Jonathan Franzen caused a stir recently when he managed to get himself disinvited from Oprah Winfrey’s television book club. His third novel, The Corrections, was to be discussed on her show but he made comments in the press to the effect that as a writer of “high literature” he felt somewhat out of place on Winfrey’s largely populist list — and he didn’t like the idea of being branded with her corporate logo. Miffed, Winfrey rescinded her invitation to him. Luckily for Franzen, the attendant publicity made up for the half a million or so sales he lost through the withdrawal of Winfrey’s sponsorship, and The Corrections has been a bestseller ever since.
The odd thing is that book would have been perfect for the Oprah Book Club. Franzen may consider his work “high literature” but it has none of the modernist difficulty of, say, the novels of Toni Morrison (Winfrey’s favourite author and a two-time selection for the book club). As an author, Franzen has far more in common with Tom Wolfe, champion of the 19th-century-style realist novel of sweeping scope, than with Morrison — or with Don DeLillo, the United States’ leading maestro of post-modern anomie, disconnection and depersonalisation, who gives The Corrections a punt on its cover.
Franzen’s prose reads a lot like Wolfe’s. It is bright, jazzy and knowing, with the magisterial confidence of the omniscient author viewing his characters and the world he is
describing from a godlike perspective (very 19th century, that). It is also somewhat overwritten — Franzen frequently uses several echoing, parallel phrases where one would have sufficed for the purpose of meaning alone. Often this works well; sometimes it seems needlessly show-offy. He is no minimalist: the most intimidating thing about The Corrections is its length (568 pages), but then size still matters to the ambitious US writer. Like Wolfe, or like Norman Mailer and others before him, he is trying to write The Great American Novel, and “great” also means “big”.
Where Franzen differs from Wolfe is in his attention to character and its nuances. Wolfe’s novels conspicuously lack characters with much depth, and his treatment of them conspicuously lacks compassion. That element of the 19th-century novel is one Wolfe has neglected in his desire to see social-documentary realism à la Emile Zola resurrected for our time.
The Corrections is a family saga or soap opera (again, perfect for Oprah — she at least knows what would work on her show) focusing on the Lamberts of midwestern origin. The family comprises aged parents Alfred and Enid and their three children, Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred is gradually losing his mind as Parkinson’s disease descends on him, while Enid becomes ever more frantic in the face of her sense of family as the only success of her housewifely life. Gary is a family man struggling with depression; Chip is a disgraced university teacher and would-be scriptwriter in love with “transgression”, while Denise is a celebrity chef with a complicated lovelife.
All three are caught in the complex set of actions and reactions that make up “the corrections”, their attempts to throw off their parents’ shaping influence, to be different and to be themselves in a world with values very different to those of the rather severe Alfred and the frustrated Enid. Franzen plays with the idea of “corrections” throughout in a nimbly witty way — it applies to Chip’s desperate attempt to make last-minute changes to his script as much as to the inevitable adjustments that will come to a bullish marketplace.
Presumably this is taking place in a booming Nineties pre-recession United States — despite his meticulous social realism, Franzen does not specify. He is also willing to let his imagination fly into more surreal directions when Chip leaves the United States and heads for Lithuania, where the rules of down-home verisimilitude apparently do not apply quite as strictly. Apart from that, and apart from the fact that the novel could have been shorter without much loss (there are digressions such as a long story told to Enid on a cruise), The Corrections is fast-moving, for all its density of detail. It is an often blackly funny, engrossing read, and, particularly in the scenes of Alfred’s decline, very moving.