The Corrections

I picked up John Franzen's The Corrections at my aunt's house, after throwing (metaphorically, of course) her copy of Sparks' The Notebook across the room in disgust (Note to Mr. Sparks: There are sentence structures in English other than S-V-O; please use some.) . I didn't know anything about the book except that it (or rather, he) had cause the Great Oprah Book Club Kerfuffle a couple of years ago--this information was sufficient to catch my interest. The shiny gold seal on the cover informed me that the book had won the National Book Award; this, however, was not enough to turn me away from the fascinating allure of the Book that Killed Oprah's Book Club. But I was expecting something rather more self-indulgent than what I found. Oprah, though I think she has generally good taste in literature, has a streak toward the overly-sentimental, while judges of literature awards tend toward the overly-pretentious: the approval of both these arbiters of American culture means either very high quality writing or absolutely nauseating shit. Being a practical optimist, I hoped for the former, but expected the latter. I had only read a bit of the beginning (to where Chip begins to think that an affair with his student is a good idea) before the trip to my Aunt's was over, so I took the book home and set it on my shelf for about a month while I was doing other things. When I picked it up again, I read the rest through in two days.

I was wonderfully surprised by Corrections--I'm not much for modern* lit and I certainly wouldn't have picked it blind off a bookstore shelf. But there is something very strong about the book--a steel core that supports the carousel of characters and viewpoints and the occasional digressions of style as they rotate through the novel. Structurally speaking, I suppose that the core is the father, Al. He is the character we ride inside the least, almost always seeing him through the lens of his family; it is his decline into the mental and physical ravages of Parkinsons that drives the plot. This organization closely resembles that of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying--it is the death and dying (separate processes in both books) of a parent that allows movement within a family. (Note, though, that unlike AILD, which relies on a single pivot point of Aggie's voice, Corrections has at least two. Is this a function of the greater length of Corrections, or is Franzen consciously making an oval, rather than a circle?)

Actually, I find this a really productive comparison (she said, modestly): emotionally, Corrections, is also about a family trying struggling to bury a parent, to bury, to resolve, to heal from the wounds of growing up. I say "growing up" rather than "an emotionally stunted, borderline abusive father" because for the purposes of the novel it doesn't matter whether the wounds were inflicted from the outside, taken up like a cross, or entirely imagined (hi Chip!). Each character identifies his scars in various ways, and though there are moments where it seems as though some universal truth or understanding will come through, like real people the characters are stuck within the prejudices of their perceptions (or perhaps, the perception of their prejudices).

My grandmother, when she talks about this book, always says, "And at the end she [Enid] still thought that her life only needed a 'few corrections'," in a tone of dismay and with the rueful headshake of someone who knows better. Maybe my gran is right and Enid is doomed to remain in her rut (though I rather think that Alfred's death removed the major obstacle in her life), but the novel doesn't care whether Enid is right or wrong. Everyone thinks they are right--and someone must be wrong. In order to live your life you have to believe in corrections; we must be able to move--even if it isn't in a direction that resembles forward. Stagnancy (Alfred in his recliner in the basement, peeing into old cans) is death, or close enough for government work. At the end of the novel, even though maybe Enid hasn't changed, all the same, everything has changed.

I don't, however, know quite what to make of the Aslan/lion motif. We first see it, I think, when Gary's youngest son is reading the Chronicles of Narnia; it then resurfaces as the name of a designer drug that Enid picks up while on a cruise (international waters). Though we never know exactly what the drug does, per see, there is a strong suggestion in the way the ship doctor describes it that it is somehow related to the "miracle cure" Correctall--the drug which looks like distopian behavior modification therapy and which makes use of a chemical process invented by Alfred. Aslan's effects are like that of anti-depressive medication, only much stronger, and--apparently--create good feeling in the patient by removing the sense of shame or embarrassment. Is this a play on Narnia's allegorical aspect, Aslan-as-Christ, from "religion is the opiate of the masses" to "opiates are the religion of the masses"? In a sense, a drug that removes shame is killing religion: many social systems use shame as a tool to enforce obedience to the rules (it's incredibly effective). But the death of shame as an ideological weapon is a blow to the fabric of society (certainly American society, probably others) in general. Yet...I have a train of thought here that doesn't seem to go anywhere, except deep into doomsaying pedagogy--a terminus I want to avoid. I really hate running into This-Is-Meaningful territory in novels; it's all mire and bog, ugly, sticky, hard to get out of, and taints the rest of the landscape in connection with it.

*say, newer than Mrs. Woolf