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.