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In his now infamous Atlantic Monthly article, "A Reader's Manifesto," B.R. Myers attacks literary fiction for becoming hopelessly quagmired in pretension and affected, meaningless, impenetrable prose. Why are serious writers "so contemptuous of the urge to tell an exciting story," he begs, particularly when it comes to edgy fiction rife with "America, that consumerist cesspool" commentary? Well, halleluiah, Mr. Myers and the rest of us apparently deeply bored and befuddled readers may have found a savior in Jonathan Franzen. An epic tragicomedy, THE CORRECTIONS follows the alternately divergent and convergent paths of two generations of the Lambert family from mid-century through the technology-saturated economic boom and crash of the late 90's. Franzen's third, and no doubt best novel, it goes a long way toward bridging the gap between the ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness of socially motivated fiction and the timelessness of a simply good story.
An infinite well of personal and interpersonal dysfunction, Alfred, the Lambert's unyielding, compulsively upstanding patriarch is fast losing his white-knuckled grip on reality and succumbing to Parkinson's-induced dementia. His entropic mind leaves him betrayed by propriety and victimized by his arch nemeses --- smut, filth, sentimentality, the helpless and the hapless. A deeply sad but fitting irony, in the end (his end) Alfred is plagued by violent sexual impulses, reduced to soiling his pants and is haunted by distant and painfully sweet memories of his children, who he had once hoped would help "correct" the mistakes of life but now holds them at an intractable emotional distance.
Meanwhile, Alfred's chirpy wife Enid spends her days waxing poetic about the wonderfully idyllic homogeneity of suburban St. Jude while insisting that Alfred's illness is entirely psychosomatic. An artful amalgamation of the stereotypical Jewish nudge, the easily scandalized and moralizing Catholic and the lonely, unfulfilled wife of a passionless Protestant, she builds an unrelenting, childlike excitement over the prospect of having "one last Christmas in St. Jude." Hers is a desperately "up" disposition, a preternatural optimism, so contrived that when it begins to wane in the face of the creeping reality of her empty life, she takes a short-lived foray into the world of personality enhancers and starts popping experimental happy pills. Like Alfred and their children, Enid is "tragic" in her utter lack of self and world-awareness. But society's Wonderbreadification and Consumerland's Rasputin-like effects leave Enid especially ravaged. From keeping up with the Joneses to money hungriness to sound Christian values without an ounce of actual belief, there isn't a negative symptom of 90's modernity that Enid doesn't embody. Frankly, there are times when she is so patently annoying she teeters on becoming a cartoonish parody of vices.
Forced from St. Jude by the exasperating admixture of Enid and Alfred, the three Lambert children move clear across the country. Geography, however, proves an ineffective weapon in the fight against malcontent and malaise. Gary, the eldest, is a tightly wound, yuppie banker drowning in unhappiness and wracked by paranoia but unwavering in his refusal to admit to "clinical depression." He is skeptical (and rightly so, which is the reoccurring anti-quick-fix message that comes across) of surrendering himself to the meta-personality offered by antidepressants. Moreover, many of Gary's anxieties stem from the fear of becoming like his father --- a remote, inflexible, truly clinically depressed man. Here, Franzen employs a mirroring effect to underscore the unmitigated blindness pervasive in Gary, specifically, and the Lamberts, in general. In the grand tradition of turning into your parents, it's Alfred's very image and likeness that Gary finally appropriates.
A neo-Foucaultian, antiestablishment soapboxer who maxes out his credit card on posh restaurants and leather pants, Chip is essentially a capitalist in disguise. After being fired from his professorship for sleeping with a student just weeks before his tenure review, Chip moves to NYC and sets his sights on screenwriting, at which he is also turns out to be a colossal failure. Deeply in debt, Chip's agent (the villainously named Eden Procuro) pimps him out to a clever Lithuanian who needs help bilking moronic, manifest destiny-minded Americans out of their money by launching Lithuania.com, a website that allows investors to buy a piece of the economically unstable country and turn it into a bonafide "for-profit nation-state." The site's tagline --- "Democracy Pays Handsome Rewards" --- may as well be the mantra for Franzen's entire book, particularly in light of its innumerable ironic twists of fate, the most hilarious being that Chip is eventually run out of Lithuania, penniless and under threat of assassination.
If Chip (like Enid) is a wannabe social climber, his sister Denise is a genuine hipster. Head chef at a trendy restaurant in Philadelphia, the beautiful Denise travels in all the right circles. That is, until she falls into dueling affairs with her boss and her boss' wife and is summarily dismissed from her job. Having cut herself off from soul-baring intimacy --- dating back to, or perhaps born from, her first sexual encounter with a man who was both much older and an employee of her father's --- Denise is self-destructive in her compulsively physical sexuality. But her newfound bisexuality is not a feckless act of passion but rather the simple result of her desperate search for love precipitated by her father's illness and finally leading toward her most profound realization of "the extent of the correction she was undergoing."
It is with unremitting scrutiny that Franzen lays so patently bare the pretensions, greed, self-deceptions, insecurities and folly of the Lamberts --- and, by extension, the greater culture --- as they swallow whole the quick-fix comforts and profitability of today's technology laden, commerce-glutted global society and conveniently sidestep all accountability for self or neighbor. Yet, Franzen's satirical edge is not the true triumph of THE CORRECTIONS; there is certainly no shortage of literature offering piercing insight into society's devolution. Rather, THE CORRECTIONS is remarkable for its seamless fusion of domestic and global dysfunctions into a deceptively simple yet utterly compelling story of one family's collective but colliding struggle toward finding meaning in their lives. Even more than that, Franzen --- unlike so many other hopelessly cynical social novelists --- is genuinely empathetic to the plight of his cast of fools and imbues them with a fundamental human decency and their screwed up lives with a faint but unmistakable glimmer of hope. In the end we realize that "the corrections" are not, as we along with the Lamberts once assumed, an unattainable, cruel irony. We have been indicted, yes, but still we are filled, in Enid's words, with a "strange yearning sense of possibility."
--- Reviewed by Sarah Brennan
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