The Corrections

Rating:
Summary: A Modern-Day "Brothers Karamazov"
Review: Much like Ben Jonjak's recent, brilliant novel "Glorious Failure," "The Corrections" aspires to litearary greatness. This is the heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart by the ravages of modern times, which yet, find a way to share tender moments in a satisfying Christmas reunion. Although "The Corrections" lacks the intense social dialogue of Dostoevsky or Jonjak, it is a fullfilling effort and, if the weight of the other two is too great, a far more readable effort.

Rating:
Summary: Pitch-perfect family life in fantasy if not reality
Review: Once I started this book, I could not put it down. (It is close to 600 pages and I read it in five days.) The book is about the Lambert family, which includes the aging parents, Alfred, who seems to be dying of Parkinson's and other attendant ailments, including dementia; and Enid, his wife with a bad hip and a lack of patience for Alfred's failing health. They live in a fictional Midwestern city, St. Jude. It's also about their three grown children, Gary, a bank VP, who is married to Caroline, and has three boys, Aaron, Caleb and Jonah; Chip, a professor of "textual artifacts" fired for writing a paper for a student and then stalking her, who spends time on a Lithuanian Web-based financing scheme; and the youngest, Denise, a chef, who may or may not be a lesbian.

The book is loooooooooong, although it was a pleasure to read, and I think my only substantive criticisms (which I'll just get out of the way), are that it may at times be uncontrolled and it has a lot of sex in it, overtly and covertly. After awhile I realized, that except for Enid, the matriarch, all the characters wanted to have sex with women. Gary did. Chip did. Denise did. I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes me wonder if Franzen just can't write heterosexual women very well. I don't know; I've never read anything else by him.

This book is simultaneously dead-on on the realistic detail as well as fantastic, and there are some funny moments, including an early moment in which Chip is correcting student papers and writes in the margin: "Cressida's character may inform Toyota's choice of product name; that Toyota's Cressida informs the Shakespearean text requires more argument than you present here."

That said, there were things about this book that just made me draw in my breath because they were so pitch-perfect about the chaos and complexity of family life. Enid, as the mother, is an interesting case, because she seems never to think that she deserves to have anything she wants, but, oh!, she wants things desperately, so she manipulates people to ask for the things she really desires and initiates. She hounds Denise to help her father with his exercises, then tells Alfred, "Denise wants to help you with your exercises." She also seeks to avoid responsibility for her comments. Note this passage from page 515:

"I don't mean to criticize," Enid said, "but [smoking]'s a terrible habit for your health. It's bad for your skin, and frankly, it's not a pleasant smell for others."

Denise, with a sigh, washed her hands and began to brown the flour for the sauerkraut gravy. "If you're going to come and live with me," she said, "we need to get some things clear."

"I said I wasn't criticizing."

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Moments like that show Franzen a keen observer of the interpersonal familial dialogue! He certainly gets right the way the kids grow up in the same family, have completely different experiences and different responses to the way they were raised and their aging parents.

And their responses lead me to my final idea, the meaning of the title. There are many corrections in the novel. Chip, while a professor, lives across a bog from a correctional institution and Gary, the stockbroker, who has an interesting interior monologue on how he is not depressed because serotonin gains outnumber declines in his brain, draws connections with market corrections, the Big One of which comes toward the end of the novel. Other corrections are more oblique (but I tried to pay attention to the use of the word in the text... I was an English major, afterall). There is the correction adult children try to make for the shortcomings they perceive they had to endure in their upbringing. There is the correction that adults try to make in their growing children to keep them from not only "bad" people, but too unusual (there's the requisite, "You're going to sit there until you eat it" scene). There is the correction that consumerism can make to a lonely or unhappy soul. There is the correction drugs (legal and otherwise) can make to an ailing psyche. There is the correction family members seek for their aging father's terminal illness. There is the way the father views his hospitalization as time spent in a correctional institute. And there is the final correction of a bad marriage that is a little shocking and simultaneously depressing and uplifting.

Franzen, through the Lambert family, takes on contemporary society and its attendant problems of expectation, entitlement, technology and distance. It's a great read, funny and fun. I recommend it.


Rating:
Summary: One Great Book!
Review: Our story begins in the ancestral home of the Lambert family, in suburban St. Jude. The house, though it has seen better days, still maintains its façade of upper-middle-class style, with tasteful furniture and knick-knacks from around the world strategically deployed to give the appearance of gracious living. Within this house, Enid and Alfred Lambert wage the long-running and tireless war of a couple who have never agreed on a single thing. Skirmishes are staged in the living room (each side capturing territory with successive furniture purchases); in the hall closet (where Enid, on the strength of her oldest son's advice, squirrels away financial correspondence that she tells Alfred she has mailed for him); and in the basement (where Alfred, inexplicably, fills old Yuban cans with urine when there is a "nice little half-bathroom not twenty feet away").

In more urban locations around the country, the three Lambert children are fighting their own battles with their respective demons. Gary, the oldest, is battling depression, his infuriating wife, and his materialistic brats; Chip is struggling with a rapidly disappearing sense of self-worth, after an affair with an undergrad leaves him jobless and heavily in debt to his sister; and Denise, the youngest, is learning that her penchant for making destructive choices is something of a hindrance to her chances for happiness. On top of all this stress is the burden of dealing with Enid's increasingly strident demands for a last family Christmas in St. Jude, and Alfred's rapidly deteriorating condition. There is also a brief but extremely gratifying cameo from a talking piece of poop, which ought to be enough to sell the story to any discerning reader.

Franzen has an amazing gift for making terrible things funny. Marital discord, debilitating disease, the general awareness that your life is falling apart - these things are not humorous, but in Franzen's capable hands, you will find yourself laughing anyway, shaking your head in incredulity at his way with words. In addition, the plot is so dense (but dense like a rich chocolate cake, not dense like a vacuous coworker) and so intricately shot through with little jokes and recurring details that, upon finishing the book, you'll want to immediately turn back to page 1 and start over again to find all the things you missed the first time through.

Corrections will repay you handsomely with hearty guffaws and the reassuring sense that you're not the only one whose life is hellishly unfair. In a world of cumbersome books that you'd rather throw away than pack up and move, The Corrections is worth its weight in gold. Pick up a copy! Also recommended is another entertaining Amazon quick-pick I enjoyed tremendously: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez. Happy reading!



Rating:
Summary: Corrected
Review: This is a good critique on the Amercian middle class today. There are no two-dimensional characters in the book, and the personalities of each one of them are described in depth in the story, which is rarely seen in other novels. I am moved by the ending of the book, although none of the characters is adorable. However, the book is a bit too long. Had the author refrained from writing long sentences (sometimes one sentence took up a whole paragraph!), the book would have been even better. I've recently read another great book titled BARK OF THE DOGWOOD which is equally intricate and well thought out. I highly recommend both it and THE CORRECTIONS.