Prison Food - What You're Not Eating Tonight

 Since I returned home, people thought being a federal prison meant I was eating well. That's about as funny as people thinking Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution had air conditioning in our cells.

 When I first got to Fort Dix, there were these sausages - think kielbasa - that were pretty good, except for the bone chips that were dangerous to teeth and digestion. They finally got rid of them, probably too expensive.

We had chicken quarters Tuesdays and Thursdays, but they discontinued the quarters for Tuesday after a few years. The chicken tended to often be pink close to the bone. This bothered some people, but I thought it had been steamed enough to be safe. It certainly had killed the taste. Other than the occasional bird with pin feathers intact, it was tolerable. Most people thought they would never eat chicken again. I can tell you chicken tastes nothing on the outside, it has almost wiped away all the bad memories of prison chicken.

 Oddly, one thing they did well was liver and onions. That got ditched after my first year, if my memory is correct.

Eggs were the one thing I despised - I think they had to use liquid eggs or some such substitute. Again, eggs out here taste nothing like they did in prison.

The word was that local restaurants donated food. I think that is how we got turkey burgers. They were a welcome change, until they tasted of freezer burn.

Then there was the time someone stored garlic or onions with the skim milk. Garlic infused milk was served for weeks.

 Anyway, what I read this morning in Food In Federal Prisons Isn't Just Bad, Sometimes It's Dangerous — Here's Why Read More (The Takeout) reminded me of all that.

You'd be naive to think that food in federal or state prison is up to par with a gourmet meal by Bobby Flay. Honestly, you'd be naive to think the food is even slightly enjoyable. Food in prison is used to further punish inmates, lacking both nutrition and basic moral decency. Cell phone images smuggled out of American correctional facilities showcase the food being served in chow halls barely looks edible. This presents a slew of health risks for incarcerated individuals.

In 2020, Impact Justice conducted a study of food in American prisons. The study produced many unfortunate statistics, like 62% of inmates stating they rarely (if ever) were given fresh vegetables and 94% saying they did not receive enough food to feel full. The report additionally found that, on average, American prisons spend $3 per day on food per inmate. The food prisoners did receive was of the poorest quality. A 2021 federal lawsuit from Mississippi alleged food was "spoiled, rotten, molded, or uncooked" and contaminated with rat, bird, and insect feces. Shockingly, formerly incarcerated individuals reported seeing "not for human consumption" labels on food boxes. These boxes contained "chicken" as well as "deli meats" such as bologna, ham, and salami.

I never saw the boxes marked not for human consumption, but I heard of them.

The article mentions the commissary:

Prisoners gather food from the life preserver that is the commissary (aka the canteen). The commissary offers food to prisoners we on the outside would purchase in grocery stores — think ramen, snack cakes, and chips. Because inmates make less than $1 per hour, unless you have support from the outside the commissary is often unattainable. Even if one is able to purchase a pack of ramen noodles, a typical bowl of ramen comes with over 1,500 grams of sodium, which only exacerbates the rampant health issues found in correctional facilities. Nevertheless, the Prison Policy Initiative found that inmates spend $947 per year at the commissary. Prison food suppliers, like Aramark, supply both chow hall food and commissary food across multiple prisons, thus incentivizing the suppliers to drive commissary sales by providing low-quality food elsewhere.

We did not have food from Aramark, but from vendors who marketed to the federal prisons. I have forgotten the names now; it was assumed the vendors were politically connected.

Relying on the commissary was called "eating out of your locker". I did not, but plenty of others did. It was a sign that you had more money than others. The hooch makers, the ones running the gambling, the ones selling tobacco or drugs, the organized crime types did this as well as those with money on the outside, or with friends and family who sent them money. I did not do this. Most of my roommates assigned this to me being crazy. I was not going to let my family and friends subsidize the federal government,

 The article is correct about how little bought at the commissary was healthy.

Unmentioned is how the BOP used commissary to punish unit buildings. 

The article mentions prison cookbooks.

Prison cookbooks have burgeoned from intrigue about prison life. Popular prison cookbooks include Albert "Prodigy" Johnson's "Commissary Kitchen" and Wisconsin Books to Prisoners' "Canteen Cuisine." Although written by different people who shared different experiences behind bars, these books display creativity at its finest and how food persists as a source of light in the darkest of places.

The links in the above paragraph did not translate, so here goes Commissary Kitchen Paperback – October 11, 2016, and What Martha Stewart Thought About The Food In Prison.

There was ingenuity in cooking in prison. The Puerto Ricans made a rice dish in cut down pickle buckets (the buckets stolen from the mess hall) in our unit microwaves. I had pizzas and cakes made the same way. If I recall correctly, Fort Dix let the microwaves breakdown without putting in replacements. This eliminated the cooking in the unit buildings, a source of income for many. By the time COVID shutdown trips to the mess hall, what we were left with was the hot water supply. It was good enough for ramen noodles and coffee.

Some of the bright boys in another unit building thought they could do a hunger strike over conditions Now, the United States Bureau of Prisons has made their operations as secretive as any Soviet Gulag. Maybe more so, no general media outlet takes an interest in the federal prisons. What Fort Dix did was empty the unit building and send them elsewhere. The conditions did not change.

What I noticed was that mess hall depended on it not having to feed all the inmates. Even at the best of times, if your unit was the last to the mess hall (and there was an order in how the units were released to meals), there would be empty pans (of beans, rice, oatmeal - depending on the meal) at the steam tables. Then one month, the prison had banned most units from commissary, then it was closed for inventory. Food service collapsed. The word coming out of prisoners working food service was that the guards running food service begged for commissary to be reopened.

 We also lost a lot of fresh fruit because people were making hooch. Hundred of gallons, in more than one unit building.

Any vegetables were canned, not fresh. And cooked well-nigh to mush.

I close with give you a link to the national menu for the Bureau of Prisons. I will make two notes: 

1. Not every prison follows this menu
2. Understand that if you see something like fajitas or having a foreign name, it is not what you think, but it is there to make you think better of what the federal government feeds its inmates.

 I recall the fajitas as mostly onions and green pepper with bits of tough meat; not what you will get at Applebee's. They did a lo mein that was boiled, greasy turkey meat tossed into spaghetti; it would have gotten a good laugh from anyone knowing lo mein.

 The BOP National Menu

I have written far more than I expected. Maybe there is more resentment in me than I have acknowledged, or I am acting out a delusion. What delusion? That any American reading this will care what they are doing to their prison's inmates. You probably think we deserved to be treated this way. However, answer this: what do you get if you treat people like animals instead of human beings?

sch 1/24 

 

What Is Going On With Federal Prisons? Nothing To Prevent Crime

The politicians whip us citizens up about crime - the blacks are coming for you, or the Latin American gangs have control of your city - and that they can save you. All that needs to be done is to get tougher on crime. And tougher and tougher. We've been getting tougher on crime my whole life, but still we have crime. We had Donald J. Trump talking about carnage in our cities during his First Inaugural. He is now sending ICE gangsters into cities because they are rampant with crime, decent people cannot leave their homes, and the local governments are under siege. Why anyone thinks he is now suffering from dementia is beyond me - there was no more carnage in our major cities during his first term than there is now.

But if the politicians were truly interested in making Americans safe, they would take care that when inmates return to their homes, they have the means to a different future.

That is, if the crime issue is not used to gin up campaign contributions and edge us closer to a police state. Power and money - the addictions of politicians.

Read Canceled DOJ Grants Threaten Bipartisan Work to Support People Released from Prison (Brennan Center for Justice) and decide for yourself what the politicians mean by getting tough on crime.

Republicans and Democrats have long agreed on the need to help people leaving incarceration find work and stable housing so they can contribute to their communities and avoid returning to crime. But in April, the Trump administration terminated grants initially valued at $40 million aimed at implementing the bipartisan Second Chance Act — a law first championed by President George W. Bush — which seeks to improve outcomes for people returning from prison and jail. 

Every year, more than 450,000 people leave prison and return to their communities, and millions more pass through local jails, typically staying for just over a month. The Justice Department’s cuts affect not just these people but their families and communities as well.

While some key federal support for reentry remains, it rests on shakier ground — both politically, as cross-partisan support seems suddenly more tenuous, and programmatically, with money and talent leaving the field.

I suppose this is why I will be spending my own money on the irrelevant polygraph examinations.  

Now, consider Legalizing Cocaine Is the Only Way to End the Drug War (The Intercept) 

After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine’s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate, harming the local Indigenous people for whom coca holds unique spiritual and nutritional value, and killing anything that tries to grow in the contaminated soil. Consumers and traffickers of cocaine have been imprisoned en masse, helping to create a prison–industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.

The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor — in many places, it’s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia, Mexico, and most recently Brazil, where a police raid on a cartel-controlled favela in Rio led to more than 130 deaths in one night in late October. “This was a slaughter, not an operation,” one bereaved mother told The Guardian. “They came here to kill.”

***

Today, cocaine is one of the world’s most reliable commodities. It’s a multibillion-dollar market serving around 50 million global consumers. Production in the Andes is at a record high. Purity is the highest it’s ever been. Cocaine is cheaper, stronger, and more accessible than at any point in history. From bankers to bricklayers, everyone is at it — and the interests of cartels all over the world are enmeshed with the legal economies.

This state of affairs represents a totemic, catastrophic policy failure. It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws — by funneling untold riches to violent criminals — are more harmful than the drugs themselves, as research increasingly shows. 

Yeah, I find it hard to see our Drug War as making money for drug dealers, politicians, and bureaucrats, including the police. I see no benefit for anyone else. 

Outrage Coda by Decarceration hits on the complicity of American citizens in the dehumanizing treatment of the incarcerated.

In prison, you don’t see a lot of rich people. There are some white collar guys, but many of them have already blown through their money. Most people come from hard times, and they’re going back to hard times. Much of this stems from the resources the government places towards arresting and prosecuting people in low-income environments and economies. But it also comes from a natural social slant the public has towards the upper class. The idea is that the unhoused deserve to be reprimanded for their social status, but when we talk about the wealthy, it’s considered a dirty word. “Socialism”. “Class warfare”. The idea that the rich can buy their way out of an indictment has gone from a cynical take to accepted fact.

When asked, the public won’t have the same knee-jerk reaction towards the unhoused as they would towards those convicted of a crime. But they have the same desires, which are that they want them out of sight, out of mind. In fact, the roots of treatment are similar for both. No one wants to address the cause of criminality, just as no one wants to observe why people might end up without a roof. They just wish to sweep streets clean. This is not about quality of life. This is about treating people, and a problem, like trash that has to be brushed to the side. I say this as, yes, part of the trash swept to the side. There will be more. Notable is that this is an excellent opportunity for a company to pursue profits. Never let a crisis go to waste.

A little off the track, but another news item from my BOP alma mater is hard to resist. Inmate dies at Fort Dix prison (The Philadelphia Inquirer) surprises me not by someone dying at Fort Dix FCI, but that the Bureau of Prisons admits someone died there. When I was there, it was commonly thought by us inmates that the BOP escaped scrutiny by having inmate deaths occurring at the closest hospital. Coverups are either not working, or BOP no longer cares about scrutiny about its operations.

A 25-year-old man died on Saturday at the federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey, prompting prison officials to notify the FBI, officials said in a statement.

Jarrette Morales was found unresponsive at 2:15 a.m. at the Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dix at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Burlington County, according to the statement. He was pronounced dead by EMS officials.

Prisons are human warehouses. They are not designed to change anyone's behavior - unless the inmate wants to change and has the means spiritual and intellectual. This blog is a record of what I have done to atone for my criminal acts. Nowhere has the federal government aided or encouraged my efforts. I was lucky because I did have a reason and the means to change. What is to become of those wishing to change without any idea of how to accomplish their goals?

sch 12/4

 

Rejections - Prison Thanksgiving - Too Cold

 Friday: I got up early and have no idea what I did. CC came over around 11 AM to wait on the arrival of the new computer. I went to group. KH picked me up, and we came to my place. CC was cleaning and cleaning; it was not even like the place was a mess. KH and I talked to Joel C; we may be launching a literary magazine on Substack. CC left around 3; just as the new computer arrived. KH agreed to my eyes are worse than his. The computer is in a corner of the living room. KH left me to piddle the night away. I got an idea about what to do with "

Inkd Publishers rejected “Going For The Kid”:

Thank you for the opportunity to read your submission to the Rebels anthology.

Unfortunately, we have limited space, and we have decided to pass on your story.

We received many great stories, such as yours, with over a hundred submissions for this anthology, but can only accept a small number of those.

--

 Facebook

Submissions

Kickstarter

And one more:

Thank you so much for sending us 'Agnes'. This time, however, we're saying no, but we wish you the best of luck with your piece.

Sincerely,

Editorial staff

The Forge Literary Magazine 

Word List From Beckett's Molloy 5-10-2015

[ 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 10/25/2025]

Let us see what I can find in Webster's II New Revised University Dictionary of my list culled from Molloy (Grove Press).

...Sometimes to be sure, when I was lucky enough to chance on a road conveniently cambered....

Molloy, I 

The following produced an epiphany of my ignorance:

 ... But to sentiments sweet and simple, to episentiments rather if I may venture to say so. For I knew in advance, which made all presentiment superfluous....

I

 Presentiment - a sense of something to occur.

Sentiment: ... 2. An idea, opinion, or attitude based on feeling or emotion rather than reason... 7. A vague awareness or feeling...

So what is an episentiment? Have to wait on the lifting of the lockdown and the unabridged dictionary. Now do you see the scarcity of information in prison?

[I do not see that I ever did follow up on a definition of episentiment after the lockdown was lifted. However, free of prison and its limitations, I have the internet, so I searched for the definitions. This is what I found today. sch 10/25/2025.]

Perforce appears here thanks to a lack of intellectual self-confidence on my part:

... Perhaps, perforce, roots, berries....

Perforce... By necessity....

Like with Kate Chopin's scintillant, Beckett's vociferation caught my eye. My dictionary starts off with the verb form that comes to my mind first.

... And when I saw him disappear, his whole body a vociferation, I was almost sorry. 

II

Vociferate... To cry out and utter vehemently, esp. in protest....

Factitious always confuses me.

... It bought me a semblance of pardon and brief moment of factitious freedom....

Factitious: 1. Produced artificially. 2. Lacking genuineness.... 

I cannot find floccillate in my dictionary.

... And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they already love to floccilate already, they are not mine, I have no hands....

Molloy, I

The closest I have is:

 flocculate... 1. To cause (soil) to form lumps or masses. 2. To cuase (clouds) to form fluffy masses,

[My last example of how prison limits the mind even more than the body. Google leads me to the following:

Floccillation: noun Pathology. a delirious picking of the bedclothes by the patient, as in certain fevers.

 sch 10/25/2025.] 

Now it is 1:35 pm. Dinner in 4 hours. I can finish off my cookies. Read on into Sophocles's Antigone. Will need to brush my teeth soon. Listening to 88.9's roots rock show. Could do some letters. This is life in prison. What did you expect me to do?

sch 

[This post also illustrates the problems of taking my journals out of order. One thing that I realized earlier in my prison career was I could not remember definitions of words. I certainly could not recall the dictionary definitions. I started compiling lists of words for which could not give a dictionary definition, and also those for which I did not know at all. Like I said above, you are seeing your tax dollars at work. sch10/25/2025.] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Word List: Scintillant 5-10-2015

 [ 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 10/25/2025]

How long since I did my last word list? Today brings more. Scintillant comes from Kate Chopin's The Awakening (Penguin Classics, 1986) XX: 

... He was scintillant with recollections....

Not scintillating but scintillant. That caught my attention. Webster's II New Revised University Dictionary gets consulted - and nothing is found. And with the lockdown, no access to the big Random House dictionary in the law library. So on hold.

sch 

[This shows the limitations on self-education and information in prison. I do not see that I ever did follow up on a definition after the lockdown was lifted. However, free of prison and its limitations, I have the internet, so here are the definitions I found today:

From Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary: that scintillates : sparkling

Now for scintillate from the same source: 

intransitive verb

1

: to emit sparks : spark

2

: to emit quick flashes as if throwing off sparks : sparkle

Imagine it's a cool summer night, the stars scintillate brilliantly in the sky overhead and the campfire blazes away.—

Thomas E. Young

3

: to dazzle or impress with liveliness or wit

The Jay Tarses sitcom, which scintillates with whacked-out wit, was dropped by NBC in 1988 because it was deemed too quirky.—

Lawrence Eisenberg

Mrs. Burnett's discussion of the Orestes leads the way to a new interpretation of Euripides' Apolline solution, a solution which has titillated, puzzled and infuriated generations of scholars. The arguments scintillate, but sometimes are pushed too far.—

Geoffrey Arnott

transitive verb

: to throw off as a spark or as sparkling flashes

scintillate witticisms

scintillator

ˈsin-tə-ˌlā-tər 

noun 

From Dictionary.com: adjective; scintillating; scintillating; sparkling. 

Now for scintillate from the same source: 

verb (used without object)
scintillated, scintillating 

    to emit sparks.

    to sparkle; flash.

    a mind that scintillates with brilliance.

    to twinkle, as the stars.

    Electronics.,  (of a spot of light or image on a radar display) to shift rapidly around a mean position.

    Physics.

        (of the amplitude, phase, or polarization of an electromagnetic wave) to fluctuate in a random manner.

        (of an energetic photon or particle) to produce a flash of light in a phosphor by striking it.

 verb (used with object)
scintillated, scintillating 

    to emit as sparks; flash forth.

I admit that I would have used the verb as an adjective. Learn something everything; it's a good way to know you're not dead.  sch 10/25/2025]

 

Then Came Molloy 5-10-2015

 [ 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 10/25/2025]

Definitely on lockdown today. Whatever happened last night in 5741 had us all locked down in our units. I missed the 5-minute move for lunch. Not that lunch cannot be missed. I did decide something needed done with this package of duplex cookies I meant for chapel. I will need to get another package tomorrow for next Sunday. Oh, well.

 So, I go from Kate Chopin to Samuel Beckett. I read Waiting for Godot when I was in high school - my Aunt Mary Ellen Finholtsent us our cousin Paul's copy he used at the Cheshire Academy. I was the only one in the family to read the play. Beckett's novel Molloy was no stranger than his play.

I can enjoy Beckett, while knowing I can never write about what he writes about. He seems a bit cranky about life's absurdity. I was seriously put out about life's absurdities. Thinking about the eventual heat death of the universe gave me my first anxiety attack. I was maybe 34. Another reason I did not try my hand at writing. Later, I got even angrier when I decided to my life and efforts seriously. That kind of thinking got me into prison. So why'd Beckett keep writing? Because if you're a writer interested in life, that is what you do.

Molloy (Grove Press) was written in French by Beckett in French, then translated into English by Patrick Bowles and Beckett; it screams out avant-garde absurdism. The second paragraph of the first section runs on for 116 pages. Grammarians aside, it works because the sentences run short, pungent. You accept the narrator - Molloy -s a bit mad. Maybe more than a bit. Obviously, Molloy goes on a bit, but he doesn't go on in a Henry James kind of way. 

Part II's paragraphs do not achieve the Everest-like heights as the one in Part I. We also have a different narrator:

That we thought of ourselves as members of a vast organizaiton was doubtless also due to the all human feeling that trouble shared, or is it sorrow, is trouble something, I forget the word. But to me at least, who knew how to listen to the falsetto of reason, it was obvious that we were perhaps alone in doing what we did. Yes, in my moments of lucidity I thought it possible. And, to keep nothing from you, this lucidity was so acute at times that I cam even to doubt the existence of Gaber himself. And if I had not hastily sunk back into my darkness I might have gone to the extreme of conjuring away the chief too and regarding myself as solely responsibile for my wretched at six pungs ten a week plus bonuses and expenses. And having made away with Graber and the chief (one Youdi), could I have denied myself the pleasure of  - you know. But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. I was a olid in the midst of other solids.

What is the novel about? An object lesson in miscommunication - or non-communication. What happens? Not much. 

sch 

[ Some items turned up while seeking out the links I put in my original text:

 Molloy by Samuel Beckett – part one (1950) (Books & Boots, 2020) - very long, long enough that I might go back later to see just how superficial was my understanding 10 years ago.

Two Fools, Among Others (The Rambling, 2023) 

I see my reading life as pre-Molloy and post-Molloy. The book is an unforgiving, bleak, and bewildering experience, with every variable crying out for attention: the plot, the narration, the philosophy, the tone, the language. Beckett demands an attentive reader. And I was once such a reader. Twenty-year-old me had an incessant need to consume great books, partly driven by a desire to assuage imposter syndrome, partly just to prove that I could. That drive turned into a greedy intellectual curiosity. I’d read three books a week, sometimes more, grappling with meanings and interpretations, taking notes in a never-ending supply of cheap notebooks.

I recently re-read Molloy. And something has become clear: I am stupid. Or I am more stupid, or stupider, than my younger self. The twenty-year-old fool who read Molloy in a day, captivated and alarmed, has regressed into a thirty-three-year-old fool who took a week, checking his phone every few minutes, binge-watching The Crown, even socialising on occasion. I often put the book down, not in awe but anguish, struggling to follow the plot, struggling with tone.

***

Maybe the problem isn’t smartphones or age. Maybe the problem is that particular book. Maybe Molloy is the problem. The plot, the second time around, failed to capture my attention. Molloy is an epic quest in which no goal is stated, no progress is made, and no one cares either way. The narrator from the second half is likely the narrator from the first half, only at an earlier and more lucid stage of his existence. The clues are abstracted but evident: the narrator(s) suffer the same ailments, employ a similar idiom, use profound poesy to discuss bicycles, reference paternity, fight dirty. Some critics deny this view, suggesting that Beckett would not engage with a method as simplistic as non-linear narrative.

 

***

It is the language that beguiles, even the second time and, I presume, the third. Beckett uses all sorts of improprieties: dangling sentences, constant qualifications, grammatical indecencies, interjections disrupting discourse, re-corrective sentences, repetitions, repetitions, breaks in syntax, multi-lingual interventions, neologisms upon neologisms. God knows how it works. But it works. To take a handful of examples, because we can, because we should: “Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn’t a state of being even worse than life. So I found it natural not to rush into it.” Or perhaps: “My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as a joke which still goes on.” Or maybe: “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope for is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were at the beginning, and at the middle.”

Beckett’s words are dark and desolate, cruel and cutting. But, perhaps most of all, Beckett’s words are funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud-funny. Not slap-the-knee-funny. Beckett is laugh-in-the-library-and-hope-no-one-notices-funny. We laugh at Beckett as a defence mechanism, choosing joy in despair because the alternative is solely despair. So we laugh when the narrator ends up in a ditch, soils his trousers, compares himself less than favorably to a pig. And we laugh when the narrator kills a person, maybe two people. We laugh because it simply does not matter. Nothing really matters, at all. And that’s funny, I think.

Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy  (Electric Literature, 2014)

   sch 10/25/2025] 

What In The World Is Going On At Fort Dix?

 Okay, there were stories when I was at Fort Dix of people seeing two pairs of feet in the showers. That the showers were disgusting. Often blocked, with water coming back up from the drain; condensation (or worse) dripping from the pipes above. These are places for an assignation of utter desperation. Not that there were no gay men - I knew several of them - and there were also the GUMPS (Gay Until Make Parole; when I first heard the term I tried fitting into Forrest Gump.), but there is a strong, deep, and wide homophobia. Keep men banged up together long enough, and some start fearing they are succumbing to "unnatural urges". I cannot understand P Diddy's prison 'overrun with inmates having mass orgies in showers at night' (Irish Star) as being about the prison I was in for 11 years. Maybe it is about the west compound; I was in the east.  There was one couple who were kicked out of the leisure library and the the chapel's video library for doing what Lauren Boebert did in a theater. There was a story that one of the COs came upon two inmates having full contact congress in one room in the Education Building; it was given as the reason for it being available only by permission when it had been open. The CO being somewhere on the autism spectrum got a sympathy from me and several other people - it had to be a traumatizing sight. Considering how Sean Combs partied, I do not see where he should be making complaints.

 But besides all that, there is a Correctional Officer stationed in the first floor of the unit buildings. Not all of them actively patrolled. Some should have, it might have improved their health. They would stay in the office watching who knows what on their computers. Yet, nighttime was a good time to catch someone with a cell phone. People would fall asleep in their bunks with phones in their hands. I recall a story of someone being caught in a bathroom stall - being heard on the phone. I always wondered if the prisoner was doing FaceTime on his phone and got a little too noisome.

There are also counts during the night. Now, these are patrols by the unit CO and outside staff. They want to make sure everyone is tucked in and having sweet dreams.

Then I read Corrections Officers Leaving Federal Prisons in Droves for ICE (ProPublica) and BOP union seeks restoration of collective bargaining through new lawsuit. I saw one or two Correctional Officers that I thought had any talents justifying their salary. They also quickly departed the fold. The Fort Dix staff was lazy when they had a contract; without one they probably became even more so. I can see some of the guards I knew with firearms, and it is not good for the citizenry. For ICE, it will be a good thing - officers who already have a dislike of people will transition well to ICE.

The federal prison system is corrupt. It corrupts its employees and inmates alike. Not that anyone will want to reform it - they will look too soft on crime. But it needs reform so people can tell the difference between criminals - those in blue BOP uniforms and those in the tan of convicts. I used to say I stuck in a place with crooks, and then there were the convicts. It was far easier to trust the convicted than the representatives of law and order.

(There was one story of a female CO who had no problem getting into a convict's locker and eating his food.)

Anyway, there is another reason for the lack of prison reform at the federal level: the American people take a vicarious thrill from the degradation imposed by their government on fellow citizens.

sch  

Lost in Russia 4-9-2015 (Part Two)

[ 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.  

Continued from Lost in Russia 4-9-2015 (Part One). sch 10/23/2025]

And for the historian this historical novel has lessons (as well as anyone wanting to write a hunting story, or satirize a conspiracy theory/superstition, or weave a marriage plot - I've given up cataloging all the stories found so far under the oh-so-simple title of War and Peace).

Now those who took part in the events of the year 1812 have long ago passed from the scene, their personal interests have vanished, leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time save its historical results.

Providence compelled all those men, striving for the attainment of their own private ends, to combine for the accomplishment of a single stupendous result, of which no one man (neither Napoleon, nor Alexander, still less any of those who did the actual fighting had the slightest inkling.

Book Three; Part 2: August 1812; War and Peace (Penguin Classics, 1988)

What more can I say about War and Peace? 

I can ask what is the conceit of Americans? That what we cannot build better, we can buy and thus become morally superior to others by our rugged individualism? Or is it our belief that we have found the way to material success, trumping some far-off, speculative success? Either way, thinking that the rest of the world would be better off if they were us?

No, all I can say is, don't be scared of the book any more than you would be of a book by Stephen King or George R.R. Martin. Go, read Tolstoy as soon as possible. Certainly read War and Peace outside of prison!

 I have read little else but my Bible the past two weeks. Oh, yes, I nibbled at M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, and read a New Yorker, but War and Peace has been swallowing my time. 

I got “Basketball” copied and off to Ryan and KH. I did write Ryan a very long letter. I wonder what he will make of that. I'm typing portions of “The Old Days” - too many changes to keep 11 pages legible. That will take some time to finish - the law library is being remodeled, and the typewriters squeezed into the leisure library's reading room. Add to a suicide/drug overdoes (the scuttlebutt is one or the other, with heroin as the means) in Unit 5752, and 5711 on lockdown (for all manner of things: a CO getting pushed while apprehending an inmate with a cell phone, hooch, and just general screwing up), the ability to get to the Education Building has been a problem. And I'd like to get this done for JC - who is not very happy with me after we got a bit loud with one another (I violated one of my rules - don't get attached to anyone in particular) - can see it before he leaves. I think I've hit the mark with this one - I also have no idea what others will make of it. I think it and “The Sloe Gin Effect” or “Driving Down a Blind Alley” are the most likely to get me killed. 

The weather is all gray drizzle, but I'm keeping the depression at bay - tired of the effort but hanging on. I never realized how much I love the sound of Joni Mitchell's voice. Considering the senselessness, the sheer nullity, of my life, the Bible and War and Peace are good to get lost in.

sch

Lost in Russia 4-9-2015 (Part One)

 [ 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 10/18/2025] 

I started reading Tolstoy's War and Peace (Rosemary Edmond, translator; Penguin Classics, 1998) on March 26, and have made 864 pages out of 1,444. Like Napoleon drawn into Moscow, I cannot stop reading. Part of me wishes I had the hardbound edition Aunt Mary Ellen gave us over forty years ago (where did that book go to, Mom? Almost 30 years too late to be asking that question.) Part of me wishes I had made more of an effort with the paperback that was in my office. (And where did that copy go to? Who cleaned out my office, my ex-wife or Yelton? Questions too late to be asked in 2022.) But reflection has me thinking only during this federally funded retirement could I ever have given Tolstoy sufficient attention.

What am I learning from reading Tolstoy? That “good literature” can be fun — that literature requires a good story about interesting people. (I am also nibbling at E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel.) I'm learning the Great American Novel lies in the future — or will never exist. War and Peace concerns itself with narrow social groups covering a wide geographic area — something wholly lacking over here. (How do the top families of New York relate to those of Texas and all those to Chicago and all of those to Silicon Valley and all of them to the powers of Washington, D.C.?) America still lacks any history, creating a national identity. (For all those nationalists who have perverted the federal government into a national, central government, there remains a difference of character still between Virginia and Texas and Indiana and Massachusetts and California.)

I've also come to the conclusion Virginia Woolf undersold herself — the writer obviously needs experience and then a large estate with a bunch of serfs to create the all-encompassing Great Novel! Otherwise, all I think Tolstoy Teaches me is the value of a simple style employed in conveying the truth of events and character.

And just for the record, I've taken to calling it War and Peace and Marriage for Money and Looking for True Love. You'd think old Leo would be as melodramatically sentimental as Charles Dickens, or as gothic as a Bronte, where he is neither.

Russianness — what would be a similar Americanness?

Where, how and when could this young countess, who had had a French émigré for governess, have imbibed the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? Where had she picked up the manner which the pas de chale, one might have supposed, would have effaced long ago? But the spirit and the movements were the very one — inimitable, unteachable Russian—which “Uncle” had expected of her….

Book Two, Part 4: 1810-11: War and Peace (Penguin Classics, 1988)

sch  

[Continued in Lost in Russia 4-9-2015 (Part Two). sch 10/19/2025.]

Locked Down Saturday 3-28-2015

[ 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 10/18/2025] 

Ah, yes, a fight somewhere last night (5702? 5703? What rumor flew last night during recall had the trouble at the opposite end of the East Compound from me in 5751), and so one-way moves from unit building to mess hall and back. No moves since we've been back in the unit building. Read a chapter or two of War and Peace. Loafed. Did our usual 10 AM stand up count. (The federal Bureau of Prisons does not do much with us, the prisoners, but it does worry that we might not be in our twelve-man rooms for our stand-up counts.) We have two more today - 4 PM and 10 PM, as done every weekday. Saturday and Sunday, the government takes an interest in our morning whereabouts. I figure no typing on, "The Old Days Are Not Forgotten". I do have more of War and Peace to read; 1,370 pages to be exact.

 I need to call Dad and Melissa. Dad to see if her got my last letter and if he read "Reunion". Melissa, to see if she's still alive.

Anxious over the stories. A friend from the writing group has "Basketball". Cathy P has "Mr. Morgan Has A Problem". KH has everything written, except "Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing". I find myself wanting validation - or, at least, feedback. Some reassurance I have talent and not what I always thought was just kind, patronizing words. Sweazy was wrong - criticism, justified and rational is a help, a need for me. I fear I've gotten too involved in my fiction, that I am talking to myself. Thanks, Mom, for leaving me hating what you called "me living in my own world". Yes, I know you meant to help prepare me for the ugliness of the real world. Instead, I've got this aslant perspective, a feeling of tiptoeing along the fault lines of insanity, of having a default mode of hedging my bets. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan still refuses to work on Maggie's farm. Would like to have heard Russell's final verdict on "Basketball" (for which I need two minor additions.)

And I wanted "The Old Days" in a form Joel could see before he departs this wondrous place. Latest scuttlebutt has a fight in 5702 and 5703 and the track. Considering how we got patted down and how containers carried by some got searched, I'm thinking the guards were looking for weapons. Yes, this is supposed to be a low security facility. But we get blacks and Hispanics (take your pick of place of origin: Puerto Rico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and some other places) gangbangers, motivated by money owed for hooch, gambling debts, or mere boredom, combined with too much energy. Prison does not encourage irony - although it is a fertile source [for irony 10/18/2025]. Those in the fighting - maybe even those caught fighting - could wind up in a camp - an even lower security level prison - where I cannot go, being a SO. 

Maybe I will work on "An Equitable Division" and my letters this afternoon. Do all that longhand. Meanwhile, I need to get ready for lunch.

sch  

Joyce Carol Oates' We Were The Mulvaneys 3/27/2015

[ 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]  

With having read so little Joyce Carol Oates, I think you might question the effect she has on me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy have also hit me as hard. She makes me wish I'd kept writing fiction — as does all the other three. At the same time, Oates makes me wonder if I can ever write as well as she does — like Marquez. Her tales of western New York surprise and encourage me. Surprising me by setting them not in the more glamorous cities, like Jonathan Franzen. But small towns like Hardy and William Faulkner. Encouraging me with my own stories of no — where Indiana. She chills how she handles the most horrible of events (here: the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl) without flinching or overplaying the event in melodrama. Is this not Art? Is not this steadiness to be found in Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina? Surprisingly, the prison's leisure library has more of her books (three, I seem to recall). I put them on the next reading list.

While reading We Were The Mulvaneys (Plume, 1997), I thought of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. There the gets raped, mutilated, and murdered; father executes his revenge. Therein lies the tragedy. In Oates' novel, the father cannot execute his revenge; society protects the rapist. The father and sons dwindle through impotence. The daughter, sent away, becomes figuratively mutilated and somewhat dead. The family splinters. Only when the father dies — away from the family but after reconciling with his daughter — does the family begin to heal. I see now what We Were The Mulvaneys shares with Franzen's The Corrections is the changing role and ineffectiveness of the American patriarch and the family. Oates has in her novel characters in some state of healing. Not a “Hollywood ending” but a hopeful one.

Tough, serious-minded, and the hardest novel I've read for a while. Oates made me think too much of my own life, my own family. I am actually looking forward to War and Peace. 

Why is there not the same touting of Joyce Carol Oates for the Nobel as there is for Philip Roth?

I want to leave with a sample of Oates' writing. The problem is one of selection — length, its durability as a quotation, are troublesome here. She packs tightly.

So in the end Mike did walk his ravaged old rubbery-legged dad up the filth-encrusted stairs to the furnished room above the Golden Pavilion Chinese Pavilion and Takeout. The pigsty room you wouldn't want to examine too closely. Poor Mike biting his lower lip, nostrils pinching. He pulled off his dad's laceless shoes, a few items of dirt-stiffened clothing, laid him onto the stained rumpled sheets where at once he began to snore, snort, wheeze, his head lolling like the head of a broken-necked goose. Waking a long time later to discover only six twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his pants pocket — a hundred twenty when he'd had a wild hope of five hundred at least. So the ravaged old man had humbled himself in the eyes of his eldest son and in his own eyes for so little, after all.

sch

[Checking out the internet for the information denied me in prison, I found the following items.

JCO has a Substack! Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal.

We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (Book Snob, 3/17/2011) has a different reaction than mine:

I could write more about what happens, but I can’t be bothered to, which sounds dreadful, but that’s how the book made me feel by the end. There was so much detail, so many interwoven stories…and it was all rather unbelievable. While there are precursors to what happens in the pasts of Corinne and Michael, from the way they are described at the beginning, their actions are just not convincing for their characters. I didn’t believe that the people they were described as being would possibly act in that way. Judd is a rather weak narrator; Oates doesn’t seem quite sure what she’s doing with him, and digs into the minds and hearts of other characters in a way Judd could not possibly have done. How could he know in minute and graphic detail, what his brother was feeling or thinking at a particular time, for example?

On top of that, it’s a heavy book, with allegorical and Biblical overtones; the setting in Mt Ephraim is, I’m sure, deliberate, and the failures of fathers and betrayals of sons and so on and so forth, as well as the frequent mentions of religion and forgiveness and atonement etc, all gave it a weight that the flimsy story could not carry. It started out very promisingly, but it ran away with itself and became far too complicated and convoluted. The essential themes of the rupturing of the myth of the all American family; the questioning of the appearance of perfection; the ease at which families can be torn apart, by any number of seemingly trivial reasons that trigger a fault line already there, under the surface, are all excellent, and intriguing, and promised a great deal. Ultimately, however, I felt Oates tried to be too clever; to introduce too many strands; to say too much. The trite, twee ending was the final nail in the coffin. To give her due credit, her writing is wonderful, and I stayed with the book regardless of my doubts because her prose is so good, and drew me in despite the weakness of the tale she was spinning. As such, I haven’t been put off trying her again, as other reviews suggest this is not her best work, and I’m sure another one of her books might strike a better chord with me. Has anyone got any recommendations?

There are 41 comments, I scanned several, and they are interesting.

booksnob is now a Substack.

Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys (John Pistelli, 2022) has interesting things to say.

The old questions: “How good is Joyce Carol Oates?” and, given an oeuvre so vast, “Where can you begin to find out?” These questions have been reinvigorated in recent years. Oates’s reputation had always been precarious, marred by a critical suspicion of her copiousness and of her bestseller-adjacent tastes and interests. It seems to have crested in the 1980s and ’90s—that Toni Morrison usurped Oates’s Nobel Prize was the opinion of even one distinguished black novelist, Charles Johnson—and then to have waned in the 2000s. But in the last decade, and especially in the last few months, thanks to the controversial film of her Marilyn Monroe novel and to a sideline in Twitter shitposting almost as accomplished as that of the former president she so abhors, Oates has seemed to stand at the apex of her vanishing generation. After the deaths of Updike, Roth, Morrison, and Didion, and amid the more sibylline reticence of her remaining peers (Ozick, McCarthy, DeLillo, Pynchon), isn’t she the last lioness of American literature?

***

But this summary of male violence and female victimization makes the novel sound more agenda-driven than it is, when in fact it is less didactic than Roth’s book. In Oates’s fiction as on her notorious Twitter feed, we encounter an exoteric politics at odds with an esoteric aesthetics. She is officially a feminist, but her criticism hints that she finds the classic female domestic novel insipid, is bored by the enlightened domestics Austen and Eliot, and considers herself the heir to fanatic, fascistic Dostoevsky and Lawrence. As in Dostoevsky, her characters seethe and roil, actuated by unconscious manias and half-uttered desires; as in Lawrence, she sets the human drama in its natural frame, amid animal heat, stony cliffs, sucking bogs, killing winds, as if to say that we are a part of nature—of its hideous violence as of its pastoral beauty or poetic sublimity—and shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise. One of Judd’s earliest visions is of a doe chased by a pack of hounds: rape rising right out of the earth. 

***

Why, then, the controversy about whether or not she’s a good writer—even leaving aside the irrelevant question of how much she writes or of the popular-feminine genres she often favors? Bluntly put, the relevant problem is the prose. We find no fine writing, no will-to-style, no singular voice in Oates (neither in this book nor in any other work of hers that I’ve read): nothing like Updike’s lyric pointillism, Roth’s eloquent rage, Morrison’s scriptural orature, DeLillo’s mediatic staccato, McCarthy’s Biblical cadence, Didion’s knowing minimalism. Instead, there are clichés and imprecisions and redundancies, my favorite being an early reference to “animals and fowl,” as if the latter category were not included in the former. There are exclamation points, italics, interjections, sentence fragments, strangely-deployed quotation marks—all adding up to an urgent anti-style. I am ungenerously reminded of the apocryphal line about the similarly astylistic Dreiser: he had no talent, only genius. It is in retrospect bizarre—truly an instance of racial ideology—that anyone suspected the Swedish Academy of choosing Morrison over Oates for the 1993 Nobel Prize on the grounds of “political correctness” when I imagine that even a Swedish translation must convey which of the two writers is the exceptional stylist, the poet of prose.

Oates accomplishes her fiction’s very real emotional effect with sheer accretion and insistence; the novel is like the wind that batters High Point Farm, a constant unglamorous roar insinuating itself through the walls of your mind. Her major characters—in this novel, the fluttery and formidable Corinne, “Protestant to her fingertips,” is a particularly glorious creation—seem hacked with a claw hammer out of stone. This, too, is an inheritance of Dostoevsky and Lawrence, as well as of Charlotte Brontë, one of the few writers named in this impressively un-literary novel. I think it is a legitimate way to write fiction, if superficially less commanding than the line-by-line vigor of a Morrison. For these anti-poetic writers, the novelist uses language to surpass language, to strike through to the core of reality—psychological, natural, and spiritual reality—over which language decorously draws its ornamented veil. 

 I would not draw a comparison to Dreiser. There is a point here that I did not see ten years ago: the effects created by sheer accretion. But Oates works more nimbly than Dreiser — in my opinion, and you determine the worth of that. I like Dreiser — even though I fear his style adhering to my own. He lacks the cutthroat eye of Oates. Well, maybe not in An American Tragedy. This feels like quibbling, so I will go on.

Review: We Were the Mulvaneys  (The Literary Omnivore, 2009) makes a point I had not seen elsewhere, one that I do not recall, but may need to be added here. I do recall one character's arc, the son, did seem dull.

Oates’ aggressively leisurely pace can drag at times, but it’s also useful for playing up suspense, mostly in the parts of the novel dealing with Marianne. It can be hard to care about Judd, our narrator, when the stories of the rest of his family are much more interesting–the lion’s share of his involvement in the main story is intertwined with Patrick’s story. Oates, like the best of mothers, devotes equal time to all the Mulvaneys. I will readily admit to flipping ahead to check where Marianne or Patrick were at any given point.

And there I will close out this post.

sch 10/14/2025.] 

So, I've Read Jonathan Franzen 3/25/2015

[ 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.

My Writes seems to have knocked off on St. Valentine's Day of 2024.

 

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]