An Opportunity to Make A Few CorrectionsI read “The Corrections” pre-Good Reads and originally rated it four stars.I wanted to re-read (and review) it, before starting “Freedom”.I originally dropped it a star because I thought there was something unsatisfying about the whole Lithuanian adventure.Perhaps, when I re-read it, I wouldn’t object to it as much and I could improve my rating.Having just finished it, I could probably add a half-star, but I’m not ready to give it five.Second time around, the Vilnius section didn’t grate as much, partly because it was far shorter and more innocuous than I recalled.However, the second reading helped me to work out what stopped it being a five star effort for me.The First DraftFranzen’s writing is easy to read.He’s a skilful writer, he knows his chops.His style is both fluent and fluid. You can dip in for a short session and suddenly find that you’ve read 50 to 70 pages pretty effortlessly.He accumulates detail, but he points you confidently in a direction, even if you don’t know what your destination will be.He seems to have put his prattishness behind him now, so it’s possible to appreciate his writing without peering darkly through the lens of the Oprah spectacle.Because he writes in a realist manner, I think that whether or not you will enjoy his novel depends on whether you relate to his subject matter and his characters.“The Corrections” is primarily concerned with the dynamics of a family.I have never been a fan of family sagas, so I was initially apprehensive.Also, when I first read it, I was over-exposed to film about dysfunctional families and the social problems they generate.However, I don’t see the Lamberts as dysfunctional so much as typical of the thermodynamics that can be present in three relatively ambitious and driven generations in the 21st century.I’d venture to say that they’re more normal than abnormal.They don't commit any grievous social crimes, although they do a lot of emotional damage internally.Punch LinesStylistically, the novel is written in the third person.This allowed Franzen to drop the reader, like a fly on a wall, into a number of different homes and rooms in homes.From this vantage point, we’re able to observe numerous family members, not only externally but internally as well.The only negative thing I want to say about this is that, what Franzen dedicated 566 pages to, I think someone like Raymond Carver could have done in 166 pages.When Carver writes, we ascertain his meaning and intent by inference from the skeletal facts and action on the page.Franzen leaves little to inference. Everything is spelt out. Meticulously and elegantly, to give him due credit.He doesn’t pull any punches, but equally he signals all of his punches along the way.This is the one reservation I have about his style.There is a sense in which he is a perceptive commentator and essayist, at the expense of being a truly great technical novelist.Time and time again, I found that he layered detail and content on the page by telling us about it rather than creating the illusion that it was happening in front of our eyes and ears.There is a lot of back story, and not enough front story.Interior DesignThere isn’t a lot of action, at least externally.The action is largely interior and individual.Little is revealed through the interaction of the characters.Most of it is revealed by way of contemplation or recollection.The personal tensions that are the focus of the plot end up being in your head, rather than in your face.While I found it all interesting, I didn’t find it exciting.I can therefore understand why a large proportion of general readers would find it either too intimidating to start or too boring to finish.To this extent, you can understand why Franzen was concerned that, because of Oprah’s endorsement, many people would buy the book, without reading or enjoying it.They weren’t really the readers that Franzen had in mind when he wrote it.Perhaps, he would have written a different book if he wanted them to read it.Instead, he wrote for an audience of readers a lot more like himself in temperament.This isn’t meant to suggest that he was arrogant, only that he didn’t want to disappoint an audience he wasn’t trying to satisfy in the first place.The Blue ChairThe patriarch of the Lambert family is Alfred, a retired railway engineer and part-time bio-tech inventor.His wife, Enid, calls him Al. To his three children, he’s obviously “Dad”. Yet, Franzen constantly refers to him as Alfred, even though he doesn’t come across as pretentious or affected in any way.You get the impression that Alfred’s old-fashioned rigidity starts with his name and works down.Whereas, in the hands of Carver, I’m pretty confident that he would have been an abbreviated Al or Fred or a contracted “Lambo” or a work-derived nickname.We soon learn that Alfred has a great blue chair that takes pride of place.It’s described as overstuffed and “vaguely gubernatorial”, but most importantly it “was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without Enid’s approval”.It has great metaphorical potential, although uncharacteristically it doesn’t really get a mention after page nine, even though it features on the cover of some editions of the novel.Still, it hints that, within the Lambert family, we have both a patriarch and a matriarch and occasionally the two don’t see eye to eye.Their differences might be great or small, but they are embodied in the Blue Chair.A Metaphor ExploredOne of the reasons I rate “The Corrections” so highly is that it is an extended exploration of the “correction” metaphor.Yet, at the same time, the ultimate reason I have dropped it a half- to a full-star is that it never strays very far from a disciplined, even mechanical, revelation of its significance.I feel hypocritical about this, because one role of a reviewer or critic is to detect these metaphors and elaborate on them.In the case of Franzen, the role is much easier to perform, because he leaves verbal sign posts or easter eggs the whole way through the text.Without using Powerpoint, he tells you what he is going to say, he says it, and he reminds you that he has said it.Normally, we would treat this as consummate communication.In the case of a novel, it leaves nothing to the imagination, it leaves no mystery, it leaves little to be detected by the reader on their own.It would be like a crime novel where you knew everything about the crime from the beginning (who, how, when, why), except where the criminal was hiding (where).The CorrectionsSo, what do “the corrections” mean?A correction implies that something is “wrong” or “broken” or isn't “working”, and therefore needs to be fixed or remedied or “corrected”.Throughout the novel, there are references to physical objects that have been kept, even though they don’t work anymore or need to be fixed.They have been retained, when someone else, some other family, might have “thrown them away” or got a replacement the moment it was determined to be useless or obsolete.Alfred would once have had the "will to fix" them, but now he is tired and things go unfixed or uncorrected.This might suggest that there has been a recent breakdown in Alfred's authority, but I don't get the impression that he has had much authority within the family for a long time.In the last chapter, there is also a reference to the need for a correction of a “bubble” in an overheated economy.Investors have blindly expected conditions and values to improve perpetually, but every now and again there must be a correction, a reality check where once there was a dividend cheque.However, when the economic correction arrives, it is "not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor."Ultimately, the metaphor most overtly concerns the state of the characters' relationships.Indeed, the novel as a whole is Franzen's State of Relations Address.In their own way, there have been life-long leakages of value in the family's internal relationships that need to be addressed.Without being overtly dysfunctional, we can perpetuate relationships even though they are flawed or defective or unsatisfying.It’s much easier to abandon a relationship (to sell down a non-performing or troublesome stock) when it doesn’t involve a family member.It’s harder, if not impossible, to abandon or negate a parent/child or sibling to sibling relationship.In a sexual relationship, you can get the thorn out of your foot.In a family relationship, sometimes, you can’t get rid of the thorn without losing your foot.Spousal relationships hover in between the two, depending on whether there are children involved.Either way, within a family, you can't usually just walk away.You have to "correct" the relationship or learn to live with the thorn in your foot.A Chip Separated from the Old BlockWhen we’re first introduced to the term “correction”, we meet the middle child, Chip, the "alternative sibling" who has dropped out of the world of "conventional expectations", a would-be post-modernist academic, script writer and left-wing libertine.He might be the “intelligent son”, the "intellectual son", but Chip is still a "comic fool", the protagonist in a farce of his own creation.Chip forensically analyses his parents’ relationship and decides that his life will “correct” all of their personal failings.Where they are passive, conservative and straight-laced, he will be active, radical and open-minded.Franzen doesn’t suggest that this choice is intrinsically wrong, only that Chip makes a bit of a mess of it.To this extent, the novel sees Chip correct himself and his relationship with his parents and siblings, he becomes "a steady son, a trustworthy brother".The Straight OptionThe oldest child, Gary, is a fund manager, experienced in the ways of business and investment.He appears to be the successful child, but the visage conceals an unhappiness and dissatisfaction with a more conventional life, so much so that he probably suffers from depression.Gary is the least resolved of the siblings in the novel.At the end, he remains unreconciled with his parents and siblings, even if he has achieved a compromise of sorts in the conflict with his wife and children.The Bent OptionThe youngest child and only daughter, Denise, is in many ways the most interesting character.Some have reacted adversely to her as a shrill harpy.In Enid’s eyes, she has failed, because she hasn’t settled down, married the love of her life and had children.Instead, she is a talented chef, uncertain about what she wants personally and sexually.Denise remains open to different options, only she still hasn’t found what she’s looking for, largely because she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.Nevertheless, within the family, she is a major factor in the resolution and correction of the problems.Families FirstFranzen most identifies with the children (who are of a similar age), yet there is a sense in which he has the greatest sympathy for Alfred and Enid.Both parents are children of an earlier generation that was given little choice in how it lived life and raised families.The children, in contrast, have suffered from an excess of choice and the lack of a moral compass as they made their own choices.Unfortunately, Alfred has the least opportunity to correct his own behavior, because he is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.On the other hand, Enid, despite the failure of her dream to have one last perfect Christmas together, liberates herself and is able to correct (and resurrect) her own life at last, albeit alone.She is reconciled with, at least, Chip and Denise, and there is a sense in which she will also make things happen with Gary and his family.Families LastThe plot and its resolution don’t ultimately suggest that there is any perfect family.Families consist of individuals who all have their own needs and expectations and who all push and pull in their own directions.The thing is that different people have different expectations, and expectations create responsibilities and obligations and burdens.If everybody performs their designated role, does their bit, pulls their weight, plays their part, then compliance, reliability and success in turn give rise to a family culture of reliance, confidence and trust.If things don't "work out", there is a risk of disappointment, a risk of opting out, non-compliance, problems, mistakes, failure and "wrongness" that lead to coercion, anxiety, ostracisation, resentment, blame, guilt and the need to "endure" each other.There is no such thing as a perfect family.There can only be good families.A good family is not one that can avoid mistakes and failure, but one that can embrace apologies and forgiveness as a timely response to disappointed expectations.This is the heart of “The Corrections”.There are no car chases, nobody gets shot, nobody goes to prison (or a correctional facility), nobody gets bankrupted, nobody O.D.’s, nobody gets pregnant, nobody even gets divorced.Yet, somehow, Franzen manages to nail 21st century families and by doing so he nails 21st century society, because, since the beginning of time, families have been at the heart of society.You cannot have a healthy society without healthy families.It might be obvious, but it needs to be stated, even if at times Franzen states it too obviously.
Jonathan Franzen, you bespectacled metrosexual, you. What a great book. 4.5 stars! Now hang with me, I know this book is pretty divisive. HERE'S WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK: at some point in your life, you will make a very difficult decision on how to provide medical/hospice care for an aging, ailing family member. Most likely that family member will be a parent (or a Baby Boomer), and that decision will not be accepted--not by the member, not by your siblings. The decision will most likely occur at an inconvenient time. But it will have to be made, nevertheless, and it will rip your soul apart.The Corrections has little to do with the final decision made by the siblings regarding their father. But, it has everything to do with the characteristics of the adult siblings, and why that decision is ultimately so difficult. This is like real life, in gory detail...like reading about your friends, their secret lurchings, their unusual compunctions, and their sexual errors.There's 3 kids. Despite the same nuclear upbringing in a small Midwest town, each kid is radically different. They're all adults now and immersed in their lives, their 30's, their most productive years. They don't want ailing parents; they don't want this decision foisted on them; they don't want to convene and talk about this uncomfortable topic; they especially don't want to revisit the past, which is painful to them. This story, then, is told by each child and their parents, reminiscing in very long, seamless chapters, moving eloquently between present and past. It's funny, sad, gross, revealing, and probably biographical for most of us. Franzen's writing reminds me a lot of John Updike's, his awesome way of slicing mundane Americana, and graphically exposing--like a cut of shank meat--the pallid bone, the waxy gristle, the flaccid muscle, and the thin layer of skin with its hair, glands, wrinkles, and dead color.Oh, how we grow up and lose our innocence. I was a boy once, and loved Christmas in our cramped apartment. Of course, I didn't think it was cramped; and I didn't think we were struggling for money; and I didn't think our traditions would crystallize into personal habits that years hence would drive me nuts. I was a boy once, and respected my siblings and thought my dad was a hero. Of course, I didn't think my dad would ever routinely piss his pants and be so friggin' hard-headed that I'd rather chew bricks than hear his unrequested advice; and I didn't think my siblings would grow up and do THAT; and certainly there's things I've done that, revealed, would embarrass me beyond contact with the family. Yes, this is life, and Franzen has revealed it for us in highly readable prose.The key to this 4.5-star novel is its careful and authentic transcription of real life. Have you met these characters? The youngest boy is fired from a great university gig for having relations with a student, and spends the rest of his time barely solvent but chasing money wherever it pools. The middle sister is swept away from school in big city life, and bumps around in the food industry, eventually beginning an ill-conceived relationship and an ill-conceived business. The oldest boy, the martyr, the reluctant sibling leader, is sub-clinically depressed and is used like a pliable tool by his unfaithful wife and spoiled kids in their middle income exurb. The parents are stuck so deep in wagon-wheel ruts that their moods, manners and characteristics are predictable, routinized and lifeless. Each family member is explored in detail. Each person is handled judiciously. Each character acts realistically--albeit a bit zany at times for effect. Franzen investigates the riddle of family life and why we grow so far apart. And then, suddenly, dad has dementia, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's and we all have to come together again for tough decisions. And then, when we're together, it's all banana hands and left feet. We're retards in our parent's old home.Franzen's writing leans a little toward being hip or pop-cultured (and perhaps a bit oversexed, even scatological), but once you understand his rhythm, once you engage the hyper-descriptive and lengthy sentences, you're in for a ride. His narration is exquisite and his backstories are lurid and savory. The adult siblings are leading lives that are wholly believable (except the bit about Latvia, ostensibly done for humor). If you can't connect with these characters in some way, through some experience, then you've grown up in ways and in places I've never heard about--you've grown up in ways that are so foreign to me that I'm scared to know you. Franzen nails it, real life, again and again. Sure, there's a stretch here and an exaggeration there, but the bottom line to this story is that you can't run from your history, that life is made of floundering starts and failures, that you oughta give folks more space to be themselves, and that your parents will always love you (mostly because they don't know you).The Corrections won the National Book Award, and I hope it won hands-down. From a rather unknown writer, this is the Great American Novel, and then Franzen drops back into obscurity. I can't wait for his next book. But, I understand this kind of writing isn't churned out annually like that other crap you see people reading at the beach. This book hit the right note with me. I laughed, I cried, I hugged my kids, I spanked my wife, c'est la vie. I recommend it to all Updike fans.New words: styptic, cupric, toque, dhoti, ailanthus, plangent
What do You think about The Corrections (2002)?
“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.” The Lamberts are experiencing corrections. Not economic ones like the rest of the country, although money does underline everything they worry about. The whole family, in a myriad of ways, is each on the verge of their very own unique self-destruction. “THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle let down, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.” There may be big events that finally shove us forward, backwards or sideways, but in the aftermath most of us can find, with some self-evaluation, that the crash in our lives was preceded by a series of miniature inadvisable decisions. Sometimes we have to crash to correct.Alfred is the father, a Kansan, who believed in hard work and honest labor. He has always been moody, self-contained, in many ways... unknowable. At the age of 75 he has come down with Parkinson’s and is quickly becoming a burden, impossible to bear, for his wife Enid and his kids. He has trouble controlling his bowels and this manifests itself in an almost comic, if it weren’t so tragic, series of delusions of talking turds pursuing him relentlessly through the corridors of his own mind. He was an amateur chemist and made an important discovery that for unknowable reasons (it will be revealed later in the book) refuses to fight for his rights to be richly rewarded. It drives his oldest son Gary nuts.”Gary didn’t know which version of Alfred made him angrier: the spiteful old tyrant who’d made a brilliant discovery in the basement and cheated himself out of a fortune, or the clueless basement amateur who’d unwittingly replicated the work of real chemists, spent scarce family money to file and maintain a vaguely worded patent, and was now being tossed a scrap from the table…. Both versions incensed him.I admit there are several moments when I too felt the urge to strangle Alfred. He is from a generation and geography where a man makes decisions, and never feels the need to explain himself. He doesn’t care how angry or upset you are. Tears nor threats will move him to give you the reasons that led him to his decisions. Gary is an investment banker in Philadelphia. He has a beautiful wife named Caroline and three sons. He is fighting with his wife more regularly than normal, and she insists that he is clinically depressed. He believes, and is not just paranoid about this issue, that his wife is manipulating events behind his back, subtly turning his sons against him. She denies everything, concedes nothing. He finds her in pain from her back and realizes as angry as he is….”That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy--that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheeked and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her--only deepened his feeling of betrayal.”He has a haughty disdain for nearly everyone. He talks down to his mother. He is furious and almost unhinged with his father. He is dismissive of his siblings. His lust for his wife is inspired as much by his desire to try and control her as it is about physical contact. Her fights with him heightens all kinds of feelings of desire. He is almost snobbishly gleeful in his fidelity to her, but as he revels in his superiority there are also other issues knocking around in his head. ”It occurred to Gary, as the young estate planner leaned into him to let a raft of sweltering humanity leave the elevator, as she pressed her hennaed head against his ribs more intimately than seemed strictly necessary, that another reason he’d remained faithful to Caroline through twenty years of marriage was his steadily growing aversion to physical contact with other human beings. Certainly he was in love with fidelity; certainly he got an erotic kick out of adhering to principle; but somewhere between his brain and his balls a wire was also perhaps coming loose, because when he mentally undressed and violated this little redhaired girl his main thought was how stuffy and undisinfected he would find the site of his infidelity--a coliform-bacterial supply closet, a Courtyard Marriott with dried semen on the walls and bedspreads…. each site over warm and underventilated and suggestive of genital warts and chlamydia in its own unpleasant way--and what a struggle it would be to breath, how smothering her flesh, how squalid and foredoomed his efforts not to condescend…”So really he is faithful because it is unhygienic to cheat. Chip is the middle child, a teacher at a college when we first meet him. He involves himself with a student who pursued him relentless not so much out of sexual attractiveness, but that she needed his help on a paper for another class. Classic barter system; that unfortunately for Chip, is discovered. After he is fired he writes a breast obsessed first draft of a screenplay called The Academy Purple. It is really horrible. He loses yet another girlfriend, Julia who's boss decides that she needs to upgrade boyfriends. Julia has a husband from Lithuanian who needs someone with Chip’s skills. (???) With zero prospects in NY Chip decides to fly to Lithuania to help defraud American investors; greed can always be exploited. After cratering over the loss of his young college lover that left him snuffling his furniture for any residual essence of her nether regions, Chip is getting over lost girlfriends quicker helped by fantasy detours about a bartender he just met. ”If he couldn’t get Julia back, he wanted in the worst way to have sex with the bartender. Who looked about thirty-nine herself. He wanted to fill his hands with her smoky hair. He imagined that she lived in a rehabbed tenement on East Fifth, he imagined that she drank a beer at bedtime and slept in faded sleeveless tops and gym shorts, that her posture was weary, her navel unassumingly pierced, her pussy like a seasoned baseball glove, her toenails painted the plainest basic red. He wanted to feel her legs across his back, he wanted to hear the story of her forty-odd years.”Things don’t go well for Chip in Lithuania, but he was so damn close. ”He didn’t understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.”Denise is the youngest sibling, a successful chef who finds herself the main negotiator between her parents and her brothers. She has a history of being attracted to older men which probably has something to do with her uneasy relationship with her father. After her marriage to a colleague, twice her age, falls to pieces she is done with men and decides to try her luck with women.With mixed results. She gets an opportunity of a lifetime when she meets a young entrepreneur, a member of the recently wealthy who decides he wants to open a restaurant. He wants Denise to be his chef and he wants her in his bed. She resists, barely, intent on not letting sex destroy this opportunity for her. Kudos for trying to break a bad pattern. Good thinking...but sleeping with his wife nullifies all that careful arms length tango she carried out so well with the husband. ”Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking the pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.”The problem with Denise is she has a hard time resisting people who find her attractive. She enjoys the fact that older men really appreciate her shapely body. The sexual attraction that males and females have for her compels her forward in a relationship long past the time when any of it is still pleasurable for her. She loses everything for something she really didn’t want in the first place.I haven’t even gotten to the mother Enid. She is at that point in her life where she is ready to go do things and finds her husband ”moldering and devaluing” before her very eyes. He is an albatross around her neck; and yet, she still loves him. She desperately clings to the idea of the whole Lambert family coming together one more time in St. Jude for Christmas. If you are someone who likes to read books where you like the characters you might struggle with this book. I find that a lot of people who say they don’t like this book abandon it before completion. It is natural to want someone in a story that you can root for. As Jonathan Franzen unpacks these characters he exposes those things that are generally hidden beneath our clothes like a nasty wart near a nipple or cellulite on our butt cheeks. The type of flaws we would prefer to be seen in half-light, not the glaring brightness of daylight. I started out not liking any of these characters, their flaws were dominating their inherently good qualities, but as Franzen so deftly unspools more revelations I became more and more sympathetic. What we have to remember is that none of us knows someone’s whole history. We get pieces and sometimes those are the best pieces, and sometimes we only see someone at their worst moment. We never have the whole story that might make sense out of the senseless. We have a tendency to ignore our own flaws and castigate those same flaws in others. You might be starting to understand where I’m going with all this. These characters are human, maybe too human, but that could be because Jonathan Franzen may have wrote one of the most honest books you’ll ever read.
—Jeffrey Keeten
I enjoyed reading this book. It is one of those rare instances when I fully agree to all those blurbs written in the front and back covers of a book. No wonder that The Millions (Reader's Choice) voted this book as #1 novel of this decade (2000-2009) that is now about to end. It is also in the 501 Must Read Books, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Time 100, Oprah Selections and won the National Book Award. This book was published in 2001 at around the same time as when 9/11 happened. Since this book is about a dysfunctional (that needed "corrections") American family, each of the American readers - critics included - was probably able to see him/herself in at least one of the many characters of this book. Franzen wrote every page beautifully with all his characters well-developed that you could almost see them moving, talking and breathing. I had to hold my breath on its last few pages this morning as Franzen put the conclusion "The Corrections" closing the life story of Alfred (who refused to eat so he died) and Enid (who still sees hope despite being a new widow at the age of 75).There was a handful of other books that I got reminded of while reading this novel. The Prince of Tides by Frank Conroy is also about a dysfunctional family of 5 with 2 sons and a daughter. The way it tackled the history of a contemporary American family also reminded me of American Pastoral by Philip Roth. The subject of dementia reminded me of two novels I recently enjoyed: Herzog by Saul Bellow and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. Related to the last novel, I am always fascinated on how these (Franzen and Atwood) exceptional authors were able to write the thoughts of a demented person. Do they really have an idea on what is going on inside a crazy person's mind?When Franzen refused to show up for an Oprah interview (because his book was chosen), he explained that he did not want this book to be seen as "book that mothers read" or something like that. I agree. This is for everyone, including non-Americans (like me).One misleading small point is the picture of a child on the front cover of the book. He must have been Jonah who does not want to eat his vegetables. However, the picture seems to be in a Christmas table and I was sort of expecting that Jonah would be there in the last Christmas part. This book was collecting dust in my bookshelf but I picked it up as I thought it was about a child attending a Christmas dinner. Tricky picture, huh?Last point to admire: the many, many small characters during the cruise were made to speak all at the same time without confusing the reader. I saw this in some of Jose Javier Reyes' movies: 2 or more characters talking at the same time but you could still understand them as they are in different tone and decibels. It's a wonder that this could be put in a prose by Franzen. Brilliant...
—K.D. Absolutely
Reading this book a second time (the first being in August last year), I am happy to report that this time, I was able to leave the house and be a fully-functioning member of society (well, as much as I ever am) while in the midst of it. Yay for me! That's not to say this book didn't have as profound an effect on me the second time around; it did. It was just that I knew what to expect. The first time, I was so hooked that there was nothing else I wanted to do, other than read it. Food lost all taste; hobbies lost their lustre; colors muted...okay, possibly going too far, but seriously, it was so good it actually diminished my quality of life, in some paradoxical way. There wasn't anything I wanted to do but read it, yet it was like watching 500 pages of a multi-car collision occuring right in front of my eyes. I'd pick it up, read, get upset, put it down, stare at it for awhile, pick it up, read, etc. ad nauseum. (And I mean that literally - I once felt physically nauseous.)I hate when people ask you what a book's about. I hate it for many reasons, which include (but are not limited to):1. It seems like a really lazy way of getting a synopsis so that they can pretend that they've read it.2. If a book can be properly summed up in thirty seconds, nobody should be reading it anyway.3. Books worth reading are always about the things in life worth reading and writing about, namely: love, hate, truth, personal freedoms, battles, growth, change, continuity, friendship, betrayal, relationships, the moon, faith, hope, optimism, blindness, narcissism, and me. Not necessarily in that order. And there are more, but I got tired of thinking. Anyway, so any good book will be about some combination of these, and generally, the best books will be about all of 'em. So who needs to ask?That being said, the one achingly poignant truth of this novel was, for me, the fact that it realizes the deeply seated level of loneliness that pervades life in this country today. It's a rotten condition, and Franzen holds up the mirror to expose it in its stark nakedness.In short, it's the finest piece of contemporary literature I've ever read. And while my arsenal of contemporary fiction may not be as well-stocked as my classical, well, that's still saying something, i.m.h.o. And, on that note, I'll also add that probably the best thing that contemporary fiction has over classical - and that's why this book ranks number one for me - is that in classical fiction, the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' are generally clearly delineated. Jane Eyre is good; Blanche Ingram (Mr. Rochester's potential wife) is bad, etc. In contemporary fiction, the line between who's good and bad is blurred to reveal a much more realistic and satisfying portrayal of human virtue and vice. This novel is simply the best actualization of this modern rendering that I've come across. You'll hate, on multiple levels, every character in this novel. You'll also realize that you hate them all because you see yourself in every last one of them. In their awful decisions. In their betrayals. In their utter refusal to take the high (read: societally acceptable) road time and again, and yet, each time, foolishly believing that this time, THIS time, things will turn out differently. You'll hate them for it and you'll love them for it, just as you hate and love yourself for all the goddamn stupid things you do day in and day out.It's a masterpiece. Read it.
—Jordan
