The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
8.5/10
I like to write, and I want to get better at it. Time passes quickly when I’m writing, and I figure that’s a good enough reason to do most things. Unfortunately, I often feel as though I don't have very much to say. One way to circumvent this issue, I figured, is to write about things that other people have written about. So, I’m starting with something relatively straightforward: a book review. Once completed, I will be well on my way to becoming the Roger Ebert of the Instagram generation. Going forward, I plan to keep reviewing books that have stood out to me, and I’m hoping to try my hand at some essays and short stories as well.
The Corrections is a 2001 novel written by Jonathan Franzen. It won the National Book Award, and the New York Times listed it as the fifth best book of the 21st century. The back cover is awash with praise: Elle calls the novel “a genuine masterpiece,” and The Atlantic calls Franzen a “wizard.”
I had never read any of Franzen’s fiction before, and I went into The Corrections with the same trepidation I feel whenever I engage with a work that has received widespread acclaim. But upon finishing the novel, I can confirm that The Corrections lives up to the hype, or most of it anyway.
At its core, The Corrections is a novel about family, and Franzen explores the meaning and significance of familial ties by examining the lives of the five members of the Lambert family: Alfred, Enid, and their three children Gary, Chip, and Denise. The Lambert children were raised in St. Jude, a prototypical, middle-class, Midwestern suburb, but by the start of the novel, they have all moved out, distanced themselves from their parents, and built lives for themselves on the East Coast. The aging Alfred and Enid have stayed put in St. Jude, but Alfred has started to develop Parkinson’s and dementia, and Enid has no choice but to assume full caregiving responsibilities for her ailing husband. The novel’s plot loosely centers around Enid’s plan to have the five Lamberts gather in St. Jude and celebrate “one last Christmas” together.
In my opinion, the two strongest aspects of the novel are its prose and its characters. Weaker are Franzen’s satirical depictions of modern American life and the novel’s general lack of forward momentum -- the building-up-to-something-ness that is the bread and butter of so-called “page-turners” -- which necessitates a certain degree of patience on the part of the reader. But the novel plays to its strengths well, and it spends enough time reveling in them that it's more gimmicky and uninspired features are easily forgiven.
If you like the English language -- if you enjoy seeing and experiencing the ways in which words can be put together and taken apart -- you should read The Corrections. Reading Franzen’s prose is like watching an expert clockmaker repair a wristwatch, although Franzen’s material is not aluminum but adjectives. He is, in short, an excellent writer, and he knows it. Many of Franzen’s sentences seem designed to thrust his brilliance into his readers’ faces; he makes sure that his virtuosity is impossible to ignore or deny. He is good at what he does, and he flaunts his abilities unashamedly. Such writing may get on some readers' nerves, but most will be too busy appreciating Franzen’s linguistic prowess that they'll forget to feel annoyed.
Franzen’s sentences are exercises in excess and precision. Most of them are long, winding, layered, and complicated. They are filled with innocuous details and indulgent descriptions, and they refuse to let go of an idea until it is squeezed dry. Here’s an example from the novel’s first page:
“By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of ‘bell ringing’ but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking the metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sounds had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of the compression of waves but a much, much slower waving and waning of their consciousness of the sound.”
I chose this sentence not because it is the novel’s most immaculate, which it is not, but rather because it is our first introduction to Franzen’s style. It is, as is probably clear, a style of excess: there are lots of words, lots of semicolons, lots of descriptions, and lots of ideas. Where Hemingway would have written “The bell was ringing,” Franzen writes a paragraph, and this impulse to expand and (over)explain is present throughout the entirety of the novel. It manifests in multi-page reports on the Lithuanian economy, prolonged accounts of experimental neurological treatments, and extensive inventories of suburban dining rooms, and it demands a kind of focused, deliberate attention on the part of the reader, who is often called upon to exercise a non-trivial amount of effort to follow the thread of a sentence from the start to finish while simultaneously remembering, and making sense of, all the words that came inbetween.
Fortunately, the effort required to decipher Franzen’s sentences isn’t prohibitively burdensome. This is because his prose, in spite of its excesses, is also incredibly precise. Franzen’s extravagant, maximalist style is difficult to pull off, and it is even more difficult to pull off well. The Corrections could have easily ended up as a confusing, scattered mess in the hands of a less disciplined and meticulous writer. But Franzen is fastidious, perhaps to a fault, and he never loses -- or even loosens -- his control over the words and sentences that populate the novel’s 566 pages. Perhaps he could have spent less time describing the minutiae of railroad acquisitions and cruise ship amenities, but these would be macro-level changes, for on the micro-level of verbs and adjectives there is little fat to trim. Franzen seems to have invested the same amount of care and rigor into every sentence he put down on the page, and given the length of his project, one cannot help but feel impressed. Not everyone can write like this, and I suspect hard work isn’t enough to make it happen. This is the kind of writing that requires that ineffable quality we call talent, and The Corrections makes Franzen’s impossible to deny.
Equally impressive is the way Franzen writes his characters. As I said, the novel is fundamentally concerned with the concept of the family -- what it is, what it means, what makes it work, what makes it fall apart. Of course, The Corrections is about many other things as well, and the novel touches on a wide array of topics including consumerism, mental health, academia, and the global economy. But Franzen’s satirical critiques of these issues comes across as a tad passe -- perhaps ironic critiques of stockbrokers and psychiatric medications weren’t as mainstream back in 2001. But etiological speculations cannot fully extinguish the scent of contrivance, and I think the novel could have done with less social commentary and criticism, especially since much of it feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed given Franzen's talents and partially designed to show us just how ironic, clever, and subversive our author really is.
Fortunately, Franzen never forgets what The Corrections is truly about: Alfred, Enid, Gary, Chip, and Denise Lambert. He dedicates roughly 100 pages to each member of the Lambert family, delving into their thoughts, desires, memories, and fears, and while such an approach may sound formulaic and unimaginative, it works, and it works well. By the end of the novel, we know a lot about the Lamberts; we can anticipate their reactions and attitudes, ascertain their unexpressed emotions and grievances, and surmise their unwritten histories. And yet, we have no idea how we should feel about any of them. We don't know whether we should like them or dislike them, whether we should sympathize with them or reject them. At best, the Lamberts are merely comprehensible; on other words, they all feel unmistakably and painfully human. To write one such character is a feat worthy of admiration. Franzen wrote five, and they all appear in the same novel.
What, then, is the story of the Lamberts? The novel’s back cover calls it a “comedy.” I couldn’t disagree more.
Near the end of The Corrections, the Lambert’s middle son, Chip, is sitting in a speeding, Lithuanian car headed towards the Polish border. Beside him is Gitanis, a corrupt Lithuanian official with whom Chip had been defrauding American investors over the Internet, and around them, Lithuania is collapsing amidst a military coup. Chip hears that the Lithuanian President, Vitkunas, has mobilized troops in the streets, and he asks Gitanis if the troops are shooting civilians. Gitanis replies: “No, it’s mostly posturing. A tragedy rewritten as farce.”
A tragedy rewritten as farce. I think this phrase captures the essence of the Lamberts, and the essence of the novel in which they appear. It also captures something that is, perhaps, universal — for while the story of the Lamberts is undoubtedly tragic, it is uncomfortably and undeniably familiar. The tragedy that unfolds beneath the layers of satire and absurdity is not sensational or dramatic; it does not manifest in a single, calamitous event, but rather a series of small, nearly imperceptible occurrences which stretch back far beyond the novel’s timeline and slowly but surely accumulate like dust on a windowsill, and by the first page of The Corrections, the situation is already irreversible and irredeemable. There are no grand gestures or cathartic breakthroughs, only banal decisions and uncompromising attitudes. Saying that the Lamberts do not function well together is an understatement, but they are unable to change themselves or their relationships with one another, for the inertia of their personalities and the durability of their habits are simply too strong to overcome. And although there are small instances of grace -- a kind word here, a considerate gesture there -- these moments are far and few inbetween, and they disappear as quickly, innocuously, and mysteriously as they emerged. Everything else is, to put it simply, a dumpster fire — not the kind that explodes into a column of flames, but one which simmers, innocuous but incessant, until nothing is left but ash and charred scraps of metal. We see it from a mile away, and we approach it with caution and discomfort, perhaps even hope, but we are quickly disabused of our belief that someone will come along and douse the embers. The Lamberts will not, and perhaps cannot, be saved -- and if this all sounds a little dreadful and depressing, not to worry. The Lamberts are not alone in their stifling misery, for Franzen suggests that their trials and tribulations are significant precisely because they are commonplace.
Yes, each of the Lamberts is tragic in their own right. They act without understanding why they are acting, and they are confused and surprised when things inevitably fall apart. They make bad decisions, some of them stupid and harmful, and they fail to do the right thing even when it’s easy. They can be petty, vindictive, jealous, and stubborn. They misunderstand themselves and those around them, and their pride and lack of self-reflection stifles their personal growth. Yet despite their similarities, each Lambert comes equipped with their own, unique set of traits and shortcomings, whether it be Enid’s captiousness, Gary’s defensiveness, or Chip’s irresponsibility, and they retain their unmistakable individuality in spite of Franzen’s suggestion that the five of them are all ultimately cut from the same cloth. They are neither convenient caricatures nor symbolic representations of the ills of modern American society. Each of the Lamberts possess an identity that is as deep as it is wide, as messy as it is structured, and Franzen depicts their actions, motivations, and aspirations with enough care and compassion to render them not only comprehensible but recognizably human. There are no heroes or villains in St. Jude; Franzen’s world is populated with ordinary, unremarkable people with quotidian failings and unexceptional failures.
That being said, the real tragedy lies not in the individual lives of Alfred, Enid, Gary, Chip, and Denise, but rather in the Lambert family’s collective inability to come together and function as a supportive and collaborative unit. They are a family, but they are rarely on the same team. The Lambert parents pick favorites, and the Lambert children choose sides. They engage in constant infighting, fueled primarily by envy or resentment, and they play their family members off each other in subtle but insidious ways. They do not attempt to understand the meaning of each other’s words, and they are upset when others fail to meet their unarticulated needs. Communication is disparate and disjointed, and the words that they exchange are so intentionally and/or unintentionally hurtful that most interactions end in frustration, despair, or disengagement. In short, the Lamberts do not know how to be there for each other, and they seem uninterested in reflecting on this fact. Albert, the Lamberts’ gruff and traditionalist patriarch, is unable or unwilling to empathize with his fault-finding and lonely wife, who is in turn unable or unwilling to empathize with her recalcitrant and despairing husband. Neither of them know how to effectively express affection or tenderness towards their children. As for Gary, Chip, and Denise, Franzen suggests that their attempts to distance themselves both geographically and emotionally from their parents are an exercise in futility. Hundreds of miles away from the geriatric and unassuming St. Jude, with relationships and careers of their own, the three Lambert children cannot help but define themselves in relation to their aging parents. They do not have the freedom to construct identities of their own; their decisions and behaviors are inevitably cast in terms of their attitudes toward Alfred and Enid, and whether that manifests as resentment, defiance, or detachment, it seeps into every aspect of their lives. As Franzen makes clear, this is not the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life -- but what other choice do they, or we, really have?
What makes all of this tragic, and not simply appalling, is that none of the Lamberts seem to recognize what they are doing to each other, and even when they do, they are unable to grasp the impact of their words and actions on the people they love. Caught amidst an unending cycle of one-upmanship, trivial power struggles, and personal grievances, the Lamberts do not know how to change the dynamics of their family, and they cannot see themselves or their loved ones clearly enough to recognize the need for change. None of the Lamberts actively set out to be condescending, defensive, or insensitive towards one another, at least most of the time. But through their unthinking gestures and behaviors, through countless words both said and unsaid, they end up hurting each other, sometimes badly, and Franzen makes it clear that such hurt began long before the first page of the novel and will continue far beyond the last. It’s either none of their faults, or it’s all of their faults -- but Franzen insists that the blame cannot be placed on the shoulders of a single Lambert. In the end, The Corrections is a tragedy because it is the story of an ordinary, failing family, and all stories of ordinary, failing families are tragic.
And yet, amidst the spite and the self-absorption and the backhanded compliments, there are a handful of moments -- I can remember four off the top of my head -- of genuine kindness, tenderness, and connection. These moments, like the tragic ones, are not particularly striking; indeed, you may miss them if you’re not paying attention. The Lamberts are flawed, deeply so, but they have good within them, buried deep underneath the mud and grime of their everyday lives, and it momentarily bubbles up to the surface and results in a father’s passing comment to his daughter, a sister’s anxious message to her brother. Franzens describes these moments in short, simple, and unadorned prose, and their stark stylistic contrast to everything that comes before and after it produces an effect that is as powerful as it is unexpected. If nothing else, the novel is worth reading for these moments of integrity and humanity, even if they are, for the most part, accidental.
And in some sort of twisted, ungratifying, and morbid way, things kind of work out in the end, at least for a couple of the luckier Lamberts. If a tragedy has a vaguely optimistic conclusion, is it no longer a tragedy? I'm not entirely sure.
This review has gotten quite long. My apologies; brevity is not my strong suit. I’ll try to tighten up the next one.
In the end, The Corrections is an excellent novel written by an excellent writer. Those who enjoy dexterous and expansive prose will find much to appreciate between its pages, and those with a complicated relationship to their family will spend a non-negligible amount of time grimacing in recognition. Those intimidated by its length should obtain a copy and read the first two chapters, which should give one a pretty good sense of both Franzen’s style and thematic interests. However, while The Corrections was nothing less than an astonishing display of linguistic craftsmanship and brilliance, it dragged on for longer than it needed to, and many of Franzen’s multi-layered, winding sentences lacked the kind of force you find in more minimalist writers. The novel also suffered from a lack of urgency, which occasionally made Franzen’s satirical critiques of modern life feel longer and more laborious than they really were. All in all, The Corrections is more remarkable in its artistry than resounding in its impact.
With all this in mind, Elle and I are in agreement that the novel should be considered a masterpiece. Despite its imperfections, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is simply too good, both on a technical and thematic level, to deserve anything less than an 8.5/10.