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The
Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Recommendation: ••• |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Doomed Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, The
Corrections, will probably win awards, and will be considered as one of
the best novels of the year. Not by me. There were too many pages on which
the author was so full of himself and of displaying his talent that I was put
off and distracted. Relationships, characters and situations are often more
edgy than necessary, creating stereotypes rather than depth. The Midwestern
parents, Enid and Alfred, value home and hearth and old-fashioned ways, and
are portrayed as neurotic or worse. New Yorker son, Chip, an underemployed
former college professor (fired for sexual misconduct), comes across as a
selfish Peter Pan. Philadelphia son Gary, a bank executive who married money,
is portrayed as suffering from untreated depression, and he fouls the air in
each encounter of every relationship Franzen creates. Daughter Denise keeps
secrets of her own inability to sustain relationships. The title refers to
many kinds of corrections: script changes; stock market declines; and fixing
minds through new treatments. There are so many levels of corrections, it’s
almost, but not quite, cute. Here’s an excerpt: “And yet, on that
October night, as she knelt on the bathroom floor, Enid had the heretical
thought that it might after all have been wiser, in her maternal homilies, to
have laid less stress on marriage. It occurred to her that Denise’s rash act
might even have been prompted, in some tiny part, by her wish to do the moral
thing and please her mother. Like a toothbrush in the toilet bowl, like a
dead cricket in a salad, like a diaper on the dinner table, this sickening
conundrum confronted Enid: that it might actually have been preferable for
Denise to go ahead and commit adultery, better to sully herself with a
momentary selfish pleasure, better to waste a purity that every decent young
man had the right to expect from a prospective bride, than to marry Emile.
Except that Denise should never have been attracted to Emile in the first
place! It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children
didn’t match. They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and
all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully
other things.” Franzen had me laughing at times,
especially in two scenes. During one, Chip is inside a gourmet grocery store
in Manhattan trying to carry on a conversation with an editor’s husband while
feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the movement of an $80 shoplifted
salmon in his pants. Franzen set this up earlier by letting us know that
Chip’s doctoral dissertation was on the cod piece. Almost cute. Another long
scene has Enid discussing medication with a shipboard physician who makes
money by selling drugs not approved for sale in the United States. The doctor
keeps calling her by different names, and both of them are missing what the
other is saying. With a bow to C.S. Lewis, the drug is named Aslan, since it transports
the patient to his or her own Narnia. At their core, the characters and
situations are not funny, and Franzen’s satire works at times, but not always. Franzen’s gloomy characters and their
relationships provide a story to present his version of social criticism.
What he writes left me cold; the way he writes left me wanting more. Read for
yourself to enjoy this fine writer’s skill. For me, he summed up this book in
a line in the middle: “What made correction possible also doomed it.” Steve Hopkins, October 17, 2001 |
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ã 2001 Hopkins and Company, LLC |
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