Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Drama
Pages: 609
I finished The Corrections while riding the subway home yesterday. As I rode the escalator out, a man noticed the copy I held in my hand. He smiled and gave me a nod of approval. The Corrections is that kind of book. It's a six hundred pages emotional trial that leaves its readers scarred like prostate cancer survivors. It's long, terribly involving and leaves you with a sense of unspeakable pride once you finished it. It's not perfect by any means, but Jonathan Franzen has a patience and a dedication to his craft that leads him to create characters that literally jump out of the page and attack you.
You all more or less know the story. Alfred, patriarch of the Lambert family (and dogmatic follower of Arthur Schopenhauer), is ravaged by Parkinson's disease and his wife Enid seeks her children Gary, Chip and Denise, so they can spend one last Christmas together in their house of St. Jude Kansas. The kids are waist deep into their own lives and The Corrections is their stories. There's no real plot, just a path to one last Christmas for the Lambert family. I say there's no plot because it's a known fact that Enid wants to reunite the family for a few days, by page sixty and the only "plot development" to speak of is a yes or a no from Gary, Chip and Denise. That's where Jonathan Franzen's magic kicks in.
The stories the characters emotional/psychological states, a few months away from Christmas, are weaved and streamed the way James Joyce would stream the consciousness of a single character. One page you have Chip Lambert on the sidewalk, brooding over the ruins of his ambitions and as you turn the next page, you dive into a long past memory from eight years ago that explains his current state of depression. In that sense, The Corrections asks a lot from its reader. I can imagine not connecting to the Lambert family if I didn't had three or four long reading stretches to settle in the storyline and understand the structure of Franzen's writing. Every hundred pages or so, he changes the point of view for another protagonist.
Literary realism is not easy, at an age of post-modernist gimmicks. It's a detail-oriented work. Franzen sews the destinies of his characters together with sometimes subtle allusions and sometimes enormous elements. He keeps the reader off balanced. The "real" in The Corrections, what hooks and sinks the reader is that "patriarchal call" that the kids feel forced to obey to, despite the state of their lives, marking the change of eras they went through at their grew up and their respective relationship with their parents as they all reacted differently to Alfred and Enid's own set of values. I found myself rooting for Denise's risk-taking ambition and feeling for Chip's vulnerability.
When I say The Corrections is not perfect, I mean that Franzen himself sometimes indulges into personal stuff that weights the novel even more than the Damocles sword that Alfred has over his head. He sometimes feels forced to channel Henry James and put a page-and-a-half sentence here and there. I find it maddening. Maybe it's some custom from another time, but I find this type of sentence useless. I like my ideas regrouped in paragraphs, not running over endless sentences. He also sometimes makes comments out of the blue, on subjects like the Lithuanian political situation, which led me to mutter "oh dude, come on", from time to time. Fortunately, he kept it short.
You all more or less know the story. Alfred, patriarch of the Lambert family (and dogmatic follower of Arthur Schopenhauer), is ravaged by Parkinson's disease and his wife Enid seeks her children Gary, Chip and Denise, so they can spend one last Christmas together in their house of St. Jude Kansas. The kids are waist deep into their own lives and The Corrections is their stories. There's no real plot, just a path to one last Christmas for the Lambert family. I say there's no plot because it's a known fact that Enid wants to reunite the family for a few days, by page sixty and the only "plot development" to speak of is a yes or a no from Gary, Chip and Denise. That's where Jonathan Franzen's magic kicks in.
The stories the characters emotional/psychological states, a few months away from Christmas, are weaved and streamed the way James Joyce would stream the consciousness of a single character. One page you have Chip Lambert on the sidewalk, brooding over the ruins of his ambitions and as you turn the next page, you dive into a long past memory from eight years ago that explains his current state of depression. In that sense, The Corrections asks a lot from its reader. I can imagine not connecting to the Lambert family if I didn't had three or four long reading stretches to settle in the storyline and understand the structure of Franzen's writing. Every hundred pages or so, he changes the point of view for another protagonist.
Literary realism is not easy, at an age of post-modernist gimmicks. It's a detail-oriented work. Franzen sews the destinies of his characters together with sometimes subtle allusions and sometimes enormous elements. He keeps the reader off balanced. The "real" in The Corrections, what hooks and sinks the reader is that "patriarchal call" that the kids feel forced to obey to, despite the state of their lives, marking the change of eras they went through at their grew up and their respective relationship with their parents as they all reacted differently to Alfred and Enid's own set of values. I found myself rooting for Denise's risk-taking ambition and feeling for Chip's vulnerability.
When I say The Corrections is not perfect, I mean that Franzen himself sometimes indulges into personal stuff that weights the novel even more than the Damocles sword that Alfred has over his head. He sometimes feels forced to channel Henry James and put a page-and-a-half sentence here and there. I find it maddening. Maybe it's some custom from another time, but I find this type of sentence useless. I like my ideas regrouped in paragraphs, not running over endless sentences. He also sometimes makes comments out of the blue, on subjects like the Lithuanian political situation, which led me to mutter "oh dude, come on", from time to time. Fortunately, he kept it short.
Sometimes, these references are playful, like in Chip's story, where the literary theory class he gives is getting torn to shreds his student. That marks a clear rejection of the academic system by Franzen and it makes him score big in my esteem. The Corrections is a physical, intellectual and emotional challenge that will require your total cooperation, but it's a novel that feels rewarding, if not a little depressing. You have to be in the mood to be shaken up, because shake you up it will. Read it, but not for leisure. Read it because you feel strong and ready. It's worth your time.
