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November 28, 2001
`The Corrections' failures bog down book
Bestseller owes its place to Oprah, not to real acclaim
By Joseph R. Thomas
Despite sometimes-electric prose, the tension of many passages, the vivid characterizations and the human drama on display in Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), the book is an excruciating bore as often as not. One suspects it owes its best-seller listing as much to talk show celebrity Oprah's influence in the marketplace as to popular acclaim by actual readers.
The premise of "The Corrections" is simple: Enid Lambert, long-suffering wife of Alfred, a bullying retired railroad executive reduced to pitiful dependency by Parkinson's disease, desperately wants to celebrate Christmas at their Midwestern home with their three children and three grandchildren after eight years of holiday traveling to Philadelphia where the host has been their oldest boy, his wife and family.
The trouble is, all of the adult principals are borderline psychopaths. Mostly devoid of human compassion and generally unlikable for one reason or another, they are governed more by self-interest and intellectual, physical and emotional appetites than by any great concern for the well-being of other members of the family, except on rare occasions. And even then the motivating factor often enough is guilt.
One exception might be Denise, the youngest child. But Denise, like the others, is an emotional wreck, having married too early, gotten a divorce, become a chef, entered into a lesbian relationship, landed a plush assignment, turned away from a sexual encounter with her employer (an encounter she openly invited), embarked on a torrid affair with his wife and then turned back to him.
The other adults are Gary, a paranoid banker and a materialist who is as bullying as his father; Gary's beautiful but spoiled wife, Caroline, who is as manipulative as Enid, the mother-in-law she detests; and Chip, who lost his college teaching position because of an affair with a student and now leads a Bohemian life as intellectually impoverished as his bank account.
To synopsize the story is to reveal the skeleton of a workable plot. But Franzen, mesmerized by his ability to conjure up bizarre if imaginative situations, appears to be more interested in literary pyrotechnics than in moving his story along at a reader-congenial pace, filling 568 pages with sometimes explosive, sometimes showoffy and sometimes dull prose. One mind-boggling sentence runs for more than 300 words.
Franzen is attempting to do two things: take you into the psyches of his characters while exposing contemporary "truths" for the open sores they really are.
Unfortunately, the psyche is a horrible place to be when Alfred is hallucinating, or when Gary is attempting to subdue his paranoia with vodka, or when Caroline is plotting to outmaneuver him, or when Chip is in the throes of some erotic imagining or Denise has surrendered to self-loathing or Enid has given herself over to self-pity or unreasonable optimism.
In spinning his frenetic web, Franzen utterly demolishes contemporary myths: sex is liberating, materialism is the essence of the good life, the political left is a bastion of integrity holding the key to reform, corporate America is all heart, life is controllable by drugs.
The book-buyer then ought not conclude that he or she is likely to come away from "The Corrections" in a feel-good mood simply because it is built around a yearning for a jolly old-fashioned family Christmas — a type of Christmas it is unlikely that this family ever experienced.
The reality is that the book deals with the disintegration of relationships within a dysfunctional family. While "corrections" do take place, no one will mistake them for a happy ending. Or a merry Christmas.
Instead: For superior story-telling swirling around family life, the discriminating reader might want to spend some time with Anne Tyler's latest book, "Back When We Were Grownups" (Knopf), in which the central figure is a woman overwhelmed by family. Here, too, family celebrations are integral to the story, one of the funniest Tyler has fashioned.
By way of contrast, Rick Bragg's "Ava's Man" (also Knopf) is the true story of the grandfather Bragg never knew, a man who died the year before the author was born, a poor Appalachian roofer who left a legacy of love.
Thomas, retired editor in chief of The Christophers and a former diocesan newspaper editor, is a frequent reviewer of books.
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