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.
