Johnathan Franzen's The Corrections
Mar. 13th, 2005 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sharplittleteethThe girfriend is in Tasmania for the weekend, meeting her new nephew and niece. On Friday I went in to the city to buy some clothes, and failed utterly. It's that great paradox of capitalism - the more choices you have, the less satisfied you are with any.
Last night I stayed up until 5am reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.
Jesus. What a book.
It's the story of a midwestern American family slowly falling apart. Their mother just wants them home for one last Christmas. But the father has Parkinsons Disease and hallucinates, the eldest son is trying to convince himself and the world he's not clinically depressed, the middle son has been fired from his academic position and winds up involved in Eastern European fraud, and the youngest daughter may or may not be involved with a married man.
It's not a nice book. Watching the father slide into incontinence and dementia is never going to be nice. And the characters are all such fuck-ups that you can't help but see yourself in them, and get depressed. So not a nice book, nor a happy one.
And it's not the easiest of books to get into. Franzen has this annoying mannerism of long paranthetical digressions in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes he does it represent the father's wandering mind. Sometimes he just does it to be funny. Almost always, it's distracting.
But about a hundred pages in, he eases off on the trick-writing and lets the characters tell their stories. They flesh out from amusing charactures into three dimensional people, and their lives are such messes that you can't help but pity them, and root for them.
It's deeply humane writing, aware of just how flawed people can be, how insignificant and filled with regret. But with it comes an awareness of how worthy people are of love. And how close they are to being loved, if only they weren't so isolated by their selves. It's almost Buddhist.
A fine book. It will take you places you may not want to go. But if you go there, and if you think carefully about what you see, you will learn things. And when you put the book down, you will want to go out into the world, and love.
Or maybe that's just the lack of sleep talking.
Last night I stayed up until 5am reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.
Jesus. What a book.
It's the story of a midwestern American family slowly falling apart. Their mother just wants them home for one last Christmas. But the father has Parkinsons Disease and hallucinates, the eldest son is trying to convince himself and the world he's not clinically depressed, the middle son has been fired from his academic position and winds up involved in Eastern European fraud, and the youngest daughter may or may not be involved with a married man.
It's not a nice book. Watching the father slide into incontinence and dementia is never going to be nice. And the characters are all such fuck-ups that you can't help but see yourself in them, and get depressed. So not a nice book, nor a happy one.
And it's not the easiest of books to get into. Franzen has this annoying mannerism of long paranthetical digressions in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes he does it represent the father's wandering mind. Sometimes he just does it to be funny. Almost always, it's distracting.
But about a hundred pages in, he eases off on the trick-writing and lets the characters tell their stories. They flesh out from amusing charactures into three dimensional people, and their lives are such messes that you can't help but pity them, and root for them.
It's deeply humane writing, aware of just how flawed people can be, how insignificant and filled with regret. But with it comes an awareness of how worthy people are of love. And how close they are to being loved, if only they weren't so isolated by their selves. It's almost Buddhist.
A fine book. It will take you places you may not want to go. But if you go there, and if you think carefully about what you see, you will learn things. And when you put the book down, you will want to go out into the world, and love.
Or maybe that's just the lack of sleep talking.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-12 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-12 08:05 pm (UTC)You're sleeping with a married man?
lucky him ;)
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Date: 2005-03-12 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-13 04:03 am (UTC)How profound (and well-put).
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Date: 2005-03-14 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 06:43 pm (UTC);p
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Date: 2005-03-17 11:20 pm (UTC)I also have a story about me, The Corrections and the whole Oprah's book club thing. When you've finished it, we should have a chat.