To read Jonathan Franzen is to know – like a Star Trek crew member facing off against some alien mind-entity – that you have encountered an intelligence indubitably greater than your own. In The Corrections there are times when Franzen’s voracious, omniscient imagination seems to have inventoried and articulated the multiplicity of the world in full.
In this he resembles other super-eclectic brainboxes of postwar American fiction – his obvious forbears Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, as well as contemporaries such as the late David Foster Wallace. But what marks Franzen out and gives this book its deep richness is his commitment to storytelling on a very human scale. Franzen uses his gifts to excavate human truths not only with unflinching clarity, but also with a touching and tender pathos. Time and again, his insights feel thrillingly, deliciously right.
The book tracks the trials and disappointments of the Lamberts, a middle class, midwestern family whose home town of St Jude is named after the patron saint of lost causes. Alfred is the family’s crumbling patriarch – an austere, emotionally frozen disciplinarian from a backwards prairie town, who dedicates a life of service to the railroad only to see it gobbled up and asset-stripped by a firm of aggressive venture capitalists. In retirement, his dignity and self-reliance are similarly devoured by Parkinson’s, and his obsolescence underlined against the backdrop of a hi-tech, consumptive America that no longer has a use for his kind.
His youngest son Chip is a Foucaultian cultural studies lecturer who (in an episode reminiscent of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain) loses his job after an affair with a precocious student. He finds his antithesis in his elder brother Gary, a senior portfolio manager in affluent midlife, depressed, paranoid and alienated from his wife and children. Meanwhile, middle chjld Denise is a bisexual workaholic control freak whose wild side erupts in a string of kamikaze love affairs.
Over these wayward children frets their hen-like mother, Enid – neurotic, status-anxious and self-deluding in her emotional need to believe in her family as a paradigm of success and respectability. As it becomes apparent that Alfred’s condition is deteriorating, she begs her children to return home for ‘one last Christmas’ in St Jude, thus providing the dénouement toward which the book’s multiple narrative threads inexorably move.
Franzen exposes the follies, vanities and neuroses of each Lambert with such insight and compassion you get the feeling that, rather as Dostoyevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov, the author has split himself into three to bring this trio of siblings to life. Each of the Lambert children’s lives are shaped, consciously or subconsciously, by a series of reactions to their overbearing parents. Franzen brilliantly captures the sticky toxicity of family relationships, of how vainly we struggle, like flies in a web, to free ourselves from the threads that tie us to our past.
But perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is its heart-rendingly powerful and lucidly observed study of Alfred and the corrosive onset of Parkinson’s. Franzen drills into the deepest recesses of this proud, complex and initially unsympathetic figure, peeling away layer after layer until we see the vast, aching sadness at his centre.
Out of such pain Franzen fashions some of the blackest and most brilliantly sustained comic writing in contemporary literature. The early chapters in particular vibrate with savage farce, and show that Franzen is at his most laugh-out-loud funny when he writes about men and masculinity.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the picaresque exploits of the hapless Chip Lambert. As the novel opens, we find the recently sacked academic in manic-depressive freefall, writing an ill-conceived attempt at a commercial Hollywood screenplay which opens with a six-page lecture on the anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama. Worse, having dispatched the manuscript to his agent Eden Procuro, he realizes that he has subconsciously littered the text with scores of repetitious and highly inappropriate references to his female protagonist’s breasts. In the first of many allusions to the book’s title, Chip is seized by the conviction that he can salvage both his career and his relationship with his girlfriend if only he can chase the document down and make the necessary corrections before Procuro reads it.
The novel’s title serves as an inexhaustible metaphor that weaves through the fabric of the story: it is referenced in the miracle Parkinsons drug Correcktall, to which the Lamberts are fighting to get Alfred access; it is a stockbroking term for the catastrophic plunge in the value of Gary’s shares in said drug; it is the political correctness that costs Chip his job, as well as the correctional facility being built on his college campus – and so on. But above all it alludes to a generalised sense of the desperate need to put things right – whether morally, spiritually, clinically or pharmaceutically – in a society obsessed with unattainable normalcy and terrified by the prospect of failure or dysfunction.
This is beautifully realized in the character of Gary, who having attained all the trappings of suburban comfort, begins to experience his home as a kind of panopticon, in which the concerned gazes of his family members become surveillance cameras. In a fit of paranoia he resorts to elaborate shows of positivity in order to disprove his wife Caroline’s accusation that he is clinically depressed, culminating in a blackly hilarious episode involving a deadly combination of vodka and hedge clippers.
Sadly, Franzen cannot sustain this level of inspiration. After producing prose of seemingly effortless fluency and verve for 300 of its 650 pages, The Corrections goes soft in the middle. Part of the problem is that Franzen can’t resist expanding his canvas to take in the widescreen vistas of ‘meta-novelists’ like Robert Coover and William Gaddis. With varying degrees of success, he riffs off themes from the late 90s zeitgeist, including the economic and cultural appropriation of failing Eastern European states, the ascendancy of cultural theory in academe, the long boom of US economic growth and the accompanying banalities of postmodern mass consumption.
But having spent the first half of the novel constructing a compelling family saga, Franzen’s story ranges into places it does not need to visit. Arid plains of narrative open up as Franzen throws in sub-plots and back-stories involving inconsequential characters we never meet. In a series of sprawling information dumps, his prose style shifts from rich first-person detail to broad-brush exposition. A cartoon-like quality creeps in, as the author falls prey to the bad habits of some of his contemporaries, including a touch of satirical excess and some overly knowing hipster symbolism.
Happily, in due course Franzen finds his way back to the story he has so expertly made us care about, and the pay-off – the long anticipated Christmas reunion – is more than worth the readers’ perseverance.
Its flabby midsection notwithstanding, at its note-perfect best The Corrections beautifully balances its satirical elements with movingly observed human drama, evoking an utterly three-dimensional world. An extraordinary feat of empathy and compassion, The Corrections can be ranked among the finest American novels of the past 30 years.
