The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 568 pp., $26 JONATHAN FRANZEN HAS THE SORT of ambition rare for an American novelist these days. His aim is to write great and enduring books that grapple with large social issues even as he offers minute dissections of the day-to-day lives of their characters. To this end, he has endured penury, writer’s block, and the indifference of the New York Times. Over the last thirteen years, the forty-two-year-old Franzen has published three large novels and a much-discussed 1996 Harper’s essay on the difficulties of being a contemporary novelist. A serious reader of fiction had time in 1945 to devour twenty-five new novels a year, he declared; in 1995, the same sort of reader might make it through five. How can a real writer survive in a vast wasteland of a country whose “notion of culture resembles a menu to be pointed at and clicked”? That essay bore a distinct resemblance to a 1961 essay, “Writing American Fiction,” in which Philip Roth complained that “American reality . . . stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Where Roth wondered how a novelist could compete when the country he lived in produced real-life characters like quiz-show cheat Charles Van Doren, Franzen wondered how a novelist could thrive in a nation where books didn’t matter any longer. Jonathan Franzen, in other words, believes himself to be a writer whose time is out of joint. But so has nearly every ambitious novelist in every generation before his. As Roth’s snotty essay indicated forty years ago, many artists are inclined to ascribe the tortuous difficulties in producing work that matters to the failures of the surrounding society. But what happens to such writers when the ridiculous mass culture they fear suddenly showers them with praise and love and millions of dollars? When “Portnoy’s Complaint” became a colossal bestseller, the cognitive dissonance caused by his new wealth and celebrity was too great a weight for Philip Roth to bear, as he revealed years later in “The Anatomy Lesson.” Roth was crippled by a phantom back problem that had no medical basis but which made it impossible for him to write. One wonders what attack Franzen’s psyche will stage, now that he is the fortunate author of “The Corrections.” Released in September, Franzen’s third novel has been reviewed ecstatically by critics who have said exactly what Franzen wanted to hear. He had done it. He had written a serious book in a great tradition, one that combined his hunger to “Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream” (the capital letters are his) with “my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved.” “The Corrections” is a book in which a central character says to a Lithuanian who had been tortured in Soviet jails that America is a “different kind of prison.” But though the idea is implicitly supported by the author, this “different kind of prison” has clasped Franzen and “The Corrections” to its bosom. The book had already earned him $1 million even before publication, in part from a movie sale. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at number five before proceeding to number one in a few weeks. The novelist who had used the pages of Harper’s to decry the popularity of Michael Crichton and John Grisham had now joined them at the summit. Then, from the very bowels of this “different kind of prison,” came a new and fiendishly clever torture for a novelist who believes himself “solidly in a high-art literary tradition.” “The Corrections” was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the October selection of her book club. She described the novel as perhaps the best in the five-year history of her club, a monthly feature of her daytime talk show that has revolutionized the publishing industry by making instant and mammoth bestsellers out of fiction with a certain literary sensibility. Farrar, Straus & Giroux immediately went back to press and printed an extra 500,000 copies of “The Corrections.” Winfrey’s anointing had added at least $1 million to Franzen’s personal fortune, not to mention hundreds of thousands of readers. Franzen’s novel, torn from his body over seven years of rough strife, is making him rich, famous, and popular. Franzen understands there is a problem here. The only character in “The Corrections” with any integrity sacrifices his chance to make millions off a stock sale and a patent because to do so would violate his conscience. The wealthiest character in his book is also the one who seeks to take selfish advantage of his father’s integrity by blackmailing his way into an IPO. One of the chief satirical targets in “The Corrections” is the mania for brandnames that leads, say, a Nordic cruise ship to call itself the “Gunnar Myrdal” and feed its passengers in the “Soren Kierkegaard Dining Room.” So how could Jonathan Franzen keep silent over the branding of his dust jacket with the giant “O” indicating an “Oprah’s Book Club” selection? If Franzen had appeared happily on Oprah’s set, surely some wise-ass writing in Slate or McSweeney’s would relish taking note of the obvious hypocrisy. He couldn’t let that happen, and he didn’t. He made slighting references to his good fortune in more august settings, like National Public Radio’s show “Fresh Air.” At literary bookstores, readers would come up to Franzen and express dismay at the Oprah-fication of his novel. In keeping with that notion, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that “The Corrections” might be a “hard book for that audience.” Finally, Oprah had had enough. She withdrew her offer to have him appear on her show. Other novelists, who would do almost anything to have been chosen, reacted with untrammeled outrage (hoping, perhaps, that their public denunciations of Franzen and praise of Oprah might cause her to look favorably upon their next novels). Editors in New York raged as well. No one has done more to keep the novel alive than Oprah, they insisted. How dare Franzen be so ungrateful? YOU HAVE TO READ Franzen’s book to grasp the real secret behind his dismay at his inclusion in the Oprah canon. “The Corrections” is a story about a dysfunctional family. Elderly father has Parkinson’s. Mother is sexually frustrated. Daughter is a closeted lesbian. Elder son is dominated by his rich wife. Younger son is a failed academic. Everyone is depressed. And in the end, they all come together for a final family Christmas in an overstuffed home in the heart of the Midwest. The lesbian daughter, a chef, is irritated by a review her restaurant receives in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It praises “the ‘perfectionist’ Denise Lambert for a ‘must-have experience’ that ‘single-handedly’ put Philadelphia on the ‘map of cool.'” Denise fears that the review makes her restaurant sound “crappy and middlebrow.” Jonathan Franzen, himself a scion of the St. Louis suburbs, fears more than anything being thought of as middlebrow. Franzen has arranged his life to resemble that of a bohemian writer from another era, complete with garret and vodka and a garbage can stuffed with years of useless pages. Peel away Franzen’s narrative intricacies, his often overwrought prose, and his vision of America as a prison of affluence, and what you have left is a really good TV movie. This is not to say “The Corrections” is worthless. There is wonderful stuff in its 568 pages. A long chapter devoted to the journey taken by the elderly Lamberts on the Nordic cruise ship is hilariously funny. “We Norwegians are great readers,” one passenger explains, bragging that her husband annually “reads one work by every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Her husband modestly declares, “It is safe to say that I have read more deeply into Henrik Pontoppidan than most.” Another passage details the effort by Gary Lambert, the eldest son, to win a pointless argument with his wife in a struggle that extends over three weeks–in which her most potent weapon is the calm assurance tha
t he is suffering from clinical depression. Franzen’s description of Gary’s internal struggle is masterful: “He was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of the disease; he would never again win an argument.” But Franzen never quite makes us believe that his five disparate characters really inhabit the same family. He gives them all quirks and corners, strengths and weaknesses, but there is no real psychic struggle or commonality between them. And he veers uncomfortably between an effort to portray their lives realistically and a desire to satirize the state of America and the world at the end of history. The satire is laid on with a trowel. And the dreadful vulgarity and lack of nuance in Franzen’s political vision suggest that while he may be hungry to “Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream,” the wisdom he has to impart is nothing more than warmed-over Katha Pollitt. Chip, the family failure, finds himself in Vilnius trying to fool American investors into believing that the entire nation has become a for-profit company. His months there are eye-opening: “In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury.” CHIP’S ILL-GOTTEN GAINS in Vilnius are stolen from him by border guards. That plot development, and the concluding pages of “The Corrections,” uncloak Franzen as a simplistic moralizer who punishes his naughty characters and rewards his good ones. After a stint of selflessness towards his sick father, Chip finds instant happiness with a Jewish nursing-home doctor who bears him twins. Chip’s growth is mirrored by the spiritual progress of his intolerant, homophobic, and anti-Semitic mother, Enid–who finds she actually loves being “carried around the room while the klezmer music played” at Chip’s wedding. And though she is never told the truth about her daughter’s lesbianism, a single conversation at the bridge table with a homophobe causes her to end a friendship of forty years’ duration. Meanwhile, the lovely Denise gets a brand-new restaurant on the hot Smith Street corridor in fashionable Brooklyn, while materialistic Gary loses his shirt in a stock deal. Jonathan Franzen is Oprah. And somewhere deep in his heart of hearts, he knows it. John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. November 19, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 10
