Thanks, Chuntzy. I'm keen to read more Franzen now. Here is my review:

Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections exploded into life in 2001, garnering the National Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and a massive following. Franzen's invitation to appear on the Oprah show was famously rescinded when he expressed doubts about the merits of this honour, saying (quite reasonably, imo) that being embraced by Oprah might label the book as one for women. Imagine the UK equivalent - who amongst us wasn't in the past slightly put off by seeing a Richard and Judy sticker on a book, knowing the TV duo's choices were catapaulted into the mainstream and assuming, perhaps unfairly, that the book must be populist bordering on pulpy?

But The Corrections is one of those bestselling books that subverts the notion that mass appeal equates with trash. It is impeccably written in a way that makes you shake your head with disbelief at Franzen's smartness, and is simultaneously hilarious and tragic.

The novel is based around the Lambert family who hail from St Judes in the US and who, from a distance, look like an ideal unit. It is only up close that the cracks and fissures of a dysfunctional family show up. Alfred is in the clutches of Parkinson's disease, with its life-sapping features of tremor and slowness of movement. The medicines he takes make him hallucinate, and his mental faculties may also be dwindling. His wife, Enid, is his long-suffering carer, but the reader's sympathy for her is diluted by her grasping materialism and miserliness.

Alfred and Enid have three children - Gary, 43, is vice-president at CenTrust Bank. He is worn down by his beautiful wife Caroline who manipulates his two older sons into seeing him as a bullying ogre when in fact it is Caroline who abuses Gary's good nature. His younger son, Jonah, is a gorgeous creation, all childish wonder and innocent enthusiasm; call me a heaving mass of oestrogen but I longed to lift him from the page and cuddle him.

Chip, 39 years, is Alfred and Enid's middle child. He is an unfortunate type, wandering into ill-thought-out schemes and affairs, choosing immediate gratification with all its inherent problems instead of long-term planning. He has high hopes for a screenplay he's written, despite the ominous warning signs of its direness.

Denise is the youngest child at 32. She works as an executive chef in Philadelphia and her private life is a mess.

From the start, it's obvious that Franzen is one of these corruscating talents who marries a scythe-sharp intellect with the irreverence and wit characteristic of the new wave of writers emerging since the early '80s. He is as clever and funny as David Foster Wallace but without the latter's endearing neuroticism; as slouchily smart as Martin Amis without Amis's occasional forays into smug self parody; as insightful as Updike but more casual. Franzen's language is assured and confident; he coins neologisms and sees ordinary things in a way that makes you wonder why no one else has come up with those terms - Enid's careful stash of pennies-off coupons is 'an anxiety' of coupons, a well-trodden airport linoleum carries 'a confusion' of tread patterns, a glaring airport light is 'the color of car sickness'.

I started off by noting particularly hilarious sections but soon gave up as it would involve mentioning almost every page of this 650+ page novel. Suffice to say that, with almost uncanny insight and a marvelous eye for satire, Franzen conjures up the petty wars and seething rages, the inane comments that drive one to jaw-clenching fury, the pointed digs and elaborate boasts, of an off-kelter family microcosm. Here is one wince-inducing section of many hundred in which the wittering Enid shows what she values most:

' Enid said 'I ran into your old friend Dean Driblett at the bank the other day'...

'Dean Driblett was a classmate, not a friend,' Chip said.

'He and his wife just had their fourth child. I told you, didn't I, they built that ENORMOUS house out in Paradise Valley - Al, didn't you count eight bedrooms?'

Alfred gave her a steady, unblinking look. Chip leaned on the door close button.

'Dad and I were at the housewarming in June,' Enid said. 'It was spectacular. They'd had it catered, and they had PYRAMIDS of shrimp. It was solid shrimp, in pyramids. I've never seen anything like it.'

'Pyramids of shrimp,' Chip said. The elevator door had finally closed.

'Anyway, it's a beautiful house,' Enid said. 'There are at least six bedrooms, and you know, it looks like they're going to fill them. Dean's tremendously successful. He started the lawn care business when he decided the mortuary business wasn't for him, well, you know, Dale Driblett's his stepdad, you know, the Driblett Chapel, and now his billboards are everywhere and he's started an HMO. I saw in the paper where it's the fastest-growing HMO in St Jude, it's called DeeDeeCare, same as the lawn care business, and there are billboards for the HMO now, too. He's quite the enterpreneur, I'd say.'

'Slo-o-o-o-w elevator,' Alfred said.

'This is a pre-war building,' Chip explained in a tight voice. 'An extremely desirable building.'

'But you know what he told me he's doing for his mother's birthday? It's still a surprise for her, but I can tell you. He's taking her to Paris for eight days. Two first-class tickets, eight nights at the Ritz! That's the kind of person Dean is, very family-oriented. But can you believe that kind of birthday present? Al, didn't you say the house alone probably cost a million dollars? Al?' '



Of course it's not all laughs - Alfred's deteriorating condition and his despair at his failing body provide the tragedy to balance the comedy. Franzen is particularly strong on painting the poignant decline of this once powerful man from the patriarchial head of the family to infirmity. And the sorrowful waste of opportunities for happiness in Alfred and Enid's marriage is masterfully described, Enid loving Alfred physically but not understanding him; Alfred longing for female comfort but not receiving it from his wife and therefore withdrawing into himself. Chances of fulfillment lost, happiness eluded.

The family relationships are evoked beautifully - as is the way with many daughters, Denise loves her father unfalteringly and feels less for her mother, and her brothers tend to the opposite.

There is a large cast of vividly-evoked supporting characters, many beautifully drole. The mealtimes on the cruise that Enid and Alfred take are a particular joy, with a pedantic and dull Norweigan couple holding forth and being yawned down by a dry Swedish man married to a knock-out woman.

This is a stunning novel, one of a very few books I've awarded five stars to this year, and an apt choice with which to while away the enforced tedium of the festive season.

__________________
a few NME articles/blog Sex and Stravinsky - Barbara Trapido (current)

I feel the need to redress the balance on this book, so here's what I posted on amazon.co.uk in February 2005:


It did find me shaking my head, Leyla, but at Franzen's sheer verbosity rather than at anything it occurred to me to consider as "smartness"...

I found some interesting points in his collection of essays rather pompously entitled How To Be Alone. (No, let's make that "very pompously"...)

But, again, it's very uneven writing in my opinion.

And, despite what someone from Harpers & Queen sticks his/her neck out to say on the back cover of my edition, Franzen is emphatically **NOT** Franzen doesn't play in the same league, and nor is he up from promotion, as far as I can see... Montaigne, in the area of the essay, is on a par with Shakespeare for poetry and drama, and you can spend a lifetime going back to him.

Franzen is not Montaigne, nor will he ever come close.

__________________
Currently reading: Will Self, Dr Mukti & Other Tales of Woe

Reading 2010

I'm surprised, JfP. I thought the more intellectual parts were very well thought out and always made sense to me. The quote you mention, 'His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery' conjured up a striking image of a spent man with his weary eyes glassily fixed on a point so far in the distance that it could be seen as the 'vanishing point'; the use of the words and the term 'perspectival regression' evoked a powerful sense of geometry and art for me. It all depends on the reader of course but at the time I read it it seemed a potent way of expressing Alfred's dead-eyed gaze. On further reflection now, the words make me think of the straight, practically parallel but in reality infinitesimally converging lines of sight from two eyes meeting at a point way, way ahead, almost in infinity, and perhaps brings to mind De Chirico paintings with their uneasy geometry and warped sense of perspective, their unsettling sense of something being very wrong or on the brink of going very wrong. This secondary thought strays from the image of Alfred's hollow, vacant stare, but still evokes an unhappy atmosphere, so I don't think any of Franzen's words in that phrase (or elsewhere) are unnecessary.
Similarly the word-play element such as the 'vastly ghastly plaid sofa' which you quote is something I find quite stimulating as long as it doesn't overwhelm the whole by becoming too frequent or strained, which I don't think it did here. Many writers I admire have their stylistic quirks and tics; I thought Franzen kept this playfulness to a minimum.
I wasn't aware of any vocabulary that made me think of Roget's thesaurus, nothing seemed forced in that way to me. And that's something I'm quite aware of usually, having felt slightly miffed by the use of 'ziggurats' in the Powers book I'm reading just now :-)

As for the many topics which crop up, the ones you mention are 'the post-Communist eastern bloc, stocks and shares, designer restaurants, designer drugs, designer lesbianism'. I thought the parts set in Lithuania were alternately funny and disturbing, but it all struck true going by my own recollections of eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin wall. I thought it took immense talent to make corruption so funny, and yet Franzen didn't belittle the violence that went on in those countries. To be fair to Franzen I don't think he dallied much in the worlds of designer restaurants and designer drugs - yes, perhaps some of those in-depth descriptions of menus Denise was cooking were superfluous, but they added to the atmosphere of her pressured professional life. The drugs part though was minimal - there was none of the young NY crowd showing-off about drugs that were found in some US writers' books in the '80s and '90s, there was just the fact that a character used some tablets and some information later about their provenance.
The least convincing part of the book for me was about Denise's love life exploits. I didn't mention them in my review because I didn't want to have to include spoilers, but I thought her predatory pursual of the objects of her lust wasn't in character with the caring, kind woman we'd seen in Chip's flat who was so decent to her parents. And perhaps the 'flipping' was unlikely, and some of the overpowering lust for , but then, people's private lives are often a source of surprise.
I'd put it on your TBRR pile, JfP!

__________________
a few NME articles/blog Sex and Stravinsky - Barbara Trapido (current)

jfp, as much as I disagreed with you just on "The Poisonwood Bible, I totally agree with you on this one.

__________________
Nomade auf vier Kontinenten. Auf den Spuren von Sir Richard Francis Burton (German non-fiction back-ground information to the book "The Collector of Worlds") - Ilija Trojanow - 2006
Book List 2010
Film List 2009

I agree with Mad Dog and Glory (amazing name - where does it come from?) This is a great book. I read it 3 or 4 years ago and can still remember incidents in it. It is probably one of those books that needs to be read continuously, ie on holiday or, if you are able to, over a weekend. It had far more resonance for me than Roth or Updike. But unlike them, Franzen seems to be a one book author. I recommend it to those who is interested in psychology, family dynamics, and American angst.

I'm glad you loved it too, virginia123. Have you read any of his other work? I'm quite keen to explore him further - he has such a keen intellect and sharp wit that I would be disappointed if it didn't come through in his other writing.

__________________
a few NME articles/blog Sex and Stravinsky - Barbara Trapido (current)

I once read an essay of his, possibly in the Guardian review section, about the importance and value of fiction. It was one of the best things I have ever read on the subject, both erudite and sensitive ( I keep trying to collect such articles as my cousin has no time for fiction but I know she is pretty well a lost cause). Now, where did I put the article...?

__________________
Currently Reading Liars and Saints Maile Meloy

Thanks for that, brightphoebus. Maybe it will come up on googling his name. I'll give it a go tomorrow.

Edit - I mean later today - how mad to be trawling bgo at 01.49am.
PS Just noticed the times above the posts are an hour out. Feel better to have only wasted until 12.49 am on the net.

__________________
a few NME articles/blog Sex and Stravinsky - Barbara Trapido (current)

As far as I know it's a movie with Robert De Niro and Bill Murray.

__________________
Nomade auf vier Kontinenten. Auf den Spuren von Sir Richard Francis Burton (German non-fiction back-ground information to the book "The Collector of Worlds") - Ilija Trojanow - 2006
Book List 2010
Film List 2009