‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen

Perhaps this post should be titled ‘Re-reading The Corrections’, because I read it in 2002- think, nearly twenty years ago. I was interested to see what I wrote about it in my pre-blog reading journal back then:

I can’t remember having such varying feelings about a book. It is really a tragedy mixed with farce. In its tragic parts, I felt uncomfortable at the harsh glare of reality: in its farcical sections I felt bored and tired of the author’s look-at-me cuteness and self-conscious wittiness. It is, as the author admits, five novellas and for me, the sections dealing with the cruise and the Lithuanian venture could easily have been dropped.

But the family dynamics were brilliant: the well-meaning but manipulative mother who wants to bring the family together for one last Christmas; the father bewildered by his Parkinson’s Disease; a psychologically-hypochondriac son bullied by his wife and children; a son who throws away a career because of sexual indiscretion and ends up doing very shady deals in Lithuania, and a daughter who discovers her lesbianism only while wrecking her own career as a chef because of an affair with both her employers. Incisive, current, but very in-your-face. 8/10

So how does it shape up 20 years later? I was more impatient this time of the self-indulgent length of 653 pages, the long lists of objects, and sheer show-off-iness of the writing. I just wanted him to shut up, frankly. Too much talk, too much self-indulgent angst.

It now seems very much of its time – pre September 11 and the GFC, it’s a time of American bombast and certainty, where greed was still good (if somewhat grubby) and the American viewpoint dominated the world. Trump, the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction and the whole Middle East mess that it gave rise to, and COVID have punctured all that.

The search for the ‘Great American Novel’, fat and sneering and self-important, seems now to be a very masculine endeavour, with Franzen being likened to Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, Don de Lillo, Thomas Pynchon etc. (all men, I note). Actually, I think that Elizabeth Strout should be in this list too, and her books are so different from these. Yes, there are deeply flawed and unlikeable characters in her books too, but there isn’t the superciliousness in these other contenders.

Of course, I’m not the same reader either. Twenty years on, Parkinson’s is a much more sensitive topic, given that someone I love dearly has it. Twenty years later, having sat beside both my parents as they died, I understand more about death and age. Hell, twenty years later, I tick the 65+ age box now. Now I’m the grandmother and mother-in-law. Given that Franzen himself is now 61, I wonder if he would write the same book.

This is an unkind book that is far, far, far too long. Twenty years later, I’d downgrade that 8 to a 6.5

Sourced from: CAE Bookgroups

Read because: it was a Bookgroup selection