[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/14/2025]
Which means I've read The Corrections (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001). Impressive, but is it really one of the best novels of all time? I'm not so sure.
I read The Corrections in tandem with Joyce Carol Oates' We Were The Mulvaneys. For the first time here, I had trouble switching back and forth between novels. Both are family novels. Time, setting, plot, and tone are all different. Siblings relating to parents would be the common themes, I think. Jonathan Franzen, I call a satirist, a humorist; Oates is grimness, dreadfulness. Franzen writes of lives lived from the Seventies to the late Nineties; Oates from the Fifties up to the Eighties. Franzen narrates from a character's POV; Oates uses a well-informed son, who morphs the tale by digressions. Franzen takes more notice of a consumer culture and economics than does Oates with her novel set in the barrens of Western New York. Franzen writes of a group of an educated, upper middle class types where Oates writes of a small businessman, with one son off to the Marines and one to Cornell for science.
I have no idea why I'd switch from Oates to Franzen, and give attributes belonging to Oates' characters to Franzen's. Maybe I am truly losing my mind, as in losing my memory, my bearings, and this is the only clue to my condition. Oddly, both novels were selected from Oprah's Book Club.
No quotes. Nothing of Franzen's prose grabbed me, either for style or content. I would have to put in a very long paragraph. Therein, he reminds me of Pynchon. His intellectual jokes cannot - I think - be taken out of context. (The Ibsen Promenade on a Scandinavian cruise ship comes to mind.) It's farce with broad streaks of horribleness. Joseph Heller's Something Else came to mind - with less insanity, less nastiness, but that might be the difference between what can be done with a first and a third-person narrator. Franzen caught a time and a segment of our class system, and what he still throws a long shadow. I wonder if we will not look back in The corrections as capturing a sweeter time than we have had since 2001
He has certainly made me want to read Tristram Shandy.
sch
[Some items I ran across while transferring this journal entry from my handwritten notes to here:
Guardian book club: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (The Guardian, 2010)
Sure, all that big, heavy, important stuff is in there. Nor would I want to argue that this is a book without profundity or even despair. The story of the Lambert family is essentially a sad one. The elder Lamberts, Enid and Alfred, are in a mess. Alfred, a once confident and able, if anal-retentive man, is succumbing rapidly to Parkinson's disease and dementia. Soon, he's reduced to having conversations with hallucinatory faeces (in one of the book's most unsubtle, but still effective images). A once handy man, he spends his days in his basement, where he eventually realises (and this broke my heart) that all the things he has saved and fixed – and that he thought he would be able to keep on saving – are beyond him now; that he ought to just "pitch the whole damn lot of it".
Another reason Alfred frequents the basement, however, is to avoid Enid, who has problems of her own. For a start, she thinks Alfred might still get better if only he'd do the useless exercises his doctor has given him. She's also obsessed with the idea of bringing her children together for one last Christmas – a prospect that seems horribly unlikely since the children don't want to visit her, are miles away from her Midwest home and have problems of their own. Gary tries to avoid the fact that he is crushingly depressed by drinking more and more martinis. Denise's love life has become so tangled that she's lost her job and just about everything else. Chipper has been fired from academia for fucking a student and things only get worse when he starts working for a "warlord" in Lithuania.
The book is tragic in most senses of the word. It's serious and challenging and poignant. Especially when Alfred, in the spite of his dementia, manages to beg his daughter: "Just have fun and be careful." No father could read that without feeling a stomach lurch. Even so, the over-riding thought in my head when reading The Corrections was a simpler one: this is fun. I laughed and laughed and laughed.
Most of the jokes are slow builders, dependent on timing, situation and character (although there are a few fantastic one-liners) so I won't try to replicate them here. Besides, I failed to mark most salient points. I was so taken up that the book became entirely real to me. I had that wonderful feeling of forgetting that I was even reading. It became, as Homer Simpson once put it, "just a bunch of stuff that happened". I always try to make notes on post-its to use in these reviews, but the ones I scribbled for The Corrections are almost entirely useless. A description in which the constantly-shaking Alfred does little more than manoeuvre "a butter-sailed schooner" into his mouth seemed so vivid and pitch perfect to me that I've just written "!". Elsewhere, where I managed to insert them, my notes read: "Brilliant!", "Indeed!" "Unbearably brilliant", "Haha!", "Chip you utter shit!", "Yes!"
Okay, that is not all that different from what I wrote above and my recollection this October morning.
The Corrections: A character study (Reading in Bed, 2017) goes deeper into the characters and is a better analysis on that level than what I wrote 10 years ago:
The Corrections is easily Franzen’s funniest book. I think the comedy that comes out of this story works because Christmastime is often hell for all of us, and nothing makes it more unbearable than all the pressure to “be with family.” It’s something we all relate to. The Corrections is similar to Franzen’s other work (notably Freedom and Purity) in that each section deals with another character and it often spans a generation.
This was the second Franzen book I ever read. I started with his essay collection How to be Alone and bought The Corrections immediately afterwards in a Target. So I first read this book ~five years ago. I decided to pick it up again so I could take part in Laura’s #FranzenFebruary.
Something that struck me as interesting in the book is that the characters are often trying to convince the reader that they are not “clinically depressed.” They all seem to be experiencing “depressive episodes” but they are always fighting the “clinical” label (e.g. Chip saying he is unable to behave like a depressed person by ignoring a phone call, Gary openly refuses the diagnosis by his wife).
Reading in Bed continues to review books, and skimming it impressed me, see what you think.
Book Analysis & Review: The Corrections (The Grant Catton Blog, 2/6/2007) is another long examination of the novel; none of which I can quibble with now.
Franzen's writing is direct and human, and he communicates his thoughts in a current and modern style. The book is truly of the new millennium, for the new millennium. As a result, I do not think it will stand the test of time as a "classic" of literature. But perhaps that very period-sensitive quality will make it the foremost classic of our time. I don't know, and any attempt on my part to speculate would surely be wrong.
However, this book works. Probably because each of us--most of us--can see ourselves in any and all of the characters in this book. Franzen gives us such a varied smörgåsbord of neuroses that anyone who reads this book will be able to pick out something with which he can identify, and, my friends, is what makes compelling literature. However, as I said, since this book deals so intimately with the tribulations of the immediately modern world, it may survive only as a period piece.
The Grant Catton Blog continues its works (and I am thinking I have run across it before.
Book Review: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (My Writes, 1/11/2012) gets what I felt went wrong with the novel in better words than I had in prison:
With all of that great writing and setup, all those tasty sentences, I was surprised to note, by the middle of the novel, that I did not have any feelings for the characters. I was getting to know them very well and I remained curious about their fates – especially the impending Last Christmas in St. Jude. At the same time, there was something that made them difficult to care about – and that was Franzen’s great writing. The ornamentation of the writing got in the way of my relationship with the characters. The writing style fluctuated in random sections of the book, sometimes for dozens of pages at a time (like the segment depicting Gary and Chipper’s childhood – the Dinner of Revenge) suddenly resorting to an abundance of dramatic sentence fragments and one sentence paragraphs, as if Franzen’s lubricated slide of words was finally hitting some squeaky spots. The writing had a kind of density – or intensity – which was its own end, heedless of the story. It was a story arc that didn’t care if it placed its own keystone, as long as all of the other stones were meticulously engraved.
***
The Corrections doesn’t offer any solutions. If you want to take a swim in Jonathan Fanzen sentences, if you want to be as irritated by Enid, or as frustrated by Alfred, as their children are, get yourself a copy of The Corrections, pronto. But if you have more of a proclivity, like myself, for gratifying narrative balance, wait for the movie. (Or better yet, grab a copy of Gretchen McNeil’s Possess) For a novel so long, the characters of The Corrections go through surprisingly little transformation. Certainly, it can be argued that keeping the characters static is a deft commentary on modern life, but I prefer more storytelling convention.
I have mixed feelings about The Corrections. By the end, my 50% opinion of the book stood firm, mostly because it built up to a let down and none of the characters transformed. Not even one character is any different by the end from how they were in the beginning. Part of it may be explained by that old chestnut, the graduate level “plight of modernity,” but part of it is weak storytelling, Franzen’s juicy sentence-slinging at the cost of story.
The Corrections: Jonathan Franzen – Post Modern Characterization as promised. (Lisa Thatcher, 2/6/2012) is perhaps an even longer disquisition on the novel; it is also the view from Australia; and gives a background to the novel I did not know, and might help a little in understanding Franzen's purpose.
Because Franzen set out to ‘fix’ what he thought was wrong with the great post modern novel, this novel is in itself a kind of correction. In this (in my opinion) it succeeds. Franzen’s emphasis on the human is welcome and this probably explains the novels huge popularity in America where it was a best seller for a long time and continues to sell well. The cleverness of Franzen is such that despite the darkness of the book, I was left feeling overjoyed and my memories of the novel are that it is warm and very funny.
It is warm and funny, and that is the point really. He wanted to show us that literature can still be popular. He wanted to show us that post-modern can be fun and engaging. He wanted to show us that writing still has uncharted seas to conquer.
And in all of this, he has succeeded.
Lisa Thatcher continues publishing.
I need to move onto other things today. sch 10/14/2025]
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