[In the following review of The Corrections, Filkins contends that Franzen's book, thanks in part to the Oprah Winfrey controversy, helps define the modern era.]

Once in a while a novel comes along that is as much a part of the cultural moment as it is a commentary on the society from which it springs. With the ill-fated brouhaha set in motion when Oprah Winfrey decided to “uninvite” Jonathan Franzen onto her show after he expressed reservations about being selected for her book club, The Corrections became just such a novel. Even before that, it was bent on rigorously examining our times and the ways in which we think about them. One would have to go back to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or, before that, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, to think of books that have come to define their eras as much as The Corrections sets out to do.

Such novels stand as markers on the cultural highway, their appearance signifying a shift in both how books are written and how they are read for years to come. This is not to say that they will hold up with time. The first two examples are read by few these days, the former because Rushdie has written better works, and the latter because the yuppie novel was, almost by definition, perishable goods from the start. Pynchon and Heller, however, are still read and studied, as are other great pioneers of the past, such as Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby remains the epitome of the kind of book an age comes to be read by, rather than that which a contemporary audience simply reads.

Whether or not The Corrections will hold up under time's scrutiny is impossible to say. However, given the often-brilliant writing with which Franzen adorns his novel, most fiction these days pales next to the book's ambition and achievement, seeming no more than the desultory record of a culture bored with itself. Though parts of the novel are wildly uneven, and though Franzen's cleverness can grate, The Corrections sets the bar up a notch and dares writers and readers to match its reach.

Both of his previous novels were equally ambitious, but each was flawed by extravagancies of plot and a failure to achieve palpable characters who lived and breathed like the rest of us. In The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen gave us a quirky thriller about a St. Louis real estate scam run by a charismatic female police chief from Bombay named Jammu. The book was intriguing in that it functioned as a social history and thriller combined, but the political and corporate corruption that it purported to reveal seemed more the product of adolescent paranoia than a convincing portrait of how things actually work.

His second novel, Strong Motion, also took place in an actual city, this time Boston. Once again the author's urge to lecture the reader about the failings of consumerism, corporate raiders, and radical conservatives tended to dilute the book's artistic strengths. As in The Twenty-Seventh City, using an entire city as a stage on which to make his point caused Franzen to lose sight of the groundlings who inhabit such places street by street. The result was a social fabric woven on the author's private loom—brilliant in its patterning but full of synthetic threads.

Not so The Corrections, for here Franzen goes at it from the opposite direction entirely. Set in the fictional town of St. Jude (which nonetheless bears a marked resemblance to the author's native suburban St. Louis), the book remains anchored in the day-to-day tribulations and tragedy of the Lambert family. Yes, there are jaunts to Lithuania, scenes set in the brick and palmfrond vacuity of the East Coast restaurant world, and meditations on Orwellian social controls over huge chunks of the citizenry fostered by the big drug corporations, but for the most part it focuses on the family's efforts to weather several crises while trying to make it home for one last Christmas dinner together. That they will seems inevitable from the start, but how they do it and the degree to which Franzen delves into the workings of their hearts is what makes the novel a genuine leap forward from his earlier books.

DESPERATION AND DESPAIR

The Lamberts are both mortal and human, and thus they are afraid. At seventy-five, Alfred, a retired railroad manager, must deal with his advancing Parkinson's disease with the help of his wife, Enid, as “the alarm bell of anxiety” rings inside their house in St. Jude. Suffering both physical incapacitation and increasing dementia, Alfred tries to endure “the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead possum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself.” Enid, however, is the one who bears the brunt of the struggle. Her unflagging hope that her husband will improve or be cured forces her to pretend that nothing has happened, though the effort to run a house and their lives within it grows more monumental by the day.

Adding to this burden is the fact that the Lamberts' three children are just as mired in the mess of their own lives. First there's Chip, who lives in Manhattan after having been fired from his college teaching position for sleeping with a student. Though as a professor he thought he was doing important work in teaching his students to “apply critical methods to textual artifacts,” in reality he led a bitter, empty life, causing his students to conclude that he was only out to “teach us the same things you hate.” Chip, in fact, seems a sendup of Franzen's overt political stance in his two previous novels, for though he argues that “the structure of the entire culture is flawed,” he is just as messed up.

When the novel begins, he is trying to finish a screenplay. Ostensibly about “the anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama,” it actually is a badly disguised spoof of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Though his sister Denise funds his wayward rebound, the money runs out and Chip takes up the offer of a former Lithuanian official to help bilk American investors of millions of dollars through the Internet. When the government of Lithuania collapses, Chip once again finds himself on the run and out of money, his only recourse being to get himself to the one place where safety and support await him, namely the house in St. Jude.

Denise, meanwhile, seems a smashing success, though trouble exists just below the surface. A renowned chef and restaurant manager, she strikes it big when a patron funds her new venue in Philadelphia and sends her on a six-month “tasting” holiday in Europe to help build her new menu. The only problem is that when Denise finds herself in bed with the owner, and then the owner's wife, and then the owner again, things get a little shaky. In fact, just as Chip has to flee Lithuania, she is fired from the restaurant. Franzen informs us of these events through a series of Emails incorporated into the text, in much the same way that his penchant for reproducing graphs, logos, and handwritten notes in his fiction allows him to use a culture's detritus to tell the culture's story. Meanwhile, much like her mother, Denise finds a way to cope and land on her feet while helping both her brothers as well.

Finally there's Gary, the oldest of the three and the most suburban of the lot, but no less troubled and sad. A banker, he suffers from clinical depression, though he is “less than thrilled to be given the responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry.” Most of the time he cannot tell if he's depressed about his loveless marriage or if his marriage is loveless because he's depressed. As a result, he survives “from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive,” much as Alfred helplessly looks on while his own body fails him. Though Gary isn't consumed by the high-stakes drama that surrounds both Chip and Denise, his life is led in quiet desperation no less significant or easy to endure.

TRAGEDY AS FARCE

The Corrections would be a depressing novel indeed if it weren't for Franzen's arch treatment of such calamity. Toward the end of the book, Chip's Lithuanian host describes the fall of the government as “a tragedy rewritten as farce.” The comment causes Chip to see what was wrong with his screenplay: he had “written a thriller where he should have written a farce.” This is probably the same revelation Franzen experienced in making the leap from his two earlier novels to this one. His newfound ability to allow his characters to maintain a sense of irony toward their own befuddlement allows them a sense of themselves larger than the novel's own purposes, whereas his earlier characters resembled live puppets struggling to detach themselves from the strings of their maker.

Franzen's wit, though always on the razor's edge of the sardonic, grants The Corrections a lighter touch despite its content. During an extended recollection of life in the Lambert household when the kids were growing up, he describes a torturous meal of bacon, liver, and rutabagas that Enid serves up to her family after Alfred returns from an extended business trip. Dubbed the “Dinner of Revenge” because Alfred left town without kissing Enid good-bye, it's described by Chip, who only wishes he could escape to his room for another glimpse of Cindy Meisner in the neighboring house.

Chip trembled in the bathroom doorway. You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries. The Dinner of Revenge was one of these.

“How was your trip,” Enid asked Alfred because she had to sometime.

“Tiring.”

“Chipper, sweetie, we're all sitting down.”

“I'm counting to five,” Alfred said.

“There's bacon, you like bacon,” Enid sang. This was a cynical, expedient fraud, one of her hundred daily conscious failures as a mother.

“Two, three, four,” Alfred said.

Chipper ran to take his place at the table. No point in getting spanked.

“Blessalor this foodier use nusta thy service make asair mindful neesa others Jesus name amen,” Gary said.

A dollop of mashed rutabaga at rest on a plate expressed a clear yellowish liquid similar to plasma or the matter in a blister. Boiled beet greens leaked something cupric, greenish. Capillary action and the thirsty crust of flour drew both liquids under the liver. When the liver was lifted, a faint suction could be heard. The sodden lower crust was unspeakable.

Chipper considered the life of a girl. To go through life softly, to be a Meisner, to play in that house and be loved like a girl.

As recognizable as it is hilarious, the scene's collective misery is underscored as Franzen inserts various quotes from Schopenhauer. Following the boys' discussion of building jails and electric chairs with Popsicle sticks, he quotes the philosopher's admonition that “if you want a safe compass to guide you through life … you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony.” Witty and biting, the result is that the mundane and the miserable are lifted to a higher plane. From it, the Lamberts' dire straits become almost sublime in their ability to fuel and refuel the novel's farce, despite the darkness closing in on the household from all sides.

PUSHING THE LIMITS

Franzen's greatest strength is also his greatest flaw. For if one goes back to the passage quoted above and notes that Chip is in the first grade when considering the “capillary action” of his beet greens, the language and thought processes used to describe the scene seem implausible. There is also a deep confusion in the writing, for the chapter from which it comes is generally told from Alfred's perspective. It is he who thinks the quotes from Schopenhauer, we know, for Enid discovers a “much handled volume … with certain passages underlined” in his workroom.

In attempting to tie up loose ends and make things real, however, Franzen makes them unreal. It's difficult to imagine that a retired railroad executive would likely walk around with lines of Schopenhauer circulating through his increasingly frayed mental wiring; nor would Enid look at the damp hair of her boys returning from the Y and describe it as “riparian,” as she does two pages earlier. On the other hand, when Alfred's experiments in metallurgy are described as “the dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person,” the analogy seems both apt and quite moving. Writerly and deft at his best, Franzen can seem a boorish show-off when he lets his own dazzling talent come between him and his characters.

This question of the distance between author and subject is the fulcrum on which the success or failure of The Corrections teeters. As with the work of Pynchon, Don DeLillo, or David Foster Wallace, Franzen's books are lent a patina of high seriousness by his ability to apply ironic insights to cultural iconography. Hence, the mild “correction” that eventually takes place in the stock market in the late nineties is mirrored by Gary's ill-advised investment in a biotech company hawking the wonder drug Correktall, which “offers for the first time the possibility of renewing and improving the hard wiring of an adult human brain.” As it turns out, it is also used as a club drug called “Mexican-A,” which Chip ingests while shacking up with the student who gets him fired. Meanwhile, poor Enid is prescribed it as a sedative after her husband falls overboard on a cruise, and later Alfred thinks about entering a Correktall trial program in Philadelphia in a last-ditch effort to control his Parkinson's.

Given the “correction” that Denise seems to be undergoing in her sexuality, as well as Gary's monitoring of his own medication and the correction Chip will make in his screenplay, one can see the artful way in which Franzen connects so many divergent lives and themes in one narrative.

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Down closer to the ground, however, he gets into trouble. He can't seem to let go of his ironic stance long enough to let the characters think in the way we would expect them to. In this way, Franzen's high art trips up his very serious effort to flesh out “the real thing” of the Lamberts' lives. Put another way, this conflation of high-minded commentary and the minutiae of the mundane makes The Corrections a great novel to read but one that falls short of being a great work of art. To point this out seems like high-minded nitpicking, given the novel's reach, for though the flaws are deep, the ride is wonderful. But one can't help but feel that if in future work Franzen can draw even closer to the lives he captures, he will have even more to say through them rather than remaining aloof and above the fray.

Franzen seems capable of devoting his considerable talents to the creation, rather than the control, of his characters for Alfred and Enid manage to rise above their author's braininess through their sheer ability to endure. In fact, at the heart of the novel is a deep nostalgia for a past that no longer exists. As a fellow passenger on the cruise complains to Enid, “‘Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to.’”

In large part, it seems, Franzen would agree. One need only think of the novel's climax, when everyone indeed makes it home for Christmas, no matter how shoddy and haphazard the outcome, and it becomes possible to read the book as a negative version of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. That is, Chip does make it home again, glad to be with his family but still realizing “I'm the least unhappy person at this table.”

In the end, there's something particularly and wonderfully American about this novel. Its characters embody the prevailing myth that one can start over again, or at the very least live for a better day tomorrow. Enid's determination at seventy-five “to make some changes in her life,” even after the loss of Alfred, reveals the pluckiness that sustains her and her family through both illness and misfortune. Franzen's reminder that “what made the correction possible [namely, human love and frailty] also doomed it” counters the naive buoyancy that allows the Lamberts to squeak through. Still, it is the way that each of these characters stares down the future with a combination of blind hope and devil-may-care grittiness that makes The Corrections both a compelling read and a savvy corrective to much of contemporary fiction.