SOURCE: Gessen, Keith. “A Literary Correction.” American Prospect 12, no. 19 (5 November 2001): 33-5.

[In the following review of The Corrections, Gessen contrasts Franzen's book with that of other great modern writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Don DeLillo.]

Toward the end of Jonathan Franzen's magnificent new novel The Corrections, Chip Lambert, an associate professor who has lost his job—in the great tradition of fictional associate professors, for sleeping with a student—returns to his parents' midwestern home after three months as a Web-based con artist in Lithuania. “A holly wreath was on the door,” Chip observes.

The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn't see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn't simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.

One can quibble with Franzen's use of Poland and “political boundaries” in the same breath, and with his suggestion that boundaries, rather than enormous militaries, are what keep political entities insulated. But the insight is appropriate, because the events of September 11 must at least partially be interpreted as just such an arcing—the awful, flaming end to a bubbly, crazy decade.

It is a decade toward which Franzen's book directs a great deal of scorn. The “corrections” of the title refer to pharmaceutical fixes and to jail, but they refer most directly to the market correction with which the decade should have ended. Franzen is no prophet—there are no terrorists in this novel, and he predicts, wrongly, that the financial correction will be a “gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to hurt anyone but fools and the working poor.” That is, of course, how things had been going; the recent pronouncements of the changed-ness of everything elide the fact that, psychologically and economically, America was already changing: The Nasdaq was losing value precipitously; jobs, especially near bloated Silicon Valley, were vanishing; and the Supreme Court had called an election for the wrong guy. Nonetheless, it's remarkable that a book written over the past nine years should otherwise read so well on the other side of history.

The Corrections feels at times like a catalog of ended modes of being. On a literary level, the book is a correction to the big postmodern novel. Franzen is, after all, a writer with a strong postmodernist pedigree: He is good friends with David Foster Wallace and has referred to Don DeLillo as being “sort of dad-like”; he has said that until recently he believed that working in the cerebral, allegorical-political mode of DeLillo and William Gaddis was “the only way to have adult dignity as a white male fiction writer.” His first two novels contained ironic, leftist/conspiracist plots; and though for The Corrections he has adopted a traditional family-romance frame, Franzen has still produced a book that includes, among other things, a shadowy corporate-pharmaceutical conspiracy, a Lithuanian cell-phone riot, and several different font sizes.

And yet nearly everyone who's written about The Corrections has lauded Franzen's abandonment of the postmodern heritage; The New York Times praised the book, on Tuesday and on Sunday, for its “family dynamics”; Poets and Writers compared the author to Leo Tolstoy, and The Atlantic Monthly likened him to John Cheever. A week later, the book began appearing in stores with the “Oprah Book Club” sticker affixed like a little prize pin. So where, at a moment when they might reasonably claim vindication, are the Pynchonians? Has anyone seen the Derrideans? The Corrections features one of the most memorable allusions to Michel Foucault in recent American literature: “[I]t warmed his Foucaultian heart,” Franzen writes of Chip in the hypercapitalist wilds of post-Soviet Lithuania, “to live in a land where property ownership and the control of public discourse were so obviously a matter of who had the guns.” This is funny. Why, then, aren't the Foucaultians in the streets, seizing the public spaces and shooting off fire extinguishers?

The answer would seem to be that Franzen really has abandoned his roots. For we are emerging from a period in which our major writers produced some extremely long and sprawling works. It was the partial premise of these books—Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) and DeLillo's Underworld (1997) being the two most striking examples, though I've been told that William Gass's The Tunnel (1995) and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997) are also very long—that they could go on forever. In Underworld, DeLillo seemed anxious about such a prospect. “How do things end, finally,” he wondered on page 823, “things such as this?” For Wallace, endlessness was bliss; 967 pages in and just a few pages before the end, he began to relate in great detail the story of a completely irrelevant personage. It was clear that Wallace could continue, virtuosically, for 967 small-fonted pages more. Critics were unimpressed, both by the semiparanoid worldview necessary to maintain the cohesion of such enormous structures and by the often hyperventilating style necessary to keep them moving. “The big contemporary novel,” James Wood pronounced in The New Republic, “is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity.”

What Wood characteristically failed to mention was that the country was undergoing the biggest stock-market speculation boom in the history of the world. The nineties did not pioneer the long, encyclopedic novel, but in that decade such books seemed to make sense and multiply. Why shouldn't a novelist invent weightless, throwaway characters and write up lengthy pitches for them when entrepreneurs were making millions inventing products that could never, in any imaginable universe, turn a profit? It was madness, and though we knew that it would end—that a bubble had, by its very nature, to burst; that the people who spoke about going “beyond” the business cycle were quacks; that those who bought in this late were suckers—even though we knew all this, it was not ending. Even the millennium ended nothing save the speculation that it might end something. And what, in such a situation, would impel our novels to end? Was it not in fact their duty, in a world where nothing ended, to likewise fail to end?

Death, of course, is the end. The Corrections is about a family, the Lamberts, in which the children are grown and the parents are old. Alfred Lambert, once the head of the family, is dying, and the book hurtles toward that death at an astonishing clip. The detours into the damaged lives of the children, into Lithuanian politics and IPO road shows and high-end restaurants, are hugely entertaining but never distracting. And that is the nature of Franzen's correction to the postmodern novel and its symbiotic culture of perpetual boom; the world does not generate an endless set of signs. Alfred, falling from a cruise ship midway through the book, realizes that “in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.” The unit of meaning can be identified: It is a human life. And around that life, the unit of meaning is the family.

The corrections occur on a stylistic level as well. One can trace Franzen's efforts in this direction in the changes he made to the book's opening lines, which first appeared in the Paris Review in 1996 looking like this:

The madness of an invading system of high pressure. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a mockery a lust gone cold. Gust after gust of entropy. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.

Five years later, in The Corrections:

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.

The changes, though minor, reveal a writer purging himself of “edginess.” The first sentence is slightly longer in the final version, its cadence extended; “system of high pressure” and “entropy,” quasi-scientific terms of the sort favored by Thomas Pynchon and his many progeny, are replaced by the more locally descriptive “autumn prairie cold front” and “disorder”; and the natural forces are stripped of their misplaced agency (the cold front no longer “invading,” the sun no longer mocking and lusting), leaving no confusion as to who, exactly, is going mad. This is style consciously adhering to its traditional task as a vehicle of character; the free indirect narrator of the above is Alfred, whose voice throughout the book is the strangest and most mystical, and who really is, on account of Parkinson's, losing his mind.

Franzen has visibly done a tremendous amount of cutting—one does not, apparently, end up with a 568-page novel unless one throws out thousands of pages. The few flaws of which the book is clearly guilty—several plotlines introduced and unceremoniously dropped, a certain hurriedness in the development of several others—can be traced directly to this cutting-down. The Corrections is emphatically not a great American book of the sort produced by fevered minds. It feels sooner like a perfect book in the manner of The Great Gatsby; but where Gatsby has been called a masterpiece of omission, Franzen's book is a masterpiece of excision. It may be worthwhile for someone to break into Franzen's writing studio on 125th Street (Franzen often types blindfolded, to avoid distractions, so it should not be a difficult job) and recover the lost pages and issue a massive director's cut of The Corrections—but as it stands, the book is supremely manageable.

This hardly makes it Franzen's fault that Oprah has smiled upon him; he makes no compromises to cliché, and even the family reunion that manages to take place at the end is deeply troubling. Furthermore, Franzen, who has been singularly honest and ambitious and abstemious, deserves all the recognition coming his way. The Corrections should win all the book awards, and if someone happens to invent another book award in the next six months, it should win that, too. But there is also no question that in setting up The Corrections in contradistinction to the bloated novels of the past 10 years, novels that might be read as symptoms of a culture that demands books with the most possible accessories, he has produced a novel that is far more likely to garner mass sales. Because part of what the postmodernist epic was trying to do in the years of hyperconsumption was to remain indigestible; to refuse to be a product that could be picked up, read, finished, and left on the bathroom floor. If this meant that the book had to be unreadable, so be it. But so here is the irony, here is the genius of capitalism: Franzen, a bitter critic of consumerism, writes a novel that at the level of form criticizes the surrender of the postmodern novel to the pressures of film and electronic media, to the vectors of stuff. In so doing, he ends up with a novel that is eminently readable. He ends up with a masterpiece: at ＄26, a steal.

The Corrections ends in death, and it was in death, too, that the symbolic world of the boom collapsed on September 11. In the time since, one has had a great deal of trouble formulating a just relation to that departed constellation of things. This reviewer spent several years in the kitchens and living rooms of Cambridge, Massachusetts, railing against the excesses of the Internet bubble and the smug triumphalism of post—Cold War marketeers. Everything I said was true. But this is not what I had in mind.

Franzen has been deliberating on essentially this theme for the last 20 years. He is a compelling writer in part because of the studied ambivalence he maintains toward the modern American world. In The Corrections, it is a world immiserated by money. “Since D— College had fired him,” Franzen writes of Chip, “the market capitalization of publicly traded U.S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent. … These were years in America when it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9٪ APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat.” Denise, the youngest and most intelligent, is obsessed with food, and Gary, the oldest son, is an IPO man. Seventy-five-year-old Enid Lambert is the most money-conscious of them all. After a lifetime of saving on phone calls by writing long letters, she finally breaks down during a cruise where she and Alfred have a cheap berth.

God had given her the imagination to weep for the sad strivers who booked the most el-cheapo “B” deck inside staterooms on a luxury cruise ship; but a childhood without money had left her unable to stomach, herself, the ＄300 per person it cost to jump one category up; and so she wept for herself. She felt that she and Al were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich.

I can think of no American novelist who is as concerned with the corrosive irony of money as is Franzen. Like Dostoyevsky, he enjoys the loss of large sums—in Strong Motion, a check for ＄600,000 is burned by matches from the Four Seasons Hotel; and in The Corrections, Chip is relieved of ＄27,000 by Lithuanian police in ski masks. So often, in fact, is it the source of tension and of plot movement in Franzen that money almost ceases to be, as it is in Dostoyevsky, an expression of psychology or character. Rather, character, somehow, is the expression of money.

Franzen's attitude to this is complicated. In his essays, he has offered an opposition to technoconsumerism that is very nearly absolute. He described himself typing on typewriters and scavenging chairs from neighborhood trash piles. In his first two novels, however, he seemed much more confused about the nature of late capitalism. Both books contained slightly ridiculous Marxists flailing away at a society that was oblivious to them. And both were marred by a deep uncertainty in Franzen's relation to these Marxists. They never came into focus; it seemed that Franzen was embarrassed by them, that for all his intellectual sympathy with their point of view, he couldn't help but make the characters themselves losers. Which, naturally, being leftists, they sort of were.

In The Corrections, we face the same problem with Chip. His cultural theorizing could have been cut-and-pasted directly from one of Franzen's essays, and yet everyone whom Chip encounters, and eventually Chip himself, maintains a disdain for his critique of capital. Chip is pathetic; after losing his job and his student girlfriend, he falls apart completely: “In the last month, since he'd embarked on projects like digitally scanning Melissa Parquette's face from a freshman face-book and suturing her head to obscene downloaded images and tinkering with these images pixel by pixel (and hours did fly by when you were tinkering with pixels), he'd read no books at all.”

Someone eventually will, I hope, write a great American novel with a Foucaultian theorist for a heroic protagonist. But Franzen, in dismissing Chip, forces himself to make the case dramatically: If Chip is finally reconciled to capitalism, his siblings are mangled by it. And yet what's truly interesting is that throughout this novel, Franzen betrays an affection for some of the nifty things that capitalism makes. The artistic capabilities of Adobe Photoshop are admired, and there is even a mildly sympathetic portrait of an SUV.

There is, in the end, a balance here, between the philosophical condemnation of capital, the human affection for its practitioners, and the writer's affection for its surfaces. It is the same set of conflicting impulses that characterized Franzen's response to the World Trade Center attacks. It was certainly possible, he wrote in The New Yorker, that terrorist plotters were “hiding in ruined Afghanistan, where the average life expectancy is barely forty. In that world you can't walk through a bazaar without seeing men and children who are missing limbs. In this world, where the Manhattan skyline has now been maimed … what you felt on Tuesday morning wasn't intellectual satisfaction, or simply empathetic horror, but deep grief for the loss of daily life in prosperous, forgetful times.” The editors of The New Republic, in their two-week, scorched-earth string search for insufficiently martial reactions, picked out Franzen for especial scorn—as if Franzen were not a fiercer and more formidable critic of American decadence than those militant center-of-centerers. No matter; the italics of “this” make the case: For all the injustice and unfairness of American prosperity and Afghan poverty, the worlds are separate. The tragedy of one in no way mitigates or exculpates the tragedy of the other; the severed limbs of Afghanistan's war veterans are unsoothed by the decapitation of New York City. And if it should come to that, neither will we be soothed by their further suffering.

Franzen's response to the attacks, then, was apt; but it is truly an indication of his deep sense of the culture's movements that a year before any of this happened he could so well describe the passing of a world. Returning to his parents' home after his three-month sojourn in Lithuania, Chip wonders at the beauty of the midwestern landscape and the magic insulatory power of borders, and thinks: “The old street with its oak smoke and snowy flat-topped hedges and icicled eaves seemed precarious. It seemed mirage-like. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something beloved and dead.”