I read
The Corrections in an airport, first instinctively removing its dust jacket. While I usually do this to protect a book’s resale value — I am not, to my ever-growing bewilderment, a wealthy man — I stored this one in a way I had to know would wreck it. I therefore must have had another reason for hiding from view the cover design that’s become an icon of early-2000s reading.
In the literary circles I frequent (
i.e., whose blogs I read), Jonathan Franzen is thought of as a dumbass. Several readers I respect highly point to “
Mr. Difficult”, a
New Yorker essay he wrote a year after
The Corrections was published. It’s about his struggles with the work of William Gaddis, perhaps 20th-century America’s best-known (if not best-regarded) author of “difficult” novels. Franzen banners Gaddis as the quintessential writer of the “Status” novel, a model dictating that
the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it.
This is opposed to the “Contract” model, wherein
a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group, whether the group consists of "Finnegans Wake" enthusiasts or fans of Barbara Cartland. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.
Well... maybe! The very terms of this dichotomy — let alone the fact that Franzen comes down, if a little reluctantly, on Contract’s side — seem to have raised intellectual hackles, but I can’t find a strong objection to them. (The piece at least seems to gave been written in good faith, which is more than I can say about a lot of articles on Gaddis.) I do think it’s a continuum. Some of Gaddis’ work sounds like is got a little Contract in it, especially his first title, The Recognitions, for which Franzen professes a troubled love. Likewise, I’d assumed that Franzen performs just enough experimentation in his own Contract-y novels to wear a modest Status button. To my mind, the highest Status in the world gets you nothing without a Contract to convey it to an audience, just as the most attractive Contract you can draw up is worthless without a high-Status product to deliver.
Thinking about these issues got me wondering what Franzen’s novels are actually like. Lots of people are reading Freedom right now, so obviously I can’t do that. The fact that I already owned a copy of The Corrections — $1.95 from Goodwill! — helped the selection forward. I figured I’d put the book on the shelf and then, with the importance of time’s fullness in mind, give it a decade before reading, but nine years would have to suffice.
In the event, I read The Corrections all day long: in the airport, on the plane, on the train, at home, and through the discarding of my plan to maybe eat some food. “Couldn’t put it down” would be the applicable cliché; if that condition was in the Contract, Franzen seemed to be fulfilling it. I can’t come up with any convincing explanation why I only stopped reading when sleepiness overtook me, other than that one page led seamlessly into the next which lead seamlessly into the next, etc., etc. Stopping points are also few and far between; nobody ever mentions it, but these are some of the longest chapters I’ve seen in a realistic novel.
Those have remained in my mind as the book’s dominant qualities: smoothness and realism. (There is a section with a talking turd, but never mind.) That might by why I mainly liked The Corrections while I was reading The Corrections; the day after I’d closed it, I could call only upon hazy impressions. Sure, I could describe the characters and the events, but as for the vehicle conveying those things, it was just a whole lot of text. This text introduced me to these characters; it described their thoughts, comings, goings, and doings; it went on to describe the consequences of these thoughts, comings, goings, and doings; then it ended.
Okay, so I wasn’t expecting Ulysses. I wasn’t even expecting The Recognitions, references to which pepper The Corrections well beyond its title. But did all of it have do go down so easily? “My idea was to have this ‘hump’ that the moviegoer has to get over,” the often fascinating main-ish character Chip Lambert says about the sprawling theoretical monologue that begins his screenplay. “Putting something offputting at the beginning, it’s a classic modernist strategy. There’s a lot of rich suspense toward the end.” Part of me suspects Franzen is making fun of this notion — more on that later — but another part insists his novel could’ve used a hump or seven.
But that is not the Franzen way, if it ever was. Reviews of The Corrections’ successor Freedom break down along roughly this line: critics who liked it extolled the allegedly forgotten pleasures of a good plain old-fashioned suspenseful page-turnin’ dramatic read. Paul Constant in the Stranger sums up the judgment of critics who disliked it: “Jonathan Franzen Is the Greatest Novelist the 1950s Have to Offer.” I suspect Richard Yates is actually the greatest novelist the 1950s have to offer, though the pleasures I found in The Corrections lay admittedly less than a million miles from those I find in Yates. (Being almost the Richard Yates of the 1990s — though published in 2001, The Corrections isn’t quite of that decade — might be a modest distinction, but it’s hardly a damning one.)
If you know anything about The Corrections, you know its plot has to do with a disintegrating family. That theme carries the sour-milk smell of artistic obsolescence, but it’s not as if novelists put it down after the mid-20th century; I wouldn’t be surprised if more of them than ever are hammering away at it (or with it) right now. In this story, it’s the Lambert family: Chip, the broke, critical theory-steeped brother; Gary, the twitchy, conventionally successful brother; Denise, the hardworking but flighty sister; the mother Enid, who lives a life of miniscule joys and epic disappointment; and the patriarch Alfred, long enslaved by a rigidly idiosyncratic moral code and more recently held captive by neurological disease.
Franzen takes great pains to empathize with these principal characters and a host of secondaries as well. Man, does he ever empathize. So long and so hard does he press this empathy that all its earnest honesty and good-faith probing of motive and desire begins to look like cruelty. With all the clarity he can muster, he writes many a passage that cut straight to a character’s core. I can’t tell whether these are moments of admirable identification or cheap ridicule, but they’re certainly the book’s finest.
Desperate for cash, Chip the hapless former academic gets down to selling his books:
The books were in their original jackets and had an aggregate list price of $3,900. A buyer at the Strand appraised them casually and delivered the verdict: “Sixty-five.”
Chip laughed in a breathy way, willing himself not to argue; but his U.K. edition of Jürgen Habermas’s Reason and the Rationalization of Society which he’d found too difficult to read, let alone annotate, was in mint condition and had cost him £95.00.
The theorists, in any case, couldn’t even compete with his thirty-year-old, married girlfriend:
It was pathetically obvious that he’d believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue. By the beginning of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he’d sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralist, his Freudians, and his queers.
But his brother Gary, the upper-middle-class bank manager with three or four kids (I cant’t remember) and an actual house, bears his own rage:
He already had one “alternative” sibling and didn’t need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it undercut the pleasure he took in his home and his job and his family; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.
To my mind, though, The Corrections’ richest character comes in the form of Enid Lambert, a study in powerless frustration containing a veritable hall of mirrors of well-meaning and resentment. Her desperation to get her adult children together for one last Midwest Christmas, which drives the narrative almost by itself, delivers the most recent cluster in her lifelong string of disappointments. Her lament that “her children didn’t match,” that “they didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted,” “radically, shamefully different things,” is only the latest iteration of despondency and regret about her kids, her husband, and herself.
This goes back, at least, to when she was still feeding the tots. Franzen illustrates it in what I consider kind of a bravura passage in spite of myself:
She decided that Chipper was exactly like his father — at once hungry and impossible to feed. He turned food into shame. To prepare a square meal and then to see it greeted with elaborate disgust, to see the boy actually gag on his breakfast oatmeal: this stuck in a mother’s craw. All Chipper wanted was milk and cookies, milk and cookies. Pediatrician said: “Don’t give in. He’ll get hungry eventually and ea something else.” So Enid tried to be patient, but Chipper sat down to lunch and declared: “This smells like vomit!” You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction — no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate the boy’s disgust.
This comes in the neighborhood of her disingenuously loud pronouncement that “I could live on nothing but vegetables.” Another damning line conveying how Enid got Chip to sit down to dinner in the first place: “‘There’s bacon, you like bacon,’ Enid sang. This was a cynical, expedient fraud, one of her hundred daily conscious failures as a mother.” (“What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive,” Franzen needs hardly add.)
Enid’s despair sharpens when she and Alfred board a long-awaited luxury cruise:
God had given her the imagination to weep for the sad strivers who booked the most el-cheapo “B” Deck inside staterooms on a luxury cruise ship; but a childhood without money had left her unable to stomach, herself, the $300 per person it cost to jump one category up; and so she wept for herself. She felt that she and all were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich.
After having her join a few cruise friends for a grand-home tour off a port, Franzen confronts an element of Enid’s character — and, let’s be honest, of the very common type of American woman he carefully crafts Enid to represent — that almost makes me queasy if I think about it straight-on:
The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn’t understand antiques or architecture, she coluldn’t draw like Sylvia, she didn’t read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she’d ever had.
Unlike the harshest of those aforementioned literary bloggers, I don’t think Franzen wields only a staid, wilted breed of novelistic power; the man can breach the core of things as cleanly as any bestselling novelist today. But go ahead and lump me in with the readers bewildered by how he appears to squander this hard-earned skill. I’ve read about conversations where Franzen and his late friend David Foster Wallace discussed how contemporary literature and poetry can’t hope to make large-scale connections with large-scale audiences unless they turn back toward marriages and family and domesticity and such: things that are actually part of most lives. But jeez, doesn’t that sound a tad... banal?
The words of an unreconstructed, semi-closeted modernist, you might say, and maybe they are. (Do note that I haven’t read all that many modernists.) As someone who has pre-emptively forsaken niceties like marriage, children, home ownership, Yule logs and the like because his chosen pursuits don’t usually admit them, I doubt I could think otherwise. But perhaps we simply disagree about whether the real interestingness is to be found in the stuff of “most lives.”
I can’t fight it: I come away from The Corrections with a deep respect for Jonathan Franzen. He says smart things, he makes sense, he seems honest, he can exercise formidable linguistic skill when he feels like it, and he achieves his concrete goals — “to reach the largest possible audience” and to be considered “the greatest writer of his generation,” according to a recent profile by Chuck Klosterman in GQ — with frightening effectiveness.
But for all its cultural pull (and physical weight), his book leaves me with a slight but foul aftertaste of disposability, the kind of disposability a potentially brilliant painter produces when he makes commemorative plates. I won’t forget that I read The Corrections, but I doubt I’ll ever read it again. For all Franzen impressed me as I turned the novel’s pages — and he certainly did impress me — he gave no indication at all that it would yield more worthwhile artistic, intellectual, or even emotional riches upon return visits. By contrast, I recently pulled Revolutionary Road out of the library for a re-read. Not only is this second time through more gripping than the first, I know there’s going to be a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Yates is stiff competition, I realize, but Franzen’s the one choosing, perhaps perversely, to play on his turf.
Making Love
“Day was dawning over Tokyo, and I plunged a finger into her asshole.” There we have, in sentence-sized microcosm, much of what I’ve found appealing in the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Another nameless narrator finds himself in a situation he didn’t expect in a place he didn’t expect it to happen, one he wound up in by only the faintest traces of his own volition. Just as something grand happens in an exotic setting, a much smaller scale presents something decidedly more, er, intimate.
I’ve chosen Jean-Philippe Toussaint as the subject of my next 
Despite having often come across the name Arthur Russell in music magazines, I never lifted a finger to learn about its bearer. I mean, that’s a culturally unpromising name, the name of a periodontist or a claims adjuster. Thanks, in part, to someone with a much more interesting name, I now know something about Arthur Russell. Jens Lekman. He’s Swedish, and maybe in Sweden his name is the equivalent of Arthur Russell’s, but still. Researching all the appearances he’s ever made in anything in advance of an L.A. live show, a friend saw that he put in a few seconds as a talking head in this documentary. Since I planned to join the trip to the Jens Lekman concert, I figured, hey, why not watch this Arthur Russell movie?
I don’t usually write about books 
Today on 3Quarksdaily, my latest “Humanists” column, on Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, is up:
I assume every cinephile knows Jean-Luc Godard’s filmography backwards and forwards. Intellectually, I realize that probably hasn’t been true since about 1970, but the fact remains that I feel out-Godarded most of the time, even though what I have seen of his work tells me that it’s not wholly in line with my own cinematic sensibilities. Specifically, I’m not into lecturing the bourgeoisie; I’m afflicted by a violent allergy against art used to make points, even if I respect it for aesthetic reasons. My internal conflict about Michael Haneke will therefore never resolve, nor, I assume will the one about Jean-Luc Godard — that is, when I’ve watched enough of his movies to develop it.