Objections to The Corrections

I really did not like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.   It reads easily enough, and Franzen has competent, easy-moving sentences, but while there are no road-blocks to pleasure here, there is very little to get excited about either.  I found nothing particularly engaging about the characters, the plot, the relationships, the humor, or Franzen’s insights into human nature or the modern condition.  This is my first Franzen novel, and I’ll be surprised if it’s not my last.  My enjoyment of the book certainly suffered from my having just read Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.  While reading Atwood, I was struck by passage after passage of poetry, both in phrasing and insight.  Compared to Atwood’s gifts, Franzen’s skills are sophomoric at best.

For the most part, reading The Corrections reminded me of reading a Grisham novel: painless but dull.  I found Franzen’s stabs at cleverness to be writerly and meaningless.  For example: “She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.”  That’s the kind of sentence that looks appealing on the surface but which is neither revealing nor plausible.  It is a sentence devoid of any real meaning.  Franzen’s similes fare no better than these empty phrases.  Similes can either be a tool of power and clarity or they can be cute.  Only a handful of the former find their way into this novel.  Most are like this example, which I found at random flipping through the book:  “The doormen in this neighborhood hosed the sidewalk twice a day, and sanitation trucks with brushes like the mustaches of city cops scoured the streets three times a week, but in New York City you never had to go far to find filth and rage.”  The simile of “brushes like the mustaches of city cops” does nothing to give tooth or meaning to the sanitation trucks and what they represent.  It’s an empty rhetorical device that is used competently but in a way that adds nothing to the story.

Family, self-deception, intellectual theorizing vs. reality, the loss of the Midwestern innocence, the use of pharmaceuticals and therapy to compensate for the emptiness of our modern existences—these are all interesting thematic concerns and worthy of exploration though cutting fiction.  This is not that cutting fiction.  It grapples these subjects like a limp-grip handshake of someone who’s not all that interested in or comfortable with the meeting. 

My dislike of The Corrections has nearly everything to do with taste of literary preferences.  Writerly sentences and empty similes are hardly a reason to dismiss a book; I give these examples as indicators of the novel’s general literary approach.  Someone else might find this style rewarding, but it does nothing for me.  This is one of the few novels whose presence on the Time’s 100 list is a complete mystery to me.  Nearly everything else has been either amazing, culturally important, historically important, or stylistically important.  The Corrections is none of those things. 

The Brilliance of The Blind Assassin

*Be warned: Spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers lay ahead, so don’t read on if you haven’t read the book—and you should read the book, because it is awesome: beautifully written with a striking narrator who unravels a compelling tale.  Go read it and then return, read what I have to say, and then tell me all about your own thoughts.*

*Second warning: this book deserves a much more elegantly written and rigorously considered review than what follows.  It is the week after the 2016 election that I write this and my mental acuity is not at its height.*

This is the first book by Margaret Atwood that I have read, and now I’m wondering why I’ve been wasting years as a literate adult not reading more by her.  The Blind Assassin was one of those books that I knew I was going to love from the first page.  Her writing is a wonderful combination of directness and poetry, intellect and insight without any pomposity.  Her language is beautiful even when her subject isn’t.  Her narrator that is rich and unique.  Iris Chase Griffen is an ornery and sharp-witted woman who is struggling against her physical body’s betrayal and against the nasty turns of fate that time has thrown at her.  She is likeable and humorous and cruel and pitiable.  Atwood’s other characters are all so beautifully drawn that the world of The Blind Assassin pulses with life, even as the narrator’s own pulse slows.

Structure and story in this novel are every bit as brilliant as character and writing.   Atwood weaves a narrative through a variety of literary forms in this book.  Through memoir, fiction, news reports, letters, and more, the strands of Iris’s and Laura’s lives come together and separate and return again so beautifully that I found myself wanting to linger in its pages and remember it in the same way that you sometimes stop to try to commit to memory the details of a particularly striking sunset.  I loved the alternating of “fact” and “fiction”—I use the quotes because of course the “memoir” is itself fiction and the fictional novel within the novel is really biographical for the fictitious author—to connect the past and present and to reveal to the reader the truths buried under the rubble of lies.

This is, above all else, a story about women.  First it’s a story about Laura and Iris, and even when the narrative seems to be more about Iris, Laura is always present.  As Iris writes at the end, “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers.  We wrote the book together.  It’s a left-handed book.  That’s why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it.”  It’s also a story about Iris and her descendants, namely Sabrina, her granddaughter to whom she finally decides she is writing.  Having lost her daughter, Iris wants to be able to tell Sabrina who she is by laying out the entirety of their past.  Iris imagines that Sabrina is standoffish and brash and dresses in black, a rebel in the way teenage girls can be.  Sabrina has been traveling the world, presumably a lived metaphor for trying to find herself, and Iris, through this book, wants to tell Sabrina who she is.  But the past can be a prison, and Iris wants any sense of identity gained from it to be freeing to Sabrina.  That is the gift that Alex Thomas brings to the narrative: “Your real grandfather was Alex Thomas, and as to who his own father was, well, the sky’s the limit. . . . Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation.  You’re free to reinvent yourself at will.”  Iris wants the information she gives to be simultaneously defining and non-confining.

There are only four men of any consequence in the novel, and one of them is Myra’s husband who does little more than drive Iris about town, mend her broken home, and occasionally keep her company.  The other three, while exerting great influence at particular parts of the narrative, all fail to keep their power for the entirety of the novel.  Alex Thomas comes closest to having a lasting influence, being the man that both sisters loved.  I found Alex to be a fascinating character insofar as he was something of an ass as characterized in the novel within the novel.  He treated the female heroine rather crappily, dismissing her, laughing at her, talking down to her, chiding her, and deriding her.  He is no romantic hero, and no one reading the novel will walk away with an idolized image of him as a lover or a companion.  But Atwood handles his portrayal so deftly that we never criticize (at least not for long) the heroine for being with him.  She is using him as much as he is using her, and while there is genuine affection between them, no one suffers from the delusion that this is a story of true love.  He is powerful and powerless at the same time, mean but desperate, manly and childish.  And as our understanding of who the heroine is changes—as we move from seeing Laura as the unnamed woman to seeing Iris instead—the very nature of the man and the woman’s relationship alters before our eyes.  The whole relationship is masterfully crafted and a marvel to read.

I will point to one other thing that I love: the way Atwood juggles genres and narrative conventions in The Blind Assassin.  We obviously have the science fiction tale of the Zycronians that the man tells the woman, and then there is the romance novel within which that tale of science fiction is told.  Then, within the larger narrative of the novel, we learn of Iris’s and Laura’s childhood, which follows the conventions of the gothic romance novel.  The girls are locked away in the old manor, kept apart from the rabble, their father disappearing regularly into the upper tower for seclusion.  There are secrets behind the doors sealed off to the young girls, and they lose their mother early in life.  Then Iris marries a mysterious and controlling man with wicked plans and a domineering sister.  The entire sequence of their honeymoon, as she is treated like a child, kept in the dark about her father’s state, and controlled by her husband and sister-in-law, was heartbreaking and as tragic-feeling as anything in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.  Atwood takes these conventions and places them in a modern context to load them full of additional meaning.  By leaning on those conventions, she presents Richard is the real-life version of Rochester, a domineering man who cannot brook opposition.  Instead of a mad-woman in an attic, he stalks Laura and then declares both Laura and Iris mad to hide his actions from public.  The brilliant stroke here is that this tale is told from the viewpoint of our heroine as a cantankerous old woman who sees the villain for what he really is, a pathetic, vain, predator.  We get our tragedy and a sense of perspective too.  In a lot of ways, it is jarring to move from the 1930s and 1940s to 1998.  She could easily have created a simple frame for the novel, beginning and ending in 1998 and throwing us into the past for the whole of the middle, but instead we are in a constant state of submersion and surfacing.  Atwood uses that jolt to keep the past in perspective. 

I really enjoyed this book, and I’m in awe of the way Atwood handles her characters, her storylines, and her language.

I will leave you with a few questions.

What is the significance of Iris’s fascination with the scrawling on the bathroom walls?  Is it the anonymity of authorship?  The way that voices are layered upon each other making comment upon comment, cultural reference upon cultural reference? 

What is the significance of the prominence of the Red Scare in the story?  A lot of the backdrop is the world of factories and labor and work, not to mention war, all traditionally masculine settings.  Is this to keep the girls out or a commentary on male spaces?  Is it important how the women fare in these traditionally male spaces in the novel?

There are a lot of suicides in the novel—why?  Similarly, infidelity seems to be a recurring plot point.  Is that relevant?

How is the relationship between Richard and Winifred a foil for the relationship between Laura and Iris?

What do you make of the recurring references to “another dimension”?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and analyses!

Something to Sink Your Teeth Into: Zadie Smith's White Teeth

As I’ve mentioned in another post or two, I often get asked about whatever novel I am currently reading, and when the book is not particularly famous, the number one question is, not surprisingly, “What’s it about?”  Sometimes I’m able to answer that question pretty early on in my reading, either because the trajectory and focus of the novel is clear from the outset or because a sufficient summary is provided on the back cover of the book.  But at other times—and I would venture to say that it was quite often—I wouldn’t be able to answer that question until I was just about done with the story.  So much of what a novel is about is determined by where it goes and what it focuses on in the end.  This latter situation was certainly the case with White Teeth.  At first it seemed to be a novel about Archie Jones, then about Archie and Samad’s relationship, then about the Jones and Iqbal families, then about what it means to be an immigrant in England when your family comes from places once controlled by the British Empire, then about what it meant to be a second generation non-white kid growing up in England in the 80s and 90s, and finally about three generations of three families in England at the end of the millennium.  The novel unfolds itself as you read, introducing new characters, new situations, and new connections, and as she introduces each new element, Zadie Smith, the author, lets you appreciate the individual element before letting you see how it fits in with what you already know.  Add to this technique of revelation and discovery interesting characters, fantastic dialogue, developing plots, great humor, irreverent jabs, and writing of great clarity and insight, and you have a dynamite novel.

White Teeth tackles so many different issues that I had a hard time collecting my thoughts about it.  The novel is about what it means to be English, what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be the child of immigrants, what it means to be non-white in England, what it means to have roots in a colonized country what it means to be Muslim in England, what role religious and philosophical fundamentalism plays in our lives and in our culture, and what it means to accept or deny the notions of fate and free will.  Intellectually, I wondered if this broad focus weakened the strength of the novel, but I only wondered that for the first half of the novel, when it was unclear to me where we were going.  We were leaning about the characters and their families’ pasts, but their future was not forecasted at all.  Then, at just about the half way point, Smith brings these entertaining and colorful characters into a collision course with white middle-class England with the introduction of the Chalfens.  That’s the point at which White Teeth takes off.  The Chalfens act as a point of contrast (and similarity) for the Joneses and the Iqbals, but they also start entangling themselves inextricably in their family affairs and in the lives of their children.  And that’s when Smith’s wide focus made sense to me as a reader.

All those different focuses I mentioned earlier (generations, Britishness, colonialism, immigration, family roots, religious and philosophic fundamentalism) are at play in the experience of a multicultural England, and they all need to be in play for a novel to attempt to capture anything close to the experiences of the families and people it seeks to discuss.  Smith handles all these concerns with grace and seeming ease by anchoring everything in the relationships at the center—and flung out at the edges—of her story.  Smith is a master at relationships, at the desire to come together and the need to push apart, at the mixture of admiration and disgust that we feel for each other.  What’s more, she creates this beautiful delineated web of relationships while artfully crafting a compelling plot that seems to wander away and then comes snapping back together in beautiful and unexpected ways. 

The characters are wonderful.  The relationships are brilliantly presented.  The writing is delightful mixture of crude and lyrical language.  The observations are insightful.  The plot is tight and driving in quiet and unexpected ways. 

White Teeth is a beautiful novel that I highly recommend.

Having His Bomb and Exploding it Too: Roth's American Pastoral

*Warning: Spoilers lie ahead like the stars on an American flag’s field of blue*

American Pastoral is a simple tale of Seymour “Swede” Levov.  Levov was naturally gifted in sports and became a local hero in his New Jersey hometown and high school.  Out of high school, in 1945, he joined the marines, but he was made a drill sergeant on Parris Island and never saw any combat.  He married a beautiful woman who had won the title of Miss New Jersey but failed to win Miss America.  He took over his father’s thriving glove-making business.  He had a daughter, Meredith, known as Merry, and moved to the country with his family.  In her teen years, Merry became and opponent of the Vietnam War and gained the name Ho Chi Levov among her classmates for her outspoken political opinions.  In 1968, she set a bomb off at the postal area of the local general store, killing a family doctor in the process.  The bomb blew up Levov’s American Dream along with the Hamlin Store.  Levov doesn’t see his daughter again until 1973.  It is a meeting that lasts for only a few hours at most but that leaves him as distraught as ever.  The last quarter of the novel takes place at a dinner party hosted by Levov and his wife the very evening after he has seen Merry as we watch the family, and presumably America by extension, fall apart.

While Seymour Levov’s story would in itself be a gripping one, Philip Roth wants the story to be every bit as much about America as it is about Levov, and that’s where his weird narrative tricks start muddying up the waters of his simple tale.  Roth’s tale of America’s lost innocence is essentially a conservative tale about how the beauty and promise of postwar America was destroyed in the late 1960s by race riots, activist women, and opposition to the Vietnam war.  Roth, it seems to me, is too smart and world-weary to not know that his representation of America’s Paradise Lost is too simplistic and easy, so he casts layers and layers of doubt on top of the narrative which simultaneously lets him draw the simple conclusions he draws and suggest that he knows that the conclusions are too simple.  He gets his simplicity and wants to keep his intellectual rigorousness at the same time--a move that, to me, falls flat.

The first and most prominent narrative complication in American Pastoral is the presence of a frame.  The story of Seymour Levov doesn’t begin until page 83 in my edition.  Before that, we learn bits about Seymour, but more importantly we learn about our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and his relationship with Levov, his idolization of Levov.  The only other Roth novel that I have read is Portnoy’s Complaint, so I was unaware at the time that I read American Pastoral that Zuckerman is a recurring character in Roth’s books, a narrator who closely resembles Roth himself.  Zuckerman was friends with Levov’s younger brother, Jerry, and had a huge man-crush on Seymour, making a childhood hero of him.  The novel, published in 1997, begins in 1995, and the first chapter involves a long scene of Zuckerman and Levov meeting for dinner in May of that year.  Throughout the scene Zuckerman attempts to reach below the surface, to figure out who Levov is, to suss out his motives, his thoughts, his traumas.  Each time he tries to get a read on Levov, Zuckerman tells us “I was wrong.”  So Roth sets us up with an unreliable narrator, a man who both idolizes Levov and who seems incapable to knowing what is going on beneath the surface.  To complicate matters further, Zuckerman writes his version of events after he learns about Levov’s death and Merry’s bombing of the Hamlin store from Jerry, whom he meets at his 45^th class reunion, in the fall of 1995.  Once he finishes his story, he tells us this:

I had the amateur’s impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thought.  It was an impulse I quashed: I hadn’t been writing and publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it. ‘That’s not my brother,’ he’d tell me, ‘not in any way.  You’ve misrepresented him.  My brother couldn’t think like that, didn’t talk like that,’ etc.

Through the layers that Roth creates, we have an imaginary narrator creating the imaginary past of another imaginary character with a different unknowable imaginary past.  As a result, nothing here is presented to us in a way that we can comfortably draw conclusions about Roth.  He has shielded himself fiercely from the story that bears his name.

Within this muddy framework, there are still more questions raised that are never answered.  I am thinking particularly here of Merry and her agency.  Levov is convinced that his daughter has been manipulated, brainwashed into creating the bomb and setting it off.  In opposition to that idea is Rita Cohen, the petite woman who presents herself to Levov as a disciple of Merry, a woman who is awed and intimidated by Merry’s overwhelming personality.  When Levov last speaks with Rita, however, Rita accuses him of telling Merry that Rita and Levov never slept together.  The subject of Rita and Levov’s encounter at the hotel is mentioned only in passing in Merry and Levov’s conversation, so Rita is clearly not as connected with Merry as she has led Levov to believe.  Who Rita is is never answered in the novel, nor is her connection to Merry ever revealed.  Rita’s presence allows for some excellent drama and allows for Roth to create an over-the-top sex scene, but her presence in the novel itself does little to effect the overarching plot.  Remove Rita from the novel, and the only real thing that you lose is the counterpoint to Merry’s agency.  Without Rita, there is no one to suggest that Merry is not simply a pawn in someone else’s game.  Levov’s inability to know—and ours as well--whether Merry was manipulated or manipulator is central to Levov’s crisis and pain.  The only other thing that Rita contributes to the story is that she is another corrupted woman in a landscape of corrupted women.

It is important to the novel that Merry is a daughter and not a son.  If Levov had a headstrong son who committed this act of terrorism, one who then met with his father at twenty-one with a sense of calm and purpose, the issue of his agency would not have been called into question, with or without a Rita Cohen.  It is Merry’s femininity that calls her agency into question.  She is always Levov’s little girl underneath the monster she has become, and I mean monster quite literally.  When she became a teenage, Roth/Zuckerman describes her transformation this way: 

the grasshopper child who used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across every available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout—she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries, pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall.

Merry becomes monstrously unfeminine, and the disgust at her appearance and hygiene is anything but lovingly described in that passage.  Both Merry and Rita are women whose femininity is twisted and threatening to Levov and the America he represents.

Poor Levov, high school sports icon, all-American kid, dutiful son, and loving father finds himself saddled with this beast of a child who seems to hate everything about the country he loves.  She’s argumentative and vitriolic in spite of Levov’s loving understanding.  No one can blame Levov for his handling of Merry’s desire to go to New York to hang out with her politically radical friends.  Roth/Zuckerman is at pains to show what a devoted and thoughtful father he is.  But then, Levov is surrounded by faulty women.  His love for Dawn, his wife, was triggered by her beauty, and her beauty is the thing that he returns to about her again and again.  Even at the moment that he most admires her, the moment in which she wins over his father, he attributes her ability to do that to her beauty.  In opposition to Dawn’s femininity are Sheila Salzman’s cold intelligence that leaves us wondering how we are supposed to believe that Levov ever had an affair with her,  Marcia Umanoff’s snooty academic posturing and delight in needling poor Lou Levov’s sense of morality, and Jessie Orcutt’s unexplained drunken behavior whose violence against Lou brings the novel to a close.  The women of this novel are uncouth and violent and a never-ending source of aggravation for Seymour Levov.  In spite of all of Levov’s violent fantasies in the last portion of the novel, he is not a man of violence.  In contrast, the two overt acts of violence are committed by women, first Merry’s bombing and then Jessie’s stabbing of Lou Levov with a dessert fork.  And after Jessie’s stabbing, it is Marcia who finds the whole thing amusing, and her laughter is the final crushing note that Levov has to endure:

Marcia sank into Jessie’s empty chair, in front of the brimming glass of milk, and with her face in her hands, she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.

Marcia is one of the laughing jackals, delighting in the world falling apart, in America’s falling apart.  In fact, she and the women like here are one of the causes of that destruction

Marcia’s laughing leads Levov to ask the final question in the novel: “And what is wrong with their life?  What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”  And here is where Roth gets to enjoy his sentimentality and his snark at the same time.  Lou’s patronizing treatment of Jessie is painful to watch, even if you believe his heart is in the right place.  Seymour would have had the perfect life if the women in his world would have only given up their own agency and followed his plans.  Merry would have been the adoring daughter.  Dawn would have been the happy wife.  He would have been Johnny Appleseed, conquering and nurturing the wilds of America.  They all would have lived in the house he chose and lived the life he dreamed and they all would have been happy.  The ending question of the novel cannot be answered unproblematically.  One cannot say that there is nothing wrong with the life of the Levovs.  But the question depends on your desire to say that there is something beautiful about the life of the Levovs to feel the question’s pinch.  You need to agree that there was something ideal about the world before the Fall whose absence we mourn.  Levov is a simple hero, an American hero, and  Zuckerman finds no fitter comparison for Levov historically than John F. Kennedy:

His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from all self-doubt by his heroic role—that all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder made me think of the compelling story . . . of Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, only a decade the Swede’s senior and another privileged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-forties just five years before the Swede’s daughter violently protested the Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father’s life. I thought, but of course. He is our Kennedy.

Merry, in this analogy, is Lee Harvey Oswald and her primary victim is not the doctor who died in the blast, but her father, whose understanding of America died in the blast.  Zuckerman’s tale depends on a lionizing of Levov and the America he represented, and in turn Roth’s novel depends on the same, but Roth knows that life is too complicated for that lionizing, so he distances himself while at the same time having the emotional thrust of his novel depend on it.

The novel is, not surprisingly, well written.  Roth creates great encounters between characters and scenes that are pulsing with meaning and movement.  My problems with the novel are all at the level of content, but the writing is not so amazing that it is with few parallels.  In short, I believe that had this list of 100 fiction novels in the English language been created by two women or two black scholars instead of two white men American Pastoral would not have made the cut.

I haven’t even touched on the racial politics that hover at the fringes of the history Roth tells and the importance of Vickie, his office manager, and the praise Zuckerman wants to give Levov for employing black men and women in Newark until the economic environment led her to move his glove factory out of the country.  I haven’t touched upon the weird Freudian scene in which Merry at twelve years of age asks Levov to “kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.”  I haven’t touched upon the role of religion in Roth’s story, the relationship between Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism.  If you have insight into these elements in the story, I’d love to hear about it.