Growing up and growing old
Sorry for the paucity of updates lately - it took me the better part of a week to finish Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. I'd heard a lot of really great things about this book, so when I saw it in the bargain bin for $6.99 I thought I'd give it a whirl. It doesn't really have a plot per se - it's more a series of vignettes following the five members of the Lambert family as they make their way towards 'one last Christmas' together at the family home in St. Jude, a typical Midwestern town. Father Alfred is suffering from Parkinson's and is utterly dependent on his social-propriety-obsessed wife Enid to survive as his body betrays him. Their children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, are all so wrapped up in their own lives and issues that they actively try to avoid their depressing/uncool/juvenile/irritating parents as much as humanly possible. Gary struggles with his marriage as his children become the weapons he and his wife Caroline use to manipulate and control each other. Chip, recently fired from his faculty position at an unnamed university for having an inappropriate relationship with a student, dabbles in writing a terrible screenplay and borrowing huge amounts of money from his sister to support his shiftless existence. Denise appears to be a highly successful restaurant chef, but her immaculate cooking hides a women careening from one bad relationship to another, a trajectory leading towards a breakdown of everything she values. As this highly dysfunctional group tries to survive that most familial of holidays, they eventually come to understand, at least modestly, what drives the people they've been running away from all this time.
In some ways this book is a typical Oprah choice (I'll save my rant about that for another post) - dysfunctional family, suffering, depression, pathos, etc. Thankfully for the reader, Franzen infuses the book with a generous helping of humor that prevents it from sliding into full-on suicide-inducing Oprah territory. Some parts of the book are genuinely touching, while others leave you with a palpable sense of disgust. It's hard to come away from the end really appreciating any of the characters as people. That said, in many ways it's a realistic view on how people relate to their families. We may share DNA with these people, but it doesn't mean that we understand them, respect them, or even like them all that much. Franzen's satirization of the Lambert children's self-obsessed worldview is the true delight of the book - he skewers the "me-me-me-me-me" ethos of 21st-century life with aplomb.
Overall, I'm not quite sure that The Corrections lives up to the massive swirl of hype surrounding it (Yann Martel's The Life of Pi does a much better job there), but it's a worthwhile read all the same.
In some ways this book is a typical Oprah choice (I'll save my rant about that for another post) - dysfunctional family, suffering, depression, pathos, etc. Thankfully for the reader, Franzen infuses the book with a generous helping of humor that prevents it from sliding into full-on suicide-inducing Oprah territory. Some parts of the book are genuinely touching, while others leave you with a palpable sense of disgust. It's hard to come away from the end really appreciating any of the characters as people. That said, in many ways it's a realistic view on how people relate to their families. We may share DNA with these people, but it doesn't mean that we understand them, respect them, or even like them all that much. Franzen's satirization of the Lambert children's self-obsessed worldview is the true delight of the book - he skewers the "me-me-me-me-me" ethos of 21st-century life with aplomb.
Overall, I'm not quite sure that The Corrections lives up to the massive swirl of hype surrounding it (Yann Martel's The Life of Pi does a much better job there), but it's a worthwhile read all the same.
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