[In the following review of The Corrections, Watman contends the novel is a masterful work of literature despite its small failings such as a tendency toward loquaciousness.]

Why can't you ever write a plain sentence like “He finished his drink, left the pub and went home?”

—Kingsley Amis to Martin Amis

Some very good books have been written by misanthropes. One certainly can't accuse Dawn Powell of being keen on people, or Evelyn Waugh of cutting anybody slack. But their books are satirical novels, their characters largely conceived to illustrate, or prove, just how awful everybody is. I am not sure if Jonathan Franzen is a misanthrope, but he demonstrates in his new novel The Corrections¹ a dislike for his subjects that is sharp and unflinching. He humiliates these awful people in public and in private, shows us their social and intimate incapacities, and brings us internal monologues that reveal petty, selfish motivations. The Corrections is not, however, a satirical novel. Franzen was clearly after a broader stroke, and as a result the novel hovers somewhere between Goodbye Columbus and a Big Portrait of American Life.

James Wood dubbed a subspecies of the long novel “hysterical realism.” These are the heavy tomes that spill ambition all over the floor of Barnes & Noble. Pretentious and clever, they set up complex series of parallelisms and hint at deep layers of meaning. Puns and clever names abound. Each bizarre coincidence, each brazen analogue, doppelgänger, and paranoiac symbol sucks a little more meaning from the book until we are left with just a web of unexplored options, a mere mosaic of literary jokes. These books give us insight only into the verbal tics and hobby horses of their authors.

Though advertised as such, it is wrong to lump The Corrections with the big “smart” books by Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon. It is a more serious novel, and a straighter one. Yes, a nursing home is called the Deepmire; walk-on characters have names like Pudge Portleigh. In The Crying of Lot 49, clues such as these hinted at a depth Pynchon wouldn't give us. Here they are throwaways. Franzen does not expect jokes to fill in for character or plot, both of which he has masterfully written. But something keeps him on the hysterical playground—it may just be a conspiracy of blurbists and critics. (One reviewer wondered if Franzen hadn't cooked up the ultimate postmodern trick of writing a traditional novel that had a narrative that was so slick that no one could tell it was really a postmodern trick at all.)

Smart-aleck novels have blown-up tractor-trailers on the highway to stand in for the foul weather of marriage; Franzen does it with dinner. After a middle-aged Alfred and Enid fight, Enid serves up revenge in the form of liver and onions. They throw their child Chip into the fray. He must clear his plate—he's there all night. The scene unfolds vividly, over many pages, a simple family drama full of frustration, aggression, and barely consensual sex. The webs of correspondence are secondary; Franzen writes first about complicated people.

Alfred and Enid are the aging parents of Gary, Chip, and Denise. Enid's dream is to gather the family together for “one last Christmas” in St. Jude (yes, the patron saint of desperate causes). Around the family's Christmas swirls a series of interconnected stories including, but not at all limited to: the use and abuse of psychotropic medicines in and out of clinical settings, free-market Lithuania, restaurant work, academia, and what it means to grow old.

Alfred, who was a railroad man, understands his internal functioning as an agglomeration of switching stations and engineering. During a demented fit on the floor of a cruise ship, he finds himself wrestling with adult diapers:

With fifty years of experience as an engineer he could see at a glance that the emergency contractor had botched the job. One of the diapers was twisted nearly inside out and a second had a mildly spastic leg sticking through two of its plies, leaving most of its absorptive capacity unrealized in a folded mass, its adhesive stickers adhering to nothing.

Gary, a banker, understands his psychology as a CNBC market report:

Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life's futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.

Chip, an ex-professor on a prostitute's massage table in Lithuania, reflects upon the “(trans)act(ion)” taking place.

The women, however, are all but devoid of contemplative capability. They want others and they want Christmas, but they don't struggle with the roots or causes of what they do. They manipulate and disapprove. They assess and work to impress. When Denise considers her relationship with an underling of her father's, it is “a dissatisfaction that pinching sensitive parts of herself might address but couldn't fix.” When her father has difficulty understanding the world, he recalls Schopenhauer. Denise pinches herself.

Careful writing means a lot to Jonathan Franzen. He was my teacher once, and, after my classmates and I had made him read a particularly sloppy batch of stories and novel excerpts, he passed out a photocopied sheet on which he'd drawn a graph of the proper tenses and uses of “lie” and “lay.” Later he opened class with a well-deserved short lecture on the difference between concrete and cement. But it was only a matter of time until someone pulled a copy of Strong Motion (his second book) off a shelf and found “Thump thump went the volleyball.” Struggling, desk-lamp lit well into the night, to come up with “Thump thump went the volleyball” is absurd. One is a long way from the serpentine musicality of Henry James.

Franzen's mellifluousness, moreover, gets the best of him at times:

By now [the non-bell that symbolized anxiety] had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of bell ringing but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of meta-sound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound.

Gosh—do you hear something?

And what of the bizarre missteps in the book? Franzen calls a truck a “Ford Stomper”? He knows that some restaurant cooks use Garland stoves. He identifies a discontinued Levi's jacket. There is no such truck as a Ford Stomper. Why has the reader been asked to discern an intent here?

These are, however, only small errors and distractions in a powerful book. The Corrections has been rightly marketed and reviewed as this year's major novel. It is an adroit one, both hilarious and stirring, and deserves the many kudos it is sure to gather. But Franzen needs to sever his ties with the young and hip.

Note

1. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 528 pages.