#9 The Corrections

#9 The Corrections (March 2012)

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         Before I started The Corrections I did a great deal of research on the novel and its author Jonathan Franzen.  I was quickly able to surmise one thing, both are highly polarizing.  Franzen is an award-winning, best-selling author who is perhaps best know for upsetting Oprah and fans of Graham Greene.  The Corrections, the National Book Award winner in 2001 is, outside of the world of literary critics, far from universally popular.  Amazon's page for the novel features user reviews that praise the novel as "beautifully written" and decry it as a "plotless wonder", and that's just two of the thousand reviews.

       I bought The Corrections at my local library where books are sold for fifty cents apiece.  I decided to read it first originally as part of a plan to read every National Book Award winner.  Franzen's novel was a favorite almost immediately this prompted me to look into Time's Top 100.  I suggested the idea as a half-joke at first but after finishing I was convinced to commit myself to it.

      Franzen, like Faulkner before him, manages to create a family composed entirely of characters both interesting and unsympathetic.  Manically old-fashioned Enid, stern, Parkinson's-addled Alfred and their children Chip, Denise, and Gary each bring weight, humour, pathos, and nuance to the novel.

      Before I get too far into this entry I want to include a sort of disclaimer.  I have no clue how I plan to format this entry or any others.  This blog is still very much a largely-misguided work in progress.  In fact I can't say for certain what's a more daunting task, reading 81 more books or coming up with interesting things to say about all 100.  As you can tell from the fairly bland format of all of this I don't have the most minute trace of an idea of how to blog.  So this is a learn as I go kind of thing for me.  My entries will hopefully get better as well as the appearance of the blog as a whole.

     Now that I got that out the way, back to The Corrections.  Franzen separates the novel into sections focusing on each character.  This colorful cast is the novel's best attribute.  I found myself deeming each individual character the best, the most maddening, the most relatable.  Each of these stories is centered around Enid's desire to get the Lambert clan together for "one last Christmas" while Alfred is still around.

    Chip and Gary's segments of the story were especially strong.  I think however the absurd turns Chip's story takes are one of the novel's weaker points.  Chip, a pretentious, Marxist professor at an unnamed (it's designated as C_____) liberal arts college in Connecticut finds himself in the employ of a Lithuanian crime-boss.  Chip's bought with depression and his damning relationship with a student were an early high-point of the work but I found the later Lithuanian storyline less interesting.  Gary is a depressed banker living with his wife and three kids near Philadelphia.  As he grows increasingly dissatisfied he begins to feel his family is in cahoots against him.  Gary's musings on the effects of his depression are at once uncomfortable and darkly humorous.  A scene where a very drunk Gary nearly slices off his hand trying to do yard work but cannot be deterred was particularly interesting.

      Franzen's dialogue is top notch.  It'd have been one thing to simply state that his characters talk without listening to each other but Franzen instead reveals the self-absorption and destructive obsessions of his characters through the "conversations" they have.  Enid seems deaf to anything not related not related to a family Christmas and listening to Gary or Denise try and reason with her is often very very funny.  These characters sometimes read like heightened versions of common stereotypes but what makes them so interesting is that we all know these people, most of us are these people.  Maybe my favorite exchange is one between Chip and his Lithuanian employer.

“So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said.

Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing."

Self-inflicted. You pathetic American."

Different kind of prison" Chip said.”

      Finishing The Corrections was the first of many times in the last two months that I've dubbed something "the best book I've ever read".  Though The Corrections only kept its title until I finished Light in August, I'd still recommend it to anyone.