A Family Portrait As
Metaphor For the 90's
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Jonathan Franzen
THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen, 568 pages. Farrar, Straus &
Giroux. $26.
Jonathan Franzen's two
earlier novels, ''The Twenty-Seventh City'' (1988) and ''Strong Motion''
(1992), were messy and wildly ambitious epics, crammed to overflowing with
cautionary political plots and tendentious asides meant to add up to a
dyspeptic portrait of America in the 1980's. Buried beneath the Pynchonian
pyrotechnics and Sinclair Lewisesque satire, however, were intimate family
dramas that grounded the characters in a recognizable emotional reality and
provided an Updikean portrait of the vagaries of domestic life.
In his new novel, ''The
Corrections,'' Mr. Franzen has brought a family and its problems center stage
to try to write a sort of American ''Buddenbrooks.'' In doing so he has
harnessed his penchant for social criticism and subordinated it to his natural
storytelling instincts, while at the same time, shucking off the influence of
other writers to find an idiosyncratic voice of his own. Though often
self-indulgent and long-winded, the novel leaves the reader with both a
devastating family portrait and a harrowing portrait of America in the late
1990's -- an America deep in the grip of that decade's money madness and sick
with envy, resentment, greed, acquisitiveness and self-delusion, an America
committed to the quick-fix solution and determined to try to medicate its
problems away.
The Midwestern suburb of
St. Jude where the Lambert family resides bears more than a passing resemblance
to Lumberton, the supposedly idyllic suburb depicted in the opening scenes of
David Lynch's movie ''Blue Velvet.'' St. Jude, as Enid Lambert likes to think,
is inhabited by nice people with nice children; her world ''was like a lawn in
which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out: a miracle of
niceness.''
But life for the Lamberts
is far from nice or perfect. Alfred, the paterfamilias and a retired railroad
executive, is suffering from Parkinson's disease, dementia and depression, and
Enid spends her days trying to stem the gathering disorder in their lives. In
her spare time she complains vociferously about Alfred to her children and
endlessly nags him to make more of an effort -- pleas that are met only with
further resistance. This sorry state of affairs is not simply a function of
Alfred's illness. In flashbacks we learn that even in the prime of life Alfred
was a secretive and emotionally reticent man, ill-suited to the chirpy,
socially ambitious Enid. The Lambert children have all moved East to escape
their parents' suffocating marriage and the narrow, faintly bigoted ethos of
St. Jude, but all three are just as unhappy -- and unpleasant -- as their
progenitors. Chip, a former professor who was fired for sexual harassment, is a
brooding disciple of Foucault and Marx, a would-be social critic who likes to
rant about ''a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity'' but who
spends all his free time pursuing women and maxing out his Visa card on fine
wines.
His sister, Denise, is a
judgmental and wildly competitive hipster, who works as the chef at a trendy
new Philadelphia restaurant until she gets herself fired by having affairs with
both her boss and her boss's wife. Their older brother, Gary, a vice president
of a Philadelphia bank, is a snobbish and bossy yuppie, trapped in a nightmare
marriage and given to attacks of paranoia and depression that cause him to lash
out at everyone around him.
In his portraits of the
Lamberts, Mr. Franzen exercises his copious talents for satire, coolly
excavating their vanities, hypocrisy and self-deceptions. There is a hilarious
scene in which Chip, hard up for cash, tries to steal a paper-wrapped fillet of
Norwegian salmon from a designer food boutique by stuffing it down his pants,
and some equally antic scenes set in Lithuania, where Chip has gone to set up a
Web site for a local politician bent on defrauding American investors by
offering them perks like ''pro rata mineral rights and logging rights to all
national parklands'' and '' 'no-questions-asked' access to wiretaps and other
state-security apparatus.''
While he is eviscerating
the Lamberts' pretensions -- and by extension, the culture they represent --
Mr. Franzen also manages to make palpable the familial geometry of their
problems. Gary's anxieties, we realize, mirror those of his father, while
Denise's social ambitions echo her mother's cravings for status. Chip's
alienation recalls Enid's sense of estrangement from neighbors and friends,
while Gary's entire existence had been ''set up as a correction of his father's
life.''
Clearly Mr. Franzen's novel
would have benefited enormously from a strict editing job. There are lengthy
digressions about Lambert friends and acquaintances, which serve no purpose but
to provide the author with a wider array of social types to send up; and there
are passages where the omniscient narrator's voice gratuitously intrudes to
tell us exactly what we are witnessing. An air of self-importance hovers over
some of the novel's more melodramatic scenes, and the unsavory antics of the
Lamberts often exude a self-conscious whiff of sociological import.
All in all, however, ''The
Corrections'' remains a remarkably poised performance, the narrative held
together by myriad meticulously observed details and tiny leitmotifs that
create a mosaiclike picture of America in the waning years of the 20th century.
And while the story line is propelled by several suspenseful questions --
whether Alfred's patent for a metallurgical discovery will pay off, whether
Chip will escape from Lithuanian thugs, whether the shotgun in the Lamberts'
basement will be put to use -- the real tension in ''The Corrections'' stems
from the characters' emotional dramas, rather than from the sort of contrived
plot points found in the author's earlier novels.
By turns funny and
corrosive, portentous and affecting, ''The Corrections'' not only shows us two
generations of an American family struggling to make sense of their lives, but
also cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way toward the
millennium.
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