SOURCE: Edwards, Thomas R. “Oprah's Choice.” Raritan 21, no. 4 (spring 2002): 75-86.

[In the following review, Edwards examines the tumult following The Corrections after being chosen as an Oprah Winfrey book club selection, as well as Franzen's concerns about “high art” and the ability of quality fiction to appeal to a broad audience.]

In 1968, reviewing a book called Gore Vidal, Gore Vidal (yes, it was he) wrote that “it is well known that in any year there is only One Important Novelist worth reading.” In 1932, putting down some pretenders to literary importance, F. R. Leavis wrote that “the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.” In 1849, doing heaven knows what, Alphonse Karr wrote that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” and he was certainly right.

The One Important Novelist worth reading in 2001 has to be Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections was almost universally applauded, won the National Book Award for Fiction, and was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club, which is perhaps to say that it entered the history of both literature and publicity simultaneously. Oprah's imprimatur of course means big sales, but this thought seemed to dismay Franzen, who (in the words of the New York Times) is “closely associated with highbrow fiction because of a 1996 essay in Harper's magazine about the challenge of writing sophisticated, socially engaged novels, in which he seemed sometimes to dismiss the possibility of a popular audience for serious fiction.”

Evidently Franzen found himself on the firing line between the Brows and the OWs (if I may so acronymize the Oprah Winfrey clubbers), and from various parts of the country—he seems to have been doing a book tour—he began to issue descriptions of his mixed feelings about that perilous situation, zigzaggy remarks like “I feel like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood,” or “She's picked some good books, but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight.”

A certain conflictedness showed up even in his appearance and mien, as publicly represented. In the dust-jacket picture for The Corrections the authorial phiz is firm and well-chiseled, or “buff,” as they say now, casually coiffed and stylishly stubbled (Nixon, thou shouldst be living at this hour), looking impassively through his mini-spectacles, in tweedy jacket and open button-down shirt like some dressed-down Clark Kent seeking a phone booth in the age of wireless. (At one point in The Corrections, a young man who “hated cell phones because he didn't have one” searches frantically for an operative pay phone in Manhattan.) But two A.P. news photos printed in the Times and no doubt elsewhere showed a kinder, gentler, rounder-faced Franzen: the Oprah pic, in a dark T-shirt, close-shaven but with sweaty-looking hair, beaming goofily enough to reveal a nascent double chin, and then the National Book Award one, in a tuxedo, hair still a bit négligé but drier, offering the camera a knowing but friendly half-smile. Only the eyeglasses prove these all to be pictures of the same man.

With suitable dignity Oprah promptly excused him from appearing on her TV show, which is really big for sales, and (perhaps after a heart-to-heart with his publishers?) Franzen plunged deeper into the healing waters of ambivalence, stating in various public places that “I really don't like to hurt people, and I feel bad because the person being hurt [presumably he means Oprah, not himself] is actually a really good person for American writing and reading,” or “Oprah Winfrey is bent on demonstrating that estimates of the size of the audience for good books is too small, and that is why it is so unfortunate that this is being cast as arrogant Franzen and popular Winfrey—I like her for liking my book.” At the time of this writing, The Corrections is number six on the Times list of best-selling novels, ahead of Danielle Steel and Robert Ludlum, though trailing John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark.

An undertone of noblesse oblige is audible in such acts of contrition, and Franzen does write better than he talks; but I feel some sympathy for his wanting to think that “high” and “popular” are not utterly different realms even while continuing to feel that they indeed are different and that “high” may even be better. A less forgivable confusion emerges in his explanations of why he so regrets being Oprah's choice. He thinks he's protesting the contamination of serious art by commerciality: surely the seal of her club, if added to the jacket of The Corrections, would constitute an advertisement for her TV show and what he calls the “corporate ownership” standing behind it. But corporate ownership already stands behind any commercially published book, high or low, and no publisher withholds its own name from the jacket; Franzen's publisher is in fact a division of an international conglomerate. And of course authors and publishers are free to keep quiet about honors and prizes—in this case Oprah's seal was not added to the cover right away, though it's there now, in time for the Christmas season.

Novels, as we know only too well, often carry ads of another sort. The jacket of The Corrections bears four endorsements by reputable writers that, like all such testimonials, seem meant to cheer the author up and help his publishers sell more copies. Blurb-speak like “large-hearted,” “great,” “powerful,” “generous breadth of vision,” “major accomplishment,” and “brightest, boldest, and most ambitious” is freely deployed, and one blurber adds that “Franzen gives notice that from now on, he is only going to hunt with the big cats.”

The book is in fact another damned thick one, as King George reportedly said to Mr. Gibbon, and it is hard not to suppose that Franzen has his eye on the big cats, the serious competitors whom Hemingway, Mailer, and indeed most novelists keep their eyes on. In accepting the National Book Award he ruefully remarked that “I feel as if I were the person who provided some blood-sport entertainment for the literary community in this time of trouble,” as if he were somehow helping the more bookish of Mr. Bush's fellow Americans recover from September 11. The big cats, of course, are always ready for blood sport, sniffing the air for book buyers who like unwary tourists may wander into their feral precincts, but also stalking the other big cats through the jungle of fame. And Franzen seems embarrassed by the thought that those others may yowl with scorn (and envy) to hear just who has taken his new high-art creation under her wing.

But why did Oprah and her people pick this unlikely book? The answer begins to appear at the front of The Corrections, even before the story starts:

     Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Franzen, Jonathan.
          The Corrections/Jonathan Franzen.—1st ed.
               p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-12998-3 (alk. paper)
1. Married women—Fiction. 2. Parkinson's disease—Patients—Fiction. 3. Parent and adult child—Fiction. 4. Middle West—Fiction. I. Title

I won't pretend to know what things like “p. cm.” mean, though “alk. paper” seems to certify that the pages are acid-free and will last long enough to sustain the prophecy of the New Yorker, Franzen's literary base, that he is to be one of “Twenty Writers for the 21st Century.” But otherwise the cataloging note sounds just right for Oprah's club. The OWs are (evidently) middle-American matrons with troubled adult children and aged parents or spouses going to pieces physically and mentally even as the ladies read. Some of Franzen's remarks suggest a fear that her endorsement will attract more women than men to the book, and many OWs probably do hope for some pain and misery in their novels. It's easy to imagine that Oprah, or her panel of referees, pricked up their ears at the sound of this one even before they read it, assuming they did.

Yet however schmaltzy or female or one-dimensional or at best middlebrow the prevailing taste of her club may be, Oprah did not write The Corrections herself, or ask or hire Franzen to do so; he himself opened the door he banged his head on. “I see this as my book, my creation,” he quite properly told the Portland Oregonian, and the real question, it seems to me, is whether the book itself encourages some customers to buy and even read it for the wrong reasons, as its author fears they may. It's time for me to say that this is a very impressive novel, even better, perhaps, than the one he thought he was writing; the topics the cataloging note mentions are indeed part of the story, but there's much more to it than they suggest.

At the center of Franzen's rich inventions is an elderly midwestern couple, Alfred and Enid Lambert. Al is seventy-nine, a metalurgist and amateur inventor long retired from a middle-management job at Midland Pacific Railroad, an intelligent, rather cold, ethically rigorous man now suffering from Parkinson's disease and the onset of Alzheimer's. As he tries to read Schopenhauer in his basement lair, his “naps deepened toward enchantment” and his “every sentence became an adventure in the woods,” a figure that Franzen, for whom language is always big with unborn metaphor, characteristically expands into an elaborate if tender tour de force:

but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods—“packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing.

This happens early in the book, before we know whether to pity the character or rejoice in the author's imaginative powers—the sentence (only partly) quoted, like the one Al gets lost in, runs to a Faulknerian length. But in the end such a choice is meaningless: we happily do both.

Enid is seventy-five, a bossy, busy-minded booby, impatient with her spouse's failings—he can't get the tax returns right, he refuses to have a hobby, he pees in empty coffee cans when the need arises—even as she struggles to keep up with her own self-imposed duties, which any OW will ruefully recognize. She can't get the supermarket coupons she compulsively clips sorted out before they expire. The house is filling up with unread magazines and catalogs, old recipes and photos, Medicare statements, all the detritus of what they once told us would be a paperless age. She keeps trying to get their adult children to visit them in St. Jude. She persuades Al to take her on an “autumn colors cruise” from New York to Quebec and back, with occasional stopovers to see some leaves. She worries excessively about money, feeling that “she and Al were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich.” Yet she is the unblockable conduit for an endless hopefulness that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, things will finally work out. Where Al can be affecting in his decline, Enid usually seems like an escapee from some geriatric sitcom, less portrait than cartoon, though often a funny one.

Their three children also flicker between caricature and character. Their oldest, Gary, a stockbroker with three kids of his own, pulled up his roots and fled to Philadelphia. The Heartland's “optimistic egalitarianism” makes him feel as unimportant as he really is, and he dreams of thwarting the region's upscale stirrings:

(suddenly cleaning ladies knew from sun-dried tomatoes, suddenly hog farmers knew from crème brûlé), and shoppers at the mall near his parents' house had an air of entitlement off-puttingly similar to his own, and the electronic consumer goods for sale in St. Jude were every bit as powerful and cool as those in Chestnut Hill. Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all mid-westerners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.

That says just about everything worth saying about Gary, except that he's professionally and personally dishonest, that he lives in terror of clinical depression, and that in his wife, Caroline, ex-lawyer, eavesdropper, and truly awful domestic tyrant, he has found even more punishment than he deserves.

Gary's younger brother Chip is a sadder but nicer figure of disaster. Always a good student, he took a graduate degree and became an assistant professor in Textual Artifacts at a small college in Connecticut. After a bright start—he was a conscientious teacher of “Consuming Narratives” (TV ads that corrupt consumers), his publications (such as “Creative Adultery” and “Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels”) impressed the administration—he was dismissed for having a disastrous affair with an aggressive female student. Moving to New York, he barely gets by on his earnings as a freelance legal proofreader and substantial loans from his sister, while he tries to finish an inept screenplay; he drifts into depression, before his new girlfriend's estranged husband, supposedly the deputy prime minister of Lithuania, hires him to do some PR work in Vilnius.

Denise is the youngest Lambert. After high school she worked briefly for her father's railroad, lost her virginity, tried college but soon dropped out and learned to cook seriously. She married a middle-aged French chef and with him made their Cafe Louche the talk of Philadelphia. After an amicable divorce and a lesbian interlude (mostly fighting), she found a backer and started her own restaurant, nouveau-Viennese in style, called The Generator because it occupied a rebuilt electric power plant. The Generator was a huge success—one reviewer wrote that it “single-handedly” put Philadelphia on “the map of cool,” which does sound like an accomplishment, though Denise wished that more had been said about the food, especially her sauerkraut. She found some personal comfort, though not a lot, in affairs with both the place's owner, a rich and lucky young entrepreneur named Brian Callaghan, and his quite uncool wife Robin, an intense idealist who devotes herself to teaching ghetto teenagers the basics of organic vegetable gardening. Discovering her duplicity, Brian fires Denise.

I can imagine the better class of OWs liking and caring about Denise as much as I did; she's by far the most sensible and competent member of her family, with less melodramatic and more interesting troubles than theirs. And she's been granted the gift of humorous self-awareness the others largely lack, enough so to allow her to escape the outlines of typicality that mostly enclose the rest. But none of the Lamberts are utterly inhospitable to the kind of feeling Franzen fears the OWs may be looking for.

It's not the substance of what is, after all, family romance but the way Franzen conveys it that supports his high-art aspirations. Governing the story, but not too insistently, are the ambiguities he finds in the word correction. Its limited local meanings are sharply drawn, as in Chip's endless correcting of his students' hopeless papers or his own pretty hopeless screenplay. Enid never stops fussing at Al, hoping to correct deficiencies of behavior she's unable to see as symptoms of terminal disease. Parents and children struggle to correct their misconceptions of each other, without success. Change is possible, but change is not correction—Chip returns from Lithuania a stronger man for knowing real fear, he accepts some emotional responsibility for his dying father, he marries a young neurologist who bears him twin girls; but, as Enid grimly notes, his only gainful employment is substitute part-time teaching, and he still thinks he can fix and sell that screenplay.

The story line moves through the present—Chip nearly breaking down in New York, Al and Enid's cruise. Chip's rebirth (more or less) in the Baltics, the family's long deferred Christmas reunion in St. Jude, Al's final decline and death—with frequent and sometimes extensive flashbacks, the most important being the history of the grown-up Denise. The writing is wonderfully alert to the sad or ludicrous details of the lives the various Lamberts have made for themselves. For instance, Franzen has down pat the lingo of the “cultural studies” Chip practices, and it's a stirring if muddled moment when his students in “Consuming Narratives,” most of whom don't know Veblen from Webern and couldn't care less, rebel against his pseudo-Socratic questioning: “As if you care about any of our opinions unless they're the same as yours,” one complains, adding “Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, … and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifier and signifieds.” The OWs may not follow all this very clearly, but they'll surely snicker when Chip, desperately broke, sells two bagfuls of his precious books of Marxist literary theory, total list price ＄3,900, for ＄65 at the Strand.

Yet details, however sharp, can interfere with narrative force. In The Corrections people and stories and intimations of meaning can irritatingly vanish without trace. There's Billy Passafaro, Robin Callaghan's adoptive brother, an alarmingly sadistic bully who within a few pages turns anarchist and cripples for life a politically active businessman, gets twelve to eighteen, and vanishes from the book forever. On the Gunnar Myrdal Enid meets a Mrs. Roth, who tells her about the torture-murder of her daughter by a nineteen-year-old punk who just wanted the keys to her car; Mrs. Roth, an artist, has become obsessed with images of guns and violent retribution even as her husband, a “very rational” doctor who “thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings,” tries to put his own deep grief behind him as being unrealistic and self-indulgent. But the Roths and their misery go somewhere else and stay there when Al, who used to fall down the basement stairs, now in full dementia falls into the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the top deck, the equivalent of an eight-story building. (He finds that he's not ready to die just yet, and he survives, for a while.)

It's from fragmentary stories, to be sure, that we construct our sense of the world, as Franzen, a good postmodernist, knows very well. Here the OWs, few of whom are postmodernists, may smell trouble, liking (as I do) stories, however brief, that point toward some sort of conclusion. Conclusions in this sense do not require full-scale, old-fashioned endings, as Chip's adventures in cowboy-capitalist post-Soviet Lithuania show. He is there to develop a Web site for his friend Gitanas's Free Market Party Company, an egregious wire-fraud operation designed to persuade at least the greediest and most stupid American investors that an impending European shortage of sand and gravel will bring boom times to Lithuania, which has plenty of both to offer, if little else. The scam works, until the story breaks off in near-revolution; Chip barely gets out alive, and Gitanas, a splendid wild man of whom he's truly fond, is not seen again. But it's clear that the whole thing is not Gitanas's story but an episode in Chip's story and in the larger story of which Chip's is only a part.

The venture into Lithuania, Incorporated, points toward what makes The Corrections more than a satiric family novel. The world of the Lamberts is under vaguely felt but continuing pressure from big business and its dubious intentions. Al retired (at considerable monetary sacrifice) when the regional railroad he worked for was bought out by the Wroth brothers, uncouth conglomerators from Tennessee who sold off its assets but preserved its name in their corporate octopus, Orfic Midland. Chip's college office was in Wroth Hall, though he seems not to notice the connection, and we're left free to wonder if the coyly named “W—— Corporation,” a maker of desktop computers which bought out Brian Callaghan's music company and thus indirectly financed Denise's Generator, may not have some hidden Wrothian implication. (What to make of the bereaved Mrs. Roth on the cruise ship is hard to know, but then names never do make much sense.)

More immediate corporate malignity is at hand. There is the Axon Corporation, which is preparing an IPO based on its development of Corecktall, a new treatment for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other related ills. Corecktall proposes to “permanently rewire your mental hardware in whatever way you want”; it's “your basic gut cerebral rehab. Leave the shell and roof, replace the walls and plumbing. … You still look serious and intellectual, a little Nordic, on the outside. Sober, bookish. But inside you're more liveable.” Al had recently sold to Axon, for peanuts, a possibly relevant patent he held, and Enid and Denise immediately try to get him included in the test group; but to Gary, who thinks only the poor really get ill, it just sounds like big bucks, and he spares no effort to line up as many IPO shares as he can for his best customers and himself. And there is Aslan, a product of Farmacopea S. A. and not approved by the FDA, which a shady ship's doctor illegally sells to Enid aboard the Gunnar Myrdal. (His name is Dr. Hibbard, which will remind some of us of the professionally challenged Dr. Hibbert of The Simpsons.) Aslan, named for the godly lion in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, is a “shame suppressor” that melts anxiety into relaxation and sleep; it helps Enid a lot, but it is also highly addictive, and Denise quickly recognizes it as a club drug popular with the young.

Pharmaceutical companies are of course replacing communist conspiracy in the popular imagination, as readers of the papers and books like John le Carré's The Constant Gardener will have noticed. And general worry about the menace of godless international megacapitalism is a lively presence even in the imaginations of otherwise conservative OWs, who get it not from highbrow left-wing books but from press and TV reports of ecological disaster, financial speculation, corporate political bribery, and so on. At the end of The Corrections the world's financial markets are undergoing a correction of their own, “a year-long leakage of value … a contraction too gradual to generate headlines [oh?] and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody [oh??] but fools and the working poor.” True enough, this correction does little harm to the senior Lamberts, since poor Al, whom Enid continually scorned for not cleaning up in dot-coms and high tech like their St. Jude friends, had cautiously kept their assets in dull old annuities and T-bills. But as the narrative implies, fools and the working poor add up to a good many casualties even so, and one of the fools is Gary, who admits to having recently “taken a nasty little bath on a biotech IPO,” though he sullenly refuses to admit it was Axon.

In the hands of older big cats like Dickens, Balzac, George Eliot, and Tolstoy, fiction kept in rather close touch with the sense of public conditions that can make a novel more than an account of a family, a locality, a single social level. Franzen's touch is not so close, and for him the financial and cultural follies of millennial times—he has little to say about the political ones—are largely background. He does look at them, but the book is so thick chiefly because he often tells us more than we may need or want to know about its people, inventive but finally tedious things like Chip's childhood eating disorders, Al's continuing hallucinations that he is under attack by malign and foul-mouthed (but almost Disney-like) turds from the Gunnar Myrdal's waste pipes, elaborate and lengthy transcriptions of keenly heard but intrinsically dull conversations between the elder Lamberts and their friends; even the Lithuanian scenes, funny and inventive though they are, come in time to sound like over-the-top Mel Brooks shtick. Franzen can write brilliantly about anything at all, and sometimes you wish he'd stop.

But even this excess is valuable. Though he yearns for the respectability of “serious” high art and is perfectly capable of producing it, Franzen's talent is Dickensian in essence. His art of fiction is less Jamesian than vaudevillean, less a matter of formal and stylistic nuance than of continuous improvisational energy. The Corrections doesn't need protecting from Oprah and the OWs; though he seems not to know it, he has written a book they will understand and enjoy for their own good reasons, even though some of those reasons are not his. No one, I think, will like every moment of this remarkable novel, but who likes every moment in Dickens? A lot of readers of all brow-levels will like a lot of it, which is more than could be said of most novels, and it does show, once again, that “popular” taste may not be the inevitable enemy of “high” taste but, whatever Franzen supposes, an important element of any taste worth having at all.