An Opportunity to Make A Few Corrections

I read “The Corrections” pre-Good Reads and originally rated it four stars.

I wanted to re-read (and review) it, before starting “Freedom”.

I originally dropped it a star because I thought there was something unsatisfying about the whole Lithuanian adventure.

Perhaps, when I re-read it, I wouldn’t object to it as much and I could improve my rating.

Having just finished it, I could probably add a half-star, but I’m not ready to give it five.

Second time around, the Vilnius section didn’t grate as much, partly because it was far shorter and more innocuous than I recalled.

However, the second reading helped me to work out what stopped it being a five star effort for me.

The First Draft

Franzen’s writing is easy to read.

He’s a skilful writer, he knows his chops.

His style is both fluent and fluid. You can dip in for a short session and suddenly find that you’ve read 50 to 70 pages pretty effortlessly.

He accumulates detail, but he points you confidently in a direction, even if you don’t know what your destination will be.

He seems to have put his prattishness behind him now, so it’s possible to appreciate his writing without peering darkly through the lens of the Oprah spectacle.

Because he writes in a realist manner, I think that whether or not you will enjoy his novel depends on whether you relate to his subject matter and his characters.

“The Corrections” is primarily concerned with the dynamics of a family.

I have never been a fan of family sagas, so I was initially apprehensive.

Also, when I first read it, I was over-exposed to film about dysfunctional families and the social problems they generate.

However, I don’t see the Lamberts as dysfunctional so much as typical of the thermodynamics that can be present in three relatively ambitious and driven generations in the 21st century.

I’d venture to say that they’re more normal than abnormal.

They don't commit any grievous social crimes, although they do a lot of emotional damage internally.


Punch Lines

Stylistically, the novel is written in the third person.

This allowed Franzen to drop the reader, like a fly on a wall, into a number of different homes and rooms in homes.

From this vantage point, we’re able to observe numerous family members, not only externally but internally as well.

The only negative thing I want to say about this is that, what Franzen dedicated 566 pages to, I think someone like Raymond Carver could have done in 166 pages.

When Carver writes, we ascertain his meaning and intent by inference from the skeletal facts and action on the page.

Franzen leaves little to inference. Everything is spelt out. Meticulously and elegantly, to give him due credit.

He doesn’t pull any punches, but equally he signals all of his punches along the way.

This is the one reservation I have about his style.

There is a sense in which he is a perceptive commentator and essayist, at the expense of being a truly great technical novelist.

Time and time again, I found that he layered detail and content on the page by telling us about it rather than creating the illusion that it was happening in front of our eyes and ears.

There is a lot of back story, and not enough front story.


Interior Design

There isn’t a lot of action, at least externally.

The action is largely interior and individual.

Little is revealed through the interaction of the characters.

Most of it is revealed by way of contemplation or recollection.

The personal tensions that are the focus of the plot end up being in your head, rather than in your face.

While I found it all interesting, I didn’t find it exciting.

I can therefore understand why a large proportion of general readers would find it either too intimidating to start or too boring to finish.

To this extent, you can understand why Franzen was concerned that, because of Oprah’s endorsement, many people would buy the book, without reading or enjoying it.

They weren’t really the readers that Franzen had in mind when he wrote it.

Perhaps, he would have written a different book if he wanted them to read it.

Instead, he wrote for an audience of readers a lot more like himself in temperament.

This isn’t meant to suggest that he was arrogant, only that he didn’t want to disappoint an audience he wasn’t trying to satisfy in the first place.

The Blue Chair

The patriarch of the Lambert family is Alfred, a retired railway engineer and part-time bio-tech inventor.

His wife, Enid, calls him Al. To his three children, he’s obviously “Dad”.

Yet, Franzen constantly refers to him as Alfred, even though he doesn’t come across as pretentious or affected in any way.

You get the impression that Alfred’s old-fashioned rigidity starts with his name and works down.

Whereas, in the hands of Carver, I’m pretty confident that he would have been an abbreviated Al or Fred or a contracted “Lambo” or a work-derived nickname.

We soon learn that Alfred has a great blue chair that takes pride of place.

It’s described as overstuffed and “vaguely gubernatorial”, but most importantly it “was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without Enid’s approval”.

It has great metaphorical potential, although uncharacteristically it doesn’t really get a mention after page nine, even though it features on the cover of some editions of the novel.

Still, it hints that, within the Lambert family, we have both a patriarch and a matriarch and occasionally the two don’t see eye to eye.

Their differences might be great or small, but they are embodied in the Blue Chair.

A Metaphor Explored

One of the reasons I rate “The Corrections” so highly is that it is an extended exploration of the “correction” metaphor.

Yet, at the same time, the ultimate reason I have dropped it a half- to a full-star is that it never strays very far from a disciplined, even mechanical, revelation of its significance.

I feel hypocritical about this, because one role of a reviewer or critic is to detect these metaphors and elaborate on them.

In the case of Franzen, the role is much easier to perform, because he leaves verbal sign posts or easter eggs the whole way through the text.

Without using Powerpoint, he tells you what he is going to say, he says it, and he reminds you that he has said it.

Normally, we would treat this as consummate communication.

In the case of a novel, it leaves nothing to the imagination, it leaves no mystery, it leaves little to be detected by the reader on their own.

It would be like a crime novel where you knew everything about the crime from the beginning (who, how, when, why), except where the criminal was hiding (where).

The Corrections

So, what do “the corrections” mean?

A correction implies that something is “wrong” or “broken” or isn't “working”, and therefore needs to be fixed or remedied or “corrected”.

Throughout the novel, there are references to physical objects that have been kept, even though they don’t work anymore or need to be fixed.

They have been retained, when someone else, some other family, might have “thrown them away” or got a replacement the moment it was determined to be useless or obsolete.

Alfred would once have had the "will to fix" them, but now he is tired and things go unfixed or uncorrected.

This might suggest that there has been a recent breakdown in Alfred's authority, but I don't get the impression that he has had much authority within the family for a long time.

In the last chapter, there is also a reference to the need for a correction of a “bubble” in an overheated economy.

Investors have blindly expected conditions and values to improve perpetually, but every now and again there must be a correction, a reality check where once there was a dividend cheque.

However, when the economic correction arrives, it is "not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor."

Ultimately, the metaphor most overtly concerns the state of the characters' relationships.

Indeed, the novel as a whole is Franzen's State of Relations Address.

In their own way, there have been life-long leakages of value in the family's internal relationships that need to be addressed.

Without being overtly dysfunctional, we can perpetuate relationships even though they are flawed or defective or unsatisfying.

It’s much easier to abandon a relationship (to sell down a non-performing or troublesome stock) when it doesn’t involve a family member.

It’s harder, if not impossible, to abandon or negate a parent/child or sibling to sibling relationship.

In a sexual relationship, you can get the thorn out of your foot.

In a family relationship, sometimes, you can’t get rid of the thorn without losing your foot.

Spousal relationships hover in between the two, depending on whether there are children involved.

Either way, within a family, you can't usually just walk away.

You have to "correct" the relationship or learn to live with the thorn in your foot.

A Chip Separated from the Old Block

When we’re first introduced to the term “correction”, we meet the middle child, Chip, the "alternative sibling" who has dropped out of the world of "conventional expectations", a would-be post-modernist academic, script writer and left-wing libertine.

He might be the “intelligent son”, the "intellectual son", but Chip is still a "comic fool", the protagonist in a farce of his own creation.

Chip forensically analyses his parents’ relationship and decides that his life will “correct” all of their personal failings.

Where they are passive, conservative and straight-laced, he will be active, radical and open-minded.

Franzen doesn’t suggest that this choice is intrinsically wrong, only that Chip makes a bit of a mess of it.

To this extent, the novel sees Chip correct himself and his relationship with his parents and siblings, he becomes "a steady son, a trustworthy brother".

The Straight Option

The oldest child, Gary, is a fund manager, experienced in the ways of business and investment.

He appears to be the successful child, but the visage conceals an unhappiness and dissatisfaction with a more conventional life, so much so that he probably suffers from depression.

Gary is the least resolved of the siblings in the novel.

At the end, he remains unreconciled with his parents and siblings, even if he has achieved a compromise of sorts in the conflict with his wife and children.

The Bent Option

The youngest child and only daughter, Denise, is in many ways the most interesting character.

Some have reacted adversely to her as a shrill harpy.

In Enid’s eyes, she has failed, because she hasn’t settled down, married the love of her life and had children.

Instead, she is a talented chef, uncertain about what she wants personally and sexually.

Denise remains open to different options, only she still hasn’t found what she’s looking for, largely because she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

Nevertheless, within the family, she is a major factor in the resolution and correction of the problems.

Families First

Franzen most identifies with the children (who are of a similar age), yet there is a sense in which he has the greatest sympathy for Alfred and Enid.

Both parents are children of an earlier generation that was given little choice in how it lived life and raised families.

The children, in contrast, have suffered from an excess of choice and the lack of a moral compass as they made their own choices.

Unfortunately, Alfred has the least opportunity to correct his own behavior, because he is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.

On the other hand, Enid, despite the failure of her dream to have one last perfect Christmas together, liberates herself and is able to correct (and resurrect) her own life at last, albeit alone.

She is reconciled with, at least, Chip and Denise, and there is a sense in which she will also make things happen with Gary and his family.

Families Last

The plot and its resolution don’t ultimately suggest that there is any perfect family.

Families consist of individuals who all have their own needs and expectations and who all push and pull in their own directions.

The thing is that different people have different expectations, and expectations create responsibilities and obligations and burdens.

If everybody performs their designated role, does their bit, pulls their weight, plays their part, then compliance, reliability and success in turn give rise to a family culture of reliance, confidence and trust.

If things don't "work out", there is a risk of disappointment, a risk of opting out, non-compliance, problems, mistakes, failure and "wrongness" that lead to coercion, anxiety, ostracisation, resentment, blame, guilt and the need to "endure" each other.

There is no such thing as a perfect family.

There can only be good families.

A good family is not one that can avoid mistakes and failure, but one that can embrace apologies and forgiveness as a timely response to disappointed expectations.

This is the heart of “The Corrections”.

There are no car chases, nobody gets shot, nobody goes to prison (or a correctional facility), nobody gets bankrupted, nobody O.D.’s, nobody gets pregnant, nobody even gets divorced.

Yet, somehow, Franzen manages to nail 21st century families and by doing so he nails 21st century society, because, since the beginning of time, families have been at the heart of society.

You cannot have a healthy society without healthy families.

It might be obvious, but it needs to be stated, even if at times Franzen states it too obviously.