Category: jonathan franzen

THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen

I read Franzen’s most recent novel, FREEDOM, a couple of months ago. I enjoyed it so much that when I saw this one, which was his first big hit, in the library, I fell upon it and devoured it. And I have to report, it is tasty.

From the Dept. of This Guy Can Write A Long Sentence Like Noone Else:
(It’s the thoughts of a son seeing his parents arrive at the airport)

He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags – either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building espirit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise, and, out a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising – before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

I find this hilarious and I love it. The story is about a fairly dysfunctional family. We have mum and dad, Alfred and Enid Lambert, who live in the Midwest, and their three grown children, who have all fled to the East Coast. This little bit, also from the opening pages, will give you a taste of the kind of family this is:

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 Labour Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid’s outslung hip, it was obvious that they were midwestern and intimidated. But to Chip Lambert, who was waiting for them just beyond the security checkpoint, they were killers.

Chip feels a failure, having lost his job as an associate professor for sleeping with a student. His older brother Gary is rich and has a beautiful family but is finding success unexpectedly disappointing. His younger sister Denise is a chef whose career absorbed so much of her energy that she only late in life discovers that she is probably gay.

We move back and forth between the stories of each member of the family, each amazingly vividly imagined. The arc of the story is given by the father Alfred’s slow decline into dementia, which forces the family to face various feelings they have long hidden about each other. There’s also a strong strand of love and nostalgia for the Midwest, which I found quite compelling.

So, a very good book. But not quite as good as FREEDOM, I don’t think.

He wrote THE CORRECTIONS ten years before FREEDOM, and it shows. It’s clearly the work of a much younger writer, I think, being full of overly obvious metaphor, and rather overheated language on occasion (a season is described as “hurtling, hurtling towards winter” – oh dear). There’s also a very dubious section where the character of Chip goes to Lithuania, and Franzen spends a lot of time making fun of Lithunia. Now, the book in general is in a comic vein, and he makes a lot of fun of America too, but it’s very obvious he knows nothing about Lithuania, and I didn’t really enjoy seeing a developing country being mocked in an ill-educated way, when the rest of the comedy in the book is so intelligently observed and so detailed.

But honestly, I can forgive anything to a man who can write like this:
(About a girl being approached by boys at university)

Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody had stale bread in his pocket.

FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen (contd)

The New York Times called FREEDOM “a masterpiece,” and I’ve seen it frequently referred to as the first great American novel of the 21st century. On the other hand, some critics think it’s not all that. I personally think it is all that.

I freaking LOVED this novel. As you could perhaps have predicted from my last post, written intemperately when I was only on page 38. Having now read all 561 pages, I’m here to report that FREEDOM is indeed a very fine novel. That it is also a bestseller goes some distance to restoring my faith in human nature that has been damaged previously in this blog by such painful episodes as PROMISES, PROMISES and THE REVERSAL.

FREEDOM tells the story of a marriage. It begins when Patty and Walter meet as undergraduates in Minnesota (Walter, I must point out, attends my undergrad Macalester). Patty is initially attracted to Walter’s best friend, the womanising musician Richard. She eventually marries Walter, as he is madly in love with her, and is a kind and caring man. They build a house in a neighbourhood on the up, have two children, and a relatively happy life. Patty struggles to understand her children as adolescents, is bored with staying at home, and has an affair with Richard. Walter becomes increasingly angry about what he perceives as the world’s descent into environmental cataclysm. Eventually the marriage crumbles. Patty has an unsatisfying relationship with Richard, Walter has a satisfying one with his young assistant, and then they get back together again.

This novel is wonderful in a number of ways.
1)It’s funny. See first post.
2)It’s accurate. For example, on a failing actress:

As if to compensate for her shortness, Abigail went long with her opening speech – two hours long – and allowed Patty to piece together a fairly complete picture of her life: the married man, now known exclusively as Dickhead, on whom she she’d wasted her best twelve years of marriageability, waiting for Dickhead’s kids to finish high school, so that he could leave his wife, which he’d then done, but for somebody younger than Abigail; the straight-man disdaining sort of gay men to whom she’d turned for more agreeable male companionship; the impressively large community of underemployed actors and playwrights and comics and performance artists of which she was clearly a valued and generous member; the circle of friends who circularly bought tickets to each other’s shows and fund-raisers, much of the money ultimately trickling down from sources such as Joyce’s checkbook; the life, neither glamorous nor outstanding but nevertheless admirable and essential to New York’s functioning, of the bohemian.

3)The man can manage a long sentences like there is no tomorrow. Or like he is a Victorian. See 2).
4)It covers an almost mindboggling amount of ground: cotemporary environmental issues, good and bad relationships, sibling rivalry, child-parent relationships, profiteering in the Iraq war, local governance, neighbourliness. It really is bizarrely both a domestic novel and a state-of-the-nation novel

The book comforted me by making me feel that life is long, and most people make a lot of mistakes in it.

I can conceivably see where you might find this book irritating: it is very much about middle class America. There is a big and slightly weird focus on sex as the ultimate determinant of a relationship, and on sibling rivalry as an explanation for all later relationships, which does seems a bit like someone might have had a bit too much therapy.

That said, I still thought it was wonderful.

FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen

I have only just begun this book, but I love it.

Let me give you a sample, describing a small girl:

. . . smitten with books, devoted to wildlife, . . . . not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it . . .

I freaking love it. Or this, description of a young middle class mother pushing her pram through her gentrifying neighbourhood:

Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

And this, off hand, about a middle aged mother:

Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formely been active with the SDS in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.