Now he's first among equals
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate £17.99, pp568
Tim Adams
Sunday 25 November 2001
The greatest burst of wealth creation the planet has ever seen, which began 15 or more years ago on the campus-factories of Silicon Valley and in the dealing-rooms of Wall Street, and which perhaps began to end on 11 September, has trailed with it a golden age of American fiction.
The most sustained deconstruction of the implications of the long boom, the corporatisation of the American soul, has come from a clutch of remarkable novelists, most notably in the mature work of Don DeLillo and Philip Roth, but also in the smaller scale brilliance of Richard Ford, or the narcotic sweep of Tom Wolfe. In his first two novels, the overly tricksy The Twenty-Seventh City and the vaguely impenetrable Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen was at such pains to join that heady company that he overreached himself and, in his desire to be the author of the Great American Novel, forgot to write books that people might want to read.
This time around, he has made no such mistake. The Corrections announced itself five years ago, with a curious personal manifesto. In a long, compellingly arrogant essay in Harper's magazine, Franzen wrote of the necessity of uniting the polarities in the ambitions of novelists he wanted as his peers,
In particular, he noted the need to combine the mesmerising dramatisation of the connectedness of America in DeLillo's Underworld with the authentic humanism of, say, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres or Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. He envisaged a novel charged with contemporary critical anxieties but which pulsed with the heart of the heart of the country, and proposed himself as the man who could write it. Five years on, he has, in mostly thrilling fashion, made good that boast.
The corrections of the title are, in part, the readjustments in stock values made in response to the first signs of economic downturn, the backwash of the wave of consumer prosperity that engulfed American values in the final years of the last century. The Lamberts, a family from the Midwestern outpost of St Jude (patron saint of hopeless causes), have been swamped by that wave and are floundering in its shallows, desperately trying to gain a footing for themselves and not lose sight of each other.
Money, its undertow and its absence, has loosened their hold on things, not least the ties that might bind a family. In an earlier, simpler time, Alfred Lambert, a retired railway engineer of celebrated accomplishment among his colleagues, and a strict personal moralist, might not have seemed to himself a failure. His wife, Enid, might not have sensed that 'they were the only intelligent people of her generation who had not managed to become rich'. He might, as a consequence, have been able to love her, and she would not have had to watch their apple-pie attitudes crust over into prejudice and bitterness, when this love was withheld. Moreover, their three children, Denise and Chip and Gary, might not have been so keen to flee the fallout of this inherited despond by looking for love and money in the cities of the East Coast.
But this is where they are at, and Franzen inhabits their five fractured lives with heartfelt intensity. He furnishes each of them with hopes to cling to, he lavishes all the resourceful invention of his language on their despair and, above all, with comedy and tenderness he makes his reader care how they will turn out. In an age when millions of 'new minted Americans were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints' - the author sets his mind to delineating the tragic fate of ordinariness.
His story begins with alarm bells ringing in the old Victorian family house. The early-warning system has begun in the head of Alfred, whose psychological certainties are dying along with the circuits in his brain, victims of the onset of Parkinson's disease. His wife can hear the crisis coming, too. But for the time being they are prepared to put their hopes into the manageable future: he, into the familiar objects he has surrounded himself with in his basement den, his vast leather armchair, which cradles him like a baseball mitt; she into Christmas, when she hopes the children will come home, and they can all pretend to be happy.
Their children, meanwhile, have a great deal else on their minds. Chip has lost his chance of tenure at a private university for stalking an undergraduate, and is investing what he can muster of his energy into a screenplay putting his side of the story. Corrections are needed, however, since the script dwells rather too obsessively on the breasts of the female lead.
Denise, who was to be her father's last great hope in life, is making her desperate way as a chef, torn between an affair with her millionaire boss and her lust for her millionaire boss's wife.
Gary, the eldest brother, who was the kind of child who built correctional facilities out of Popsicle sticks, is locked into a marriage that is beginning to resemble the stubborn stand-off of his parents'. His modest success in the financial markets does little to alleviate his growing sense of paranoia at home, an anxiety not aided by the fact that his son has rigged up a CCTV camera in the kitchen and trains it on his father as he raids the icebox for enough vodka to get him through the barbecue hour.
They may all be living in the land of possibility, but their lives inform them that there are no easy fixes. Chemical solutions sometimes look like an answer - Franzen interrogates the idea that the biotech industry might be the cavalry that will rescue the American soul - but different elixirs, including a new drug, Correcktall, that promises to rewire ageing and disturbed thought patterns, never quite materialise.
In the absence of laboratory help the Lamberts are left to work on their imbalances with the resources they are born with. The soul of the book lies in the morbidity and love with which Franzen describes the breaking down of what makes Alfred Alfred. As he, and those he wants to love, battle to adjust themselves to their changing circumstances, Parkinson's disease begins to act as a metaphor for the wider breakdown of connections in lives and families and society.
In an Observer interview about his book (see below), Franzen spoke of how he wrote parts of it blindfold, wearing earplugs, shutting out the here and now so that his writing could recreate it all the more tellingly. The notion seems a little absurd, until you read what his years of wilful sensory deprivation have produced: a novel as tactile in the world of objects and as alive to the pressures of the present moment as any I can think of; a book in which memorable setpieces and under-your-skin characters tumble over one another to compete for attention. Like the greatest fiction, for all its edgy satire and laugh-out-loud comedy, this novel is, above all, an exercise in generosity. Its subject is human frailty and the compensations we might make to hold lives together.
Franzen famously refused to allow his book to be endorsed by Oprah Winfrey (it was, he claimed, tongue almost in cheek, 'high art') but you know why she would have loved it: somewhere near its heart is a self-help formula to live (and write) by: Only Correct.
THE GUARDIAN
