Modern Families

THE CORRECTIONS

By Jonathan Franzen.

568 pp. Farrar Straus Giroux. $26.

Jonathan Franzen paints a searing portrait of American family life across geographies and generations in his third novel, The Corrections. Superficially, the novel concerns the mother of three adult children, Enid Lambert, convincing her wayward offspring to return home to a Midwestern suburb (ironically named St. Jude) for one last family Christmas. But amidst the long-distance arguments and transatlantic passive-aggressiveness, multifaceted and intimate characters, all contending with their own fears and insecurities, slowly begin to take form; Franzen uses the sympathy that these characters evoke to pull his readers deeper into the issues at hand. Time and again, Franzen returns to one central question: what does it mean to be a family in America's consumption- and competition-crazed society?

The first thing one notices when reading—and continues to notice throughout the novel—is Franzen's masterful descriptions. From food—"Wagnerian slabs of Sauerbraten, softballs of Semmelknodel, alps of Schlag"—to facial expressions—"there was a pinch in her brow, a groove of distress around her mouth"—Franzen's imagery can often feel more vivid than reality. His scintillating wit shines through slightly less frequently, but this makes those moments all the more amusing: "She wanted to get an egg timer and see how long this marriage would last;" "He was kneeling and sniffing the plush of his chaise longue minutely, inch by inch, in hopes that some bodily fluids might still be lingering eight weeks after his girlfriend had lain here." Though sometimes he shows off his too-broad vocabulary—"gerontocratic," "altazimuth," or "riparian," for example—they distract only occasionally from what is overall a very well-written story.

The novel is divided into five broad chapters and bookended by a short prologue and epilogue; each chapter contains multiple winding flashbacks that shed a little more light on the question of how these characters turned out the way they did. Perhaps because the novel is about a family, and because each character and his or her problems are explored with such depth, there is no clear protagonist. But the novel is not any worse for it—the fact that Franzen mercilessly rains down judgments on all of his characters only make them more captivating.

At the head of the family stands Alfred, the septuagenarian patriarch crippled by the obsolescence of his values and his body; through his perspective, Franzen reveals the depth and breadth of the social rot that pervades America. In a conversation about the local transportation museum, Alfred criticizes the "romanticization" of steam locomotives and fumes that people "thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then bellyached if a train was slow. […] He despised the museum and its goers for everything they didn't know." Goers such as, it is worth noting, his children and grandchildren. Later, the Midland Pacific company, the railroad to which Alfred dedicates his career, is bought up by two venture capitalists. The pair promptly "rip down wires, smash signal boxes, and coil up anything copper. […] Five years after the takeover, the rails were still in place, the right-of-way undisposed of. Only the copper nervous system, in the ruthless pursuit of profit, had been dismantled." All this is followed by a characterization of Alfred's and Enid's bed as the "museum of antique transports." Despite the heavy-handed allusion (this one is not the first: just look to the first ten pages, which are devoted to "alarm bells of anxiety" echoing through Midwestern suburbia), Franzen perfectly captures Alfred's dread of the impending era: people blindly hearkening for the past while ignoring aspects they don't like; profiteers eviscerating well-run, useful railroads to sell its material assets and to eliminate competition; piety and prudence being cast aside as "antiques." No symbol, however, is at once compelling, funny, or tragic as the hallucinations brought on by his Parkinson's. In progressively intense experiences through the novel, Alfred sees a turd that mocks his traditions, values, and deteriorating body: to him, his world is literally filling up with feces.

On the other hand, through Enid, who is steeped in nostalgia, Franzen demonstrates how pernicious a blind devotion to tradition can be. By and large, Enid has had an unremarkable, perhaps even constrictive, life: she grew up cooking and cleaning at her mother's boardinghouse, and then for fifty years she cooks and cleans for her emotionally stunted, workaholic husband. In that time, her only aspiration was to raise well-adjusted children with strong family values; this tunnel vision leads to one ultimate goal in her final years: bring (that is to say, pressure and coerce) her children home for Christmas. Gary, the elder son, arrives only to see his nitpicky mother and ailing father; blaming his mother for the separation from his family during the holiday season, he storms from the house on Christmas morning. Denise, the baby sister, accepts the invitation to please her mother but betrays her displeasure in curt exchanges:

[Denise:] "I can only come for a few days."

[Enid:] "You can't take a week?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Mother."

And one cannot forget Chip, who finds the prospect of St. Jude so off-putting that he accepts an offer to work for the Lithuanian government, an offer that was given to him hours after his mother's proposed pilgrimage to the Midwest. No one save Enid, it seems, cares much for tradition.

Which isn't to say that Alfred is some virtuous stalwart of American values or that Enid is the Wicked Witch of the (Mid)West. Alfred was so guarded about his feelings that Gary reminds himself that he's "nothing like his father" to calm himself in moments of paternal distress; Enid, under all of her nagging and Christmastide giddiness, is a simple suburban grandma who wants to see her kids in the home she raised them in.

Franzen spends much of the novel's nearly six hundred pages touching upon contemporary social issues in America: government surveillance, the death penalty, advertisements, Eastern European nations, "medical" supplements for everything from psychological disorders to neurodegenerative diseases. These topics are worked into the plotline in snippets and asides which reward the careful reader with a moment of "aha" joy, and the novel is better off for them. However, the essence of The Corrections is an examination of the paradigmatic shift of culture from the conservative values of Baby Boomers to the newer, urbanized generation, with all of the globetrotting and heterodox sex that it entails. By turns poignant and lighthearted, political and emotional, Franzen weaves a supremely entertaining narrative and compels us to ruminate on the big questions—how should we confront changing social dynamics? different opinions? the unknown? By the end, Franzen leaves us aching for more—more of his wit, more of his sarcasm, more of his deeply human insights. And that is all that can be expected of any excellent novel.

[Written 2017; lightly revised 2022]

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