Bibliofreakblog

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I just finished this book the other day.  While you might think that this would leave it fresh in my mind, and I would have already planned out what to say about it, you couldn’t be more wrong.  I mean, I know what happened.  It’s not one of those books that makes you wonder what went on when you finish it.  

It’s the story of a family of five.  The children, two boys and a girl, were born in, my estimate, ‘58, ‘62, and ‘70, but I could be a little off.  Suffice it to say that the oldest kid, who ends up a banker, is not Gen X, but the other two are.  The middle child became an anti-corporation English professor.  He gets fired because he slept with a student who challenged his notions about why money is evil.  The last kid, the daughter, is recently divorced and making it as a chef.

The parents grew up during the depression.  They, or at least, the mother, didn’t have sex before marriage, and they probably shouldn’t have married each other to begin with.  I take it that they didn’t know each other very well.  The father is distant, and the mother just wants love and affection.  

None of the five people like each other very much.  The children fled to the East Coast when they turned eighteen, but the parents stayed firmly rooted in the Midwest (though it never says, I gather that it takes place in Missouri, which I personally do not consider the Midwest.  Indeed, the passive-aggressive nature of the mother is more indicative of Southern women to me).

Though he stays in the third person, Franzen is really good at switching his writing style subtly to reflect each character’s personality.  Early on in the book, I underlined, and wrote WTF? in the margin where it said:

“At the weekly farmers’ market…he loaded up on heirloom tomatoes, white eggplants, and thin-skinned golden plums.  He ate arugula (’rocket,’ the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.  As he remembered the Good and the Healthful, he began to recover his self-discipline.  He weaned himself off alcohol, got better sleep, drank less coffee, and went to the college gym twice a week.  He…did his crunches every morning.  Other pieces of the self-improvement puzzle fell into place, and for a while, as cool working weather returned to the Carparts Creek valley, he experienced an almost Thereauvian well-being.”

Thank God Franzen only writes that way when talking about that character.  I mean, comparing arugula to Thereau?  For real?  I almost gave up on the book then and there.

Eventually though, you get to like the characters, even though they don’t like each other.  You learn about their pasts and that helps garner sympathy and understanding.  

However, they still don’t like each other.  If they knew all the things about each other that the reader does, maybe the would like each other more.  I doubt it though.  Because they are not so horrible, so dysfunctional as to reasonably do things like avoid seeing each other in person for three years.  

All families get annoyed with each other.  But I think that most families love each other more than not.  That’s part of being a family.  Now, I know that my generation–Gen Y–is more inclined to have better relationships with their parents than previous generations.  I have my own personal theories about why this is, but that’s another story.  The fact remains that even though the characters in this book don’t get along, Franzen doesn’t do enough to make them real.  The reader gets them, but they don’t get each other.  It’s like they are trying not to like each other.  He doesn’t show the good with the bad.  It weakens them as dimensional characters.

If you can get past that though, it’s a good story.
Buy The Corrections on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith 
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
JPod by Douglas Coupland
More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
Gilead by Marlynne Robinson
Dress Your Children in Corderoy and Denim by David Sedaris 
The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
The Chess Artist by J.C. Hallman
Family – The Ties that Bind…And Gag! by Erma Bombeck
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman 

Other works by Jonathan Franzen:

How to Be Alone: Essays
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
Strong Motion
The Twenty-Seventh City