Skillfully conceived, adeptly written

Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’ is a skillfully conceived and adeptly written novel about a family, the Lambert’s, who are navigating the new realities of modern society with mixed success. The patriarch and the matriarch, Alfred and Enid, still live in St. Jude in the home where they raised their three children. Alfred, who is a retired railroad executive, suffers from depression and battles the onset of Parkinson’s disease, while Enid perpetually competes with the Jones’. The Lambert’s oldest son, Gary, lives in Philadelphia with his manipulative wife, Caroline, and their three sons. Like his father, Gary denies that he may suffer from depression. The middle child, Chip, is a disgraced college professor who lost both his job and his chance at tenure by willingly allowing himself to be involved with (and manipulated by) a precocious female student. Emotionally bankrupt and having no place else to go, Chip agrees to travel with Gitanas, the husband of his recent former girlfriend, to Lithuania and create an Internet business to defraud American investors. Finally, Denise an accomplished chef in a trendy Philadelphia restaurant and a part-time lesbian, is beautiful but has no moral compass.

The superb prose is no better illustrated than during the extended metaphor Franzen uses to allow Denise to compare her romantic experiences with her ex-husband, Emile, with those of her same-sex lover, Robin. With Emile, Denise thinks, “The last thing she wanted late at night was to follow a complicated and increasingly time-consuming recipe for a dish she was too tired to enjoy. Prep time was fifteen minutes. Even after that, the cooking was seldom straightforward. The pan over-heated, the heat was too high, the heat was too low, the onions refused to caramelize or burned immediately and stuck; you had to set it aside to cool off, you had to start over after painful discussion with the now angry and anguished sous-chef…” Conversely, continues Denise’s stream-of-consciousness, “Robin was prêt-a-mange. You didn’t need a recipe, you didn’t need prep, to eat a peach. Here was the peach, boom, here was the payoff.”

The title is a multifaceted play on words that relates to themes and ideas in the parallel story lines. For Chip, the corrections are literally his belief that his screen play immediately requires changes. (Chip’s girlfriend, Julia, gives Chip that idea when, after she reads the screen play, she dumps him.) For Alfred, corrections to his deteriorating mental state may be possible through a phase-II testing drug being manufactured by a biotech firm that bought a patent that Alfred himself developed in his basement many years earlier. The idea of corrections permeates in some way each of the main characters’ lives, some of the secondary characters’ lives, and throughout the entire story as well.

The stories build to a climax when, after a great deal of emotional blackmail from Enid, the family, sans significant others, convene for Christmas at the Lambert ancestral home in St. Jude for one last time before the train in Alfred’s mind leaves the station for the last time. The event is not exactly what Enid had anticipated, but does provide a reasonable resolution, a somewhat happy ending, and even more corrections. In this reviewer’s opinion, corrections are, if not synonymous with, are certainly a close relative to rationalizations.

While the pages in ‘The Corrections’ turn very easily, the reader detects an undercurrent of cynicism, which is just a bit disconcerting. While the reading is technically superb and the story is rock-solid, the tone may be suggestive of the author’s arrogance, aloofness, or superiority to traditional family values…but THAT is part the story. To base one’s dislike of this literarily sound novel on the author’s contemptuous opinion of what family life in the Midwest may be is akin to panning the film ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ because it was written in the context of prostitution. In spite of cynicism may be disagreeable to some readers, that component of the setting does not make ‘The Corrections’ any less interesting or the prose any less inspired.