is a delight. Real, and not stilted. show less

Published a year after my birth, The Corrections is one of those books that make you grateful to have existed at this particular point in time, so you could have the privilege to read them. A deeply, deeply sad work that is all the more beautiful for its sadness, because our families are sad, and it portrays them with full, gut-punching honesty. I can’t wait to reread this in another ten years, when I am hopefully (even) more forgiving of my own.

She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn’t know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth.

How can you distinguish the people when everybody pretends to be the same?

My first Franzen, and he got me with that first, soaring and ominous sentence: “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.” I was expecting a festive celebration of language and psychology, but that it was to be as astounding as it ended up being was beyond my expectations. Gritty, bitter and sad, dizzyingly hopeless. Life lived and lost.

I count myself lucky to have read the book now, 15 years after publication. The dust has settled, and while everyone show more first thought it was the best thing ever, and after a while thought it must be the worst thing ever, what's left now is the book itself.

Having John William's Stoner (1965) fresh in my mind, it was easy to find in that work an apparent precursor to Franzen's work. There’s the same direct and cruel honesty, so much so that the characters are so strongly non-idealized, a degree of which is needed for their likability, that they become — well, they become very real, instead, so real that one starts to believe them when they reason, believe that they do what they do because it makes sense to them, or that they’re trying, really trying. Franzen’s characters, the family in the epicenter, are inchoate and hardly make sense even to themselves and their relationships are dysfunctional and illusory. They prevaricate when they think they’re lucid, and they flaunt in their earnestness. Their perfidiousness is obvious to all except themselves. Each person is more squalid than the next, and they really can’t see the mote for the beam.

And if it weren’t so, The Corrections wouldn’t be the marvelous book that it is. All the characters fight for agency and meaning, attrition their great nemesis as they yearn for acceptance, love and success in their own terms. Franzen doesn’t make them to be blameless in their plight, far from it, which only enables him to truly reveal their humanity and humaneness, since this is not morality Franzen lays before us in plain words. There’s no golden rule or a way out. The crux is in the plaintive pattern of social distrust, instead, and entropy, and the inherent irrevocability of it all. When we wonder with Alfred how “it was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world,” we also acknowledge it to be only partially true. The world turns and there is no new dawn, merely darkness and oblivion. It merely ends, and the rest is silence.

It is this lack of apparent catharsis that lends substance to the story. It makes it real, in fact painfully so, but Franzen’s affable style and keen eye for the comic in the tragic turns a tale that could have been unreadably depressing into a glowing, near-prophetic elegy, stately and brilliant, even life-affirming with its anxiety-ridden heart. Indeed, Franzen’s keen ear for comic timing and his stunning skill with the written word make this enjoyable, in fact mostly hilarious, and far from a burdensome “intellectual” reading exercise. (I know many people will have found the book just that, but I just can't relate to them this time.) Not that there isn’t any kind of change, mind, but in Franzen’s hands the cathartic realizations of his characters are the corrective measures implied to in the book’s title, not an all-encompassing solution for a decidedly successful turn of events. The universe doesn’t neatly fold into their hands, and adaptation is their only choice as the path keeps on swirling into the distance.

I marvel at Franzen’s wisdom, clarity of thought, mastery of language and ultimately, the ability to sit quietly and perceive what his characters are doing and why. The Corrections is, for me, everything I look for when reading fiction.

30 June,
2016 show less

A positive impression despite innumerable faults

The phenomenon of the persistent positive impression is something I call The Carver Effect (After Raymond Carver, whom I continue to admire despite significant reservations regarding most all his stories. (Inverse of The Borges Effect, whose author still leaves a middling impression despite my enjoying, to a certain extent, many of his works. (Though my favorite remains The Aleph, perhaps the least Borges of Borges in that it contains at least a residue of human interest.)))

Franzen's characters have a tendency to fall flat. Their situations read contrived. The spoof of inflated campus-adjacent post-docs and empty-hole bourgeois is roll-my-eyes bad. His women don't have non-Bechdel show more problems. Their inner lives, though effortfully described, remain prurient sketches. The paterfamilias possesses an improper prosody, "Better not to leave here than to have to come back." (This, we no longer have to assume, is a direct quotation from Franzen's actual father, affixed to the last page of the novel in incongruity with (revolt against) the surrounding prose.)

Yet, Franzen displays a studied way of describing things as if he has actually seen them. About once or twice a paragraph one encounters something clever, or so intimately characterized one almost has the impression the reader's own life has been captured on the page (similar to certain, not-infrequent moments in Nabokov). "Corpuscular" impressions of the "crepuscular." The maniacal game of kicking packages up the stairs. Circling 'M's in the New York Times. The pan-fried liver warped so that it won't sit flat on a plate. "Buttery" alkali metals. The instinctual photo-taking of one's spouse later revealed, in a moment of reverse-anagnorisis, (analogous to a certain powerful scene in To the Lighthouse i.e. the dramatic irony is that characters know something we do not) such that the instinctual taking of photographs read as "sign of intimacy" is revealed to be motivated by the construction of a "body of evidence" against her - as evidence one was already in pain.

"He saw nothing but the principles [principals] at stake." [my reading]

"He's sowing salt in the field of the financially unrighteous."

"Without ever figuring out that this excruciating perpendicular stroke was actively suppressing orgasm."

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A painfully realistic look at a normal Midwestern family and the way that even such a "normal" family is hopelessly mucked up. As I was reading it, I was hoping that at least one member of the family would manage to rise above their dysfunctions, actually succeed at making their "corrections," and lead a reasonably well-adjusted life, yet despairing that this would actually turn out to be the case. I was grateful that Chip and possibly Denise did seem to be somewhat better off at the end, but their parents and Gary sadly did not. Though it might be suspected that Franzen was trying to rewrite this family tragedy as a farce, and though it was quite satirical much of the time, the tragedy still shone through in all its painfully realistic show more bitterness. It depicted well the state of growing old and even growing demented.

It was difficult to get into at first due to its utterly mundane subject matter, but it became more compelling as I got to know the characters from inside their heads more. show less

This is one where there's a good chance I'll upgrade it to five after a re-read.

It's really hard for me to not read The Corrections through the lens of the book I finished right before it: Infinite Jest. Both are "big" books—with IJ something like four times as long, though—and as the story goes, The Corrections was sort of a Franzen return-lob after Wallace served IJ to him.

But whereas IJ hits at the same subject from any number of angles, and incidentally drawing in so much other material, The Corrections seems more explicitly aimed at being the The Great American Novel. You know, a chronicle of our times and all that, grabbing the zeitgeist by the balls. post-USSR eastern Europe? Included. Pharmaceuticals? Yep. Aging? Oh hell show more yes.

But The Corrections feels more superficial on all those subjects. Sure, it deals with capitalism rushing into eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. But only in about as much specificity as Goldeneye, a James Bond movie. (Let it be known that I love Goldeneye, though.) Some of this is due to the historical distance from the time and place it's describing, but The Corrections' successes there seem more from incorporating that kind of pulpy material into a psychological novel, giving it a sort of grand scope you don't normally see. The scene that was infamous at the time actually isn't crazy at all, except if you're used to genre stuff.

And the psychological novel parts of The Corrections can be very good! Some of the sections are excellent! Franzen does a good job of circling around, showing each of the family members' behavior from the outside along with everyone else's perceptions of them. There's some weird sort of happy ending nonsense at the end (kinda undercut by the final bit!), but it's pretty grim overall. Franzen doesn't seem to particularly like many of his characters, a drastic change from IJ where you felt that Wallace absolutely loved all his characters—even the assholes.

Best book of the first decade of the twentieth century? Probably not: The Known World by Edward P. Jones is incredibly hard to top. And it's certainly no Infinite Jest. But as a good starter to get people more into lit fic? Maybe. show less

Not since 100 Years of Solitude have I been so convinced that an author wrote a book to specifically piss me off.

I have no idea what to make of this. I was into it early, but after about page 200 I felt like I was having a mental breakdown; what the fuck was going on? Why are we spending 100 pages on this, 100 pages on that, all of which are bloated, pretentious and boring tangents.

But the book is so well written, it's maddening. The prose and descriptions flow effortlessly, as long as you're ok with going along for the ride. I got a very clear idea of who these characters were and why they were like that, I just didn't like any of them...nor was I supposed to. Is this satire? I have no clue - the final 100 pages are, frustratingly, show more really good. True moments of reflection, quiet and difficult family moments hit hard. The ending was very satisfying.

But still, fuck this book. I hated how there weren't any chapter breaks, I was frustrated at the structure, and most of all I am immensely annoyed that a beautifully written book is one of my least favorite ever.

Some parts are 5 stars, some made me want to give up reading for a few months. show less