Ordinary People

During the Gulf War, Jonathan Franzen, fledgling novelist, found himself sitting in front of the television watching the bombing of Baghdad and acidly wondering how fiction could hope to compete with the distortions of televised reality, especially with the instant distortions of news shows. Five years later, he published a literary manifesto in Harper’s in which he used the experience as an example of how powerless the novel had become beside the impact of the media culture. Even the media’s favors, he protested, amounted to the kiss of death for a novelist.

Franzen went on to declare his “despair about the [novelist’s] possibility of connecting the personal and the social.” The media presented one obstacle to such an aspiration; contemporary America posed another. That was because in America, suffering had become medicalized into stories with happy endings. The “mystery” in life that literature had always applied itself to was converted by Americans into a manageable “disease.”

Structuring his new novel with themes of depression, disease and an expanding pharmacological culture, Franzen has made “The Corrections” virtually a fictional reenactment of his essay. And the media culture has amiably hailed it as a masterpiece. “The Corrections” is not a masterpiece; it is a second-rate work with first-rate moments and ambitions. And even more than a work of art, “The Corrections” is a significant cultural document.

Franzen wants to capture, in Trollope’s phrase, “the way we live now” and to write an old-fashioned novel, solidly built on character and psychological insight. The novel’s title, repeated throughout the book, refers to Americans’ belief in perpetual self-renewal. In this surprisingly derivative vision, prisons “correct,” and so do drugs; much action hinges on an antidepressant called “Corecktall.” Parents try to correct their children, and children naturally try to correct their parent’s corrections.

The novel revolves around the tensions between two generations of Americans, and it will remind readers of the archetypal conflict of a score of books and movies. On one side loom Alfred and Enid, Midwestern parents born during the Depression; on the other side stand their three boomer children: Gary, an investment banker; Denise, a high-powered chef; and Chip, a former English professor and failing screenwriter. Alfred is repressed, puritanical, utterly perplexed by his children, estranged by the new economy and actually pretty tender. He also suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Enid is repressed by Alfred and beset by Madame Bovary-like illusions; she flees anything that upsets her willfully rosy view of the world. She, too, is utterly perplexed by her children and, yes, actually pretty tender.

Gary hates his depressed father and ends up resembling him. Denise, the caring daughter, is alienated by Gary’s rage against their parents. Chip, the wayward artistic son, turns out to be the prodigal son who returns to his parents in the end, after a harrowing stay in Lithuania, whose post-communist economy Franzen cartoonishly presents as the dark underside of our own. Chip and Denise are actually pretty tender. The central event of the novel is Enid’s desire to have the family united in her Midwestern home, where all the children grew up, for one last Christmas. As one might imagine, this is not the Christmas that either parents or children remember as being anything like the ones they used to have.

“The Corrections” is everything certain readers have been wanting for years: an attempt at a realistic portrayal of ordinary people and everyday life. Franzen isn’t afraid to try to inhabit the most diverse kinds of people, from heiresses to nurses to gangsters to Norwegian tourists. And he has to be one of the funniest novelists at work now. His portrait of the social comedy aboard a luxury cruise liner--his mischievous reply to David Foster Wallace’s essay about taking a luxury cruise--stands alone as a comic gem. There is something humbling about the way this writer strains his psychological acumen to the breaking point.

Yet “The Corrections” flounders amid its connect-the-dots--”personal” to “social”--deliberateness. Franzen is so studious about representing the way people live now that his characters are truer to their creator’s idea of them than to themselves. They are like brightly painted wind-up toys, propelled not by idiosyncratic inner life but by their social roles. Chuck, a lawyer who plays the stock market, steers his car “as if dialing his broker.” About Gary, the investment banker, Franzen writes: “[H]is leading indicators all seemed rather healthy.”

Franzen is unable to regulate the flow of the literal through his novel. Thinking of his wife, Gary recalls “the sound of her swallowing her lachrymal mucus.” Franzen even brings his metaphors and similes down to the level of a fact, so that they are mere redundancies. Alfred, who has disobedient children, also has hands that tremble “like bad children.”

The unexpected result of Franzen’s literalness is that he associates the “real” with whatever thought comes into his head. It is as if he refuses to surrender his authorial rights and disdains his imagined world. This novel’s harsh tonal shifts, never justified by their context, are like the ringing of a cell phone throughout a concert. In one place, you get traditional description: “All the foliage near the house was chalky now with outpouring indoor light, but there was still enough twilight in the western trees to make them silhouettes.” In another, Franzen suddenly decides to animate his characters with the biochemistry of his pharmacological subtext: Enid “brought her knee up in a vaguely proctologic reflex”; “the anger was an autonomous neurochemical event.”

Sometimes the narrator is casual: “its branches and spurs were rotting like you couldn’t believe,” as if he wanted to remind us that he was not some snooty writer but a regular guy; sometimes he pulls out all the literary stops: “odd to glimpse infinity precisely in a finite curve, eternity precisely in the seasonal.” We get “drecky insinuations,” but we also encounter “interconnecting flywheels of pride and love.” Franzen is enthralled by the British “rather” and “quite.” He uses them so often that the novel takes on a stiff, Merchant-Ivory feeling: “a rather tasty Fronsac”; “a rather substantial tiny splash”; “never quite believed.” By novel’s end, the characters have absurdly acquired the same tic: “You hit me rather hard. Why did you do that?”

Having driven out his imaginative sympathy with his subjectivity, Franzen ends up creating characters that are monsters of subjectivity without sympathy. Chip, Denise and Gary, three adults in their 30s and 40s, spend much of the novel either self-consciously wondering whether they are depressed or anguishing over their childhoods. And Franzen presents this solipsism not as a critical satire on solipsism but as a sympathetic feature of his characters’ identities. For this novel, an attempt to look American life unflinchingly in the eye, ends happily for everyone involved.

Witnessing a vicious fight that she had incited between a husband and wife, both of whom she had had affairs with, Denise thinks of Mom and Dad: “She was struck by how seldom in her childhood her parents, that other married couple in her life, that other incompatible pair, had shouted at each other.” Trapped in strife-torn Lithuania--where he experiences the “strong synthetic shampoo fragrances such as pleased the Baltic nose”--having witnessed the murder of two people, knowing that his close Lithuanian friend is in danger of being killed, Chip considers the weather and recalls “the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break.” Buried in such emotional deadness is the author’s cool defensive irony, and in the end Franzen’s characters cannot escape it. As Chip speeds away with three friends from Vilnius in an SUV, the car flips over: “He experienced huge retroactive affection for good traction, low centers of gravity, and non-angular varieties of momentum.”

The novel’s most callous feature is its portrait of Alfred, who spends nearly the entire novel urinating and defecating in his pants. Alfred’s experience is so pitiful that the reader has no space in which to develop his or her own response to the character. Indeed, because a disease like Parkinson’s often reduces people to the same condition, Alfred is no character at all. His disintegrating consciousness becomes nothing more than an opportunity for Franzen to show, on the surface, how serious and moral he is about human suffering, and at bottom, to indulge in a lot of far-out creative writing.

There is plenty of up-to-the-minute chatter about clinical depression in this book but no real sorrow or tragedy. It’s as if Franzen can only rise out of himself by gripping the handles of platitude. Reading “The Corrections,” a fledging novelist might well wonder how he or she could hope to compete with a novel that is in such calculated complicity with the official version of the way we live now--and at the same time so unreal.