The Corrections

I am currently reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (thanks for the copy, Liam and Melissa). After page 17, I was prepared to write a piece about how terrible the beginning is, and, possibly, the whole project. I should note I've listened to his other book, Freedom, read some memoir-y book of his (The Discomfort Zone), and read some essays from his book How To Be Alone (and was disappointed that he never discussed the premise of the title in any direct fashion). But I wanted to read this super popular book. Just like I read the last Harry Potter - I want to know what people are reading. I should also note that I then got sick, bed-bound for a day, in which I read the next hundred pages. I softened. It reads really well. It's funny, it's smart. Some of the scenes and some of the writing are excellent. Most of it. I could bootlick and learn something, sure, but that's not to say I don't have broader problems with the book.

And so I started the book with a bit of impatience. We open with a 10-or-so page chapter watching the elder Lamberts in the decline of their years. We see their perfect, americana, midwestern suburban house, kept magazine-clean ("the fiction in the house was that people didn't live there"). Enid, the matriarch of the book, is overwhelmed by material - she hides bags and bags of mail in different places throughout the house. Alfred, the patriarch, is in physical decline, and spends a lot of his day in the overwhelming embrace of an impossible large and cushy chair. Most of the opening is about the thingness of the house, the materiality of living, and the small apparent concerns (of furniture, etc.) which consume these old folk.

This depiction of being overwhelmed by material, and of being fully occupied with the material world (materialism), is contrasted at the outset of the second chapter when we meet Enid and Alfred's culture-critiquing, marxist, leather-clad idealist son. Bring on the familial conflict!

There is an excellent bit of writing right in the first paragraph, when we see the parents after they just landed in NYC: "To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred's straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labor Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid's outslung hip, it was obvious that they were midwestern and intimidated."

So good! See how the comparison to corn, emblem of the midwestern plains, elegantly and concisely characters the old man! Without breaking a sweat, without a paragraph of digression, just in one sentence, nail on the head. Economical writing is elegant. See how the mother's bight colors (also of the color of that regional crop) clearly cuts her figure for us! And the humor, without condescension, of the whole thing (well, that's harder to see, but how I feel it).

See how seamlessly it works, and how it asks to ignored. Perhaps my opinion of good writing is similar to that old-school feeling about children: it should be seen, not heard begging for attention. Writing should serve the story, not the other way around. A number of patches in the opening I found tedious and cutesy, purple and clever. One digression on 'crepuscular' and 'corpuscular' is the perfect example. For me, such a passage is vibrating with the author's desire for special attention for his cleverness. Cleverness, in our diploma-saturated nation, in this media saturated time, in our wired and infinite information age, in our stupidly smart world, is at a period of great devaluation. (Save in conversation, where it's spontaneity and ease validates its impulse, and distances itself from that feeling that it is trying to please.) If I want cleverness, I'll go be with my friends. My friends are clever. My kitchen table is clever. My pillow talk is clever. Cleverness is the fizz of living - but it doesn't last long in the fridge without going so, so flat.

It could be argued that this 'crepuscular' passage is in a section about Chip, our feckless, straw dog academic, and it is just like the cute intellectual show-offy thing he might do, but this argument would avoid the fact that we know, we know in our blood, going into this book, that this character is a caricature of the author himself. Which brings me to this line on the third page of Chip's introduction, and, perhaps, it points out my greatest issue with the book as a whole: "... he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parent's for the person he'd become." This line confirmed exactly what I had felt in the first section about the parents - an intelligent, unsympathetic, and vengeful eye turned on one's parents at particular moment in American history.

I grew up in the glut of the American 80's and 90's; as a reasonably intelligent and relatively angsty teen and in my new-found high-school intellectualism, I analyzed the consumeristic practices of my parents like it was the punk rock thing to do. I thought it was, but never had sex in high school, so maybe it wasn't so punish or rockish. I wrote about how cosumerism-materialism belied an existential hole, and how these traits were harming all of our relationships and happiness. I wrote a lot about this. I consumed David Foster Wallace at the time, and was enormously impressed by the endlessly clever and footnoting critique of, well, you know, Society. There was a phase, and I passed through it. I haven't been able to return to DFW without feeling a certain futility and intellectual-clever vamping in his endless salvos.

Considering DFW, an anecdote: There was a summer in my early twenties when I was at the beach in the Carolinas with some friends, and one of the girls and I were chatting a the widow's watch, she was a Foster Wallace book in her hand. We talked about the book and the author, and my two-cents were that his loudly intellectual-esque form (a literary voice that aped that of academic writing, complete with footnoting and esoteric words, as well as an inherited post-moderny story sensibility of fracturedness) covered up and belied an inability to tell stories. How does this work? (How am I such a good actor?) Stories require recognition and change and acceptance of things that aren't ideal. Stories are the conflicts between people and reality, and the consequences. The person changes, or they suffer. The possibility of change and recognition is the combustion in the story's engine - otherwise, we have only mannequins and automatons (and maybe that's DFW's perspective). Stories also, as a matter of structure, require their creator to be able to prioritize what things are important to the story. For Wallace, and his sprawling style, the dissecting lens itself has all the priority, and nothing within its gaze can rival it, or it challenge it to control its shape. I remember saying that someone who couldn't write a straight story had some disconnect with their emotional life, with their heart, didn't know how to prioritize the humanness of the story. A little pat, I admit, but it was a few weeks later Wallace killed himself, and I felt, irrationally, mildly guilty for uttering my verdict.

(Which isn't to say Wallace didn't have a huge heart, and express such concerns beautifully: his graduation speech was something that did, and also, it comes to mind, his essay, "Signifying Nothing", which is, surprise surprise, his shortest essay, running at four pages. Also, a short story about a sleazy guy seducing a woman who discloses that she is a rape victim, which made me consider rape more intensely than I ever had. I bring it up as a stylistic trend of his - to overwhelm his stories and his characters with ideas and asides and moreness, rather than concision, rather than emphasize what was important. This trend of his led him to produce Infinite Jest, a thousand page book, and one which has no end.)

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For me, personally, this type of fiction (intelligent, culturally well-versed, pessimistic realism, sullenly antagonistic towards our cultural configuration) pushes boundaries of sensibility for me. Literary Realism: A steady look at realistic people and their realistic unhappiness. An examination of our family, those close to us, ourselves, and the use of this material for our work, to give to others. Some atavistic sense that one shouldn't air dirty laundry, some recoil from voyeurism, rises in my mammalian, tribal blood.

That's a lie, it's not an instinctual thing at all. It is a preference in stories for a small amount of distance between real people and the story. Greater distance, to me, indicates that then the author must craft his story, intentionally choose everything, no

It is the sense that the author may not be trustworthy, that his his perspective may cold, bitter, and decidedly pessimistic, and that he me be stuck in the noble rut of serious fiction (literary realism).

To the point: Dissecting something is a different operation entirely from creating something, which is the province of parents, of gods, and of artists.

I'm not sure that focusing on neuroses, countless little failures, and catalogues of our material life is powerful literature or storytelling. Just as I've known brilliant people who are depressed, and who sit on the couch and intelligently articulate their (and the world's) problems, I appreciate listening to (reading) Franzen, but I don't trust him as someone with a wide view of life. I can't help but think ( I may be wrong) that there is a peculiar satisfaction to being unhappy and correct about conditions, and that there's a desire to punish the world by exposing the machinations of unhappiness one has discovered.

That said, The Corrections is reading very nicely, after the initial 20-page hump. The presence of one seeming sane character (the sister, Denise), and the satire which is Chip is entertaining (though I wish I could feel more empathy with his erstwhile love of Theory, and I was surprised that his career as a professorial Lothario was so short and so inexplicably unstable)

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I can come off as anti-elitist, anti-snobbist, which, I don't know, is more or less right. I suppose what rubs me is that a certain tone in popular literary literature, in the literature of modernism and after, which is suspicious of hope, and eager, mostly, to diagnose our malaise. As if analysis and craft is enough. We come to stories because we're hungry for a vision. A broader vision of life. Now, hope is a cheezy, sentimental, and easily commercialized vagaries of our language. Sarah Palin made fun of Obama's Hopey, changey thing. I think hope, and eliciting in people the feeling of and motivation to rise up to it, is one of the functions of literature, of storytelling. Not that stories should be sweet and harmless, or have a patently happy ending, or be optimistic, but that, in the balance of tragedy and comedy, which all great stories are, riding on the fulcrum, there is always a pulse, a character, or believable possibility of a better health, of a better people.

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I finished The Corrections. It was okay. Kinda.