The Corrections

Wow, The Corrections. I’m not a great rereader; this is maybe the book I’ve read the most times. (The Bluest Eye is also in contention, as are probably some since-decanonized Star Wars novels.) And, weirdly, it’s a book I’ve read so many times that now, on this latest and ostensibly most reflective or analytical read, I find I don’t have as much to say as I’d like. It’s just: The Corrections, a book I know pretty well, by Franzen, a guy I’ve read a lot of, and it’s awfully good, and it works the way that it works. Still, the job here is to say something a little more interesting than ‘I like this book,’ and so:

I think from the very beginning you can read Franzen’s career as interested in a moral rehabilitation of the white (especially midwestern, especially protestant) suburbs. I really mean rehabilitation: it is notably not a defense of those suburbs. They’re always a topic, but the idea’s never that they’re just plainly and obviously good—instead the suburbs are the site of a kind of exegetical or hermeneutic or redemptive project. Franzen knows right from the beginning (you see it very clearly in Twenty-Seventh City, and most tenderly in The Corrections) that there’s some really lethal stuff moving around those ‘houses with no mortgage.’ He’s not telling us they’re all that great! But he does see them, I think (and maybe in ways that have been annoyingly manifested in recent presidential politics) as critical determinants in the y2k-period American project—if the suburbs are just lethal then we’re really quite fucked.

So Franzen sets out to find out what it would take for them to be something other than lethal—for those dads to be heroes, for those twerpy little sons to be graceful and generous, for the real positive ‘values’ of the suburb, thrift and care and community, to gain some kind of upper hand over the vices of censoriousness and shame and reaction. For what’s good in Enid and Alfred to be able to triumph over not only what’s bad in Enid and Alfred, but also over fucking Chuck and Bea Meisner: rehabilitation. How would we have to think, what would we have to see in, the suburbs in order to make them a place from which grace could ensue? This is not the plot of The Corrections, but you could get pretty close to the plot of The Corrections by starting with that question and trying to make some mannequins that’d perform it. Freedom and Crossroads (the other good ones) are substantially the same story—the big innovation in his stuff, the thing that moves him out of writing bad novels and into good ones, is the realization that things threatening the suburbs don’t come from elsewhere (S. Jammu, Sweeting-Aldren) but from the suburbs themselves (from dad!), and so that the rehabilitation of the suburbs isn’t about relating to or defeating an enemy but about self-overcoming.

[Purity’s kind of an exception here; Purity’s also the least successful of the novels After He Figured It Out. I think he decided to go back and take one more shot at the Pynchon plotting from SM and 27c, see if it could work with the more mature and loving approach to character, and I think, well, it turned out that kind of plot is just not where this writer’s talents shine brightest. I think he is not going to try another Purity.]

And so: a novel called The Corrections. Substantially it is about people correcting themselvess. Everyone starts out insisting on some (Berlantian?) false premises in their own lives, everyone has a series of challenging experiences connected loosely to Alfred and Enid’s Fall Colors Cruise, and everyone’s kind of forced, in the end, to get over some things about themselves and live a little differently. Chip’s got to stop taking himself and his writing so seriously/denominating his life in terms of sexual achievement w/especially young women, Denise has got to relate more honestly to her queerness, Gary’s got to admit he’s (1) depressed and (2) can’t actually oblige anyone to come to St. Jude for Christmas, Enid’s got to drop her absurd pride and insistence on forcing everyone else to substantiate that pride. Alfred’s got to accept love even as it means being vulnerable: The Corrections.

The process of Correction seems to be interior, but this is a comic dramatized novel and so: the urgency of correction has got to come from the exterior. And so the novel is built around long sections, each of which often focalize a particular Lambert and the experience that culminates in their access to correction. Chip’s first—a literary theorist fired after a pretty dumb student affair, now living on borrowed money and the hope a screenplay will get picked up. All of this—and here’s the technical thing—gets played out on one day in Manhattan, when (I’m sure I’m leaving things out):

>His girlfriend (who’s also a key part of his screenplay-reading network) breaks up with him

>His parents and sister arrive to visit

>He’s increasingly aware his screenplay’s not any good.

>He finds his ~agent’s daughter drawing on the pages of the screenplay

>He’s offered, finally, a job by his now-ex-girlfriend’s husband, who figures out Chip was dating the now-ex-girlfriend

There’s plenty (really, plenty) of other present-tense events, but something that stands out about the section—and about the like Franzenian section as a general question—is how deftly the present tense, this day of comic reckoning and catastrophe, is interwoven with accounts of the developments that led Chip to this particular series of catastrophes and precarities. This interweaving is in a technical sense backstory, but it doesn’t feel like backstory, largely because Franzen dramatizes almost all of it—the scenes with Melissa and (memorably) at the supermarket etc have just as much reality in them as any of the Big Bad Day stuff is given. So one of the dramatic achievements here—and I think of this too as pretty Franzen-characteristic—is that these long chapters render (very successfully, for me) both the past and the present catastrophes as part of the same accumulation of pressure, the same dramatic exigency happening right here in the present. Today’s a hard day, a day when we’re running into the incommensurability of our self-image with the material facts of our lives—when we’ll be forced to realize that we are wrong, depressed, queer, overindexed on control, etc—but it’s not just today that expresses that, it’s instead a long today, a today that’s been building and developing and hurtling toward us for months. The alarm in the house in St. Jude has been ringing for years; the alarms in the lives of the children have, too, been ringing for some time. Today is a crisis, but the book shows us how it’s possible to love these crises: for in the crisis there is permission at last to hear the alarm, and to make corrections.

Most of the sections in the book follow this pattern—Denise and Chip get parallel sections, as do the parents (as a unit), and then there’re the roving group accounts at the end and the brief St. Jude intro. At the book’s very heart, though, is a luminous 30 page passage, one of my favorites in literature, again from the far past but given the dramatic weight of the real present present—a dinner from the children’s childhood, Denise unborn and Gary a little annoying and Chip a victim, Alfred repressed and Enid wielding little self-justifying violences, in which we’re able to see playing out as drama many of the characteristic issues the characters are going to have today.

*

The making of the correction turns out, in most cases, to involve a bit of overcoming—as Franzen asks from the suburbs. That these corrections seem by the end of the novel to be mostly successful puts the book—maybe oddly—in the tradition of optimistic novels, and in particular downstream of Middlemarch, which is also a novel about people having to surrender some conceptions of themselves in order to find some things they actually (or, yknow, kinda-sorta actually) want. That in turn runs back to Austen, and from thence, sort of obliquely, to Pamela: we’re right in the mainstream of a particular model of the novel.

Which, again, I think that Franzen executes really nicely—part of the way the text mirrors the characters’ actions is that the text too is engaged in a long process of discovering a surpassing love for its characters. It’s always there, I think—even the openings with Chip and Gary wouldn’t work if the text didn’t deeply adore the guys—but as a dramatic effect everyone’s self-overcoming, even Enid and Alfred’s, is related to the text’s discovery of what’s really best about them. That Enid really does love everyone, that Alfred kept Denise’s secret at great personal cost even though it must have activated all his shames and complications really perfectly. For his silence and suppression to, in the end, look a little heroic.

Odd, though, that this novel-of-optimism is in most of the cases I’ve mentioned an English novel. The American ones, or at least the ones I’ve read on this list,  and I think we could say canonized American novels a little more generally, are very often decline-and-fall novels. Things do not tend to go so great: Moby Dick; Portrait of a Lady, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, Invisible Man, The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved. Denver does head to college! But these are not, as a group, books about people getting things right, or overcoming themselves—they are books about people who get overcome, people for whom personal or institutional history or historical forces are just too fucking much, and they can’t cope, they break down, they hold their attachments so dear they crack up around them.

Give Franzen the credit of saying: here and in his work generally there is a dialectical relationship to this trajectory in the American novel. I think it is important here to locate Franzen as a Gen-X novelist, and in particular as a novelist of the Clinton-Bush period—Corrections is drafted after some people had announced the end of history, at a point where it really maybe did look like the American suburb was a terminal form for human development. On the one hand: an easy time to access some of this optimism, some of this sense of human and social fixability, the problems of history a little sillier and a little more earnestly overcomable than they’d sometimes seemed—the Lamberts aren’t really that poor. On the other hand: a time when the moral rehabilitation of that scene may have seemed unusually urgent, too, because if this was the terminal historical form then gosh hadn’t we better hope it can produce goodness? Or grace? Or kindness or tenderness? Despite all the Meisners and Armours, and despite the ways it indulges or encourages our own harmful fragility? (Connected also, I think, to Franzen’s notorious techno-skepticism, a little in evidence here—for if you find that project both possible and essential it could seem that only the digital threatened the little green shoots of decency coming up beneath those red oaks and pin oaks.)

So, yes, Franzen really does think it’s possible: for the suburbs to be good. Thinks this despite knowing better than most what kind of subject the suburb produces. And believes in it almost desperately; has written these gorgeous novels to convince us of his vision. It’s an irony of his career that he’s done so at a time when the suburbs—as a political unit, with just a ton of Alfred and Gary (the only other enthusiastic suburbanite in the novel) Lamberts involved—have vacillated between endorsing palliative liberalism and real actual protoauthoritarianism in the United States, seeming at times to be, in ways a Franzen character precisely wouldn’t, attached mostly and lethally to the suburbs as a form themselves. Which: Franzen is attached to them, too—but in the way we get attached to toxic partners. He thinks he can fix them. He might not be entirely wrong—the books are really very good. But it is not so clear the suburbs have been listening. In a lot of those recliners, beside a lot of those issues of good housekeeping, people are not reading novels: they are watching Fox News.