A boy of seven sits at the kitchen table long after the dishes have been cleared. In front of him is a plate of liver, rutabaga and beet greens that his mother cooked partly to spite his father, and his father has ruled that nobody leaves the table until the plate is clean. The boy hides what he can, eats what he must, and stays put. The light goes. His sister is put to bed. Hours pass. The scene sits in the middle of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, inside a long flashback, and it may be the best single chapter of a book that has many contenders. Every later grievance of the Lambert family seems to begin at that table.
That boy, Chip, grows up to be one of three adult children whose parents want them home in St. Jude for Christmas. The novel opens on a Midwestern afternoon in autumn and walks its family, year by year and season by season, toward that December. Thanksgiving passes through its margins more than once, but the holiday it is really aimed at is the one with the tree.
A Father Who Loves From a Distance
Alfred Lambert is the book’s gravitational centre. A former railroad engineer, he is now trembling, falling and seeing things that are not there, and Enid, his wife, is running out of ways to pretend otherwise. Franzen writes illness in close focus without asking for pity. A late scene in which Alfred tries to repair a string of Christmas lights, finding that one stretch of bulbs keeps dying while the rest burn, says more about his mind than any diagnosis.
What gives this thread its depth is how slowly the novel reveals him. For hundreds of pages he looks like the cold, rigid father his sons describe, and the book seems to agree. Then, little by little, it shows a man whose love takes the form of distance, who protects his family by refusing to ask about their lives. Enid, meanwhile, is all appetite: for status, for her grandson’s company, for a perfect holiday. Her hope reads at first as foolishness and later as a kind of stubbornness that keeps the house standing. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen lets both readings stay true.
The Children’s Escape Routes
Each child gets a long movement of the novel, and each has run in a different direction. Chip has lost a college teaching job over an affair with a student and is trying to sell a screenplay whose first pages are a lecture on Tudor anatomy. His lowest point delivers him to a Lithuanian former official who looks almost exactly like him and has a plan to sell his own country to Western investors online. Denise, the youngest, has become a celebrated Philadelphia chef and is opening a restaurant inside a disused power plant, a project that rewards her talent and exposes everything she has kept hidden. Gary, the eldest, manages money and is losing an argument with his own family about whether anyone will go to St. Jude at all. What unites the three is that each believes he or she has escaped, and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen spends hundreds of pages proving otherwise, with a patience that is part comedy and part autopsy.
The architecture is cumulative. Each section quietly changes the reader’s view of the people in the last one, so that by the time they finally share a table in the closing pages, a single Christmas breakfast carries the weight of every earlier chapter. The Christmasland light show at the local park, which Enid has been promising her grandson for months, becomes the novel’s quiet emblem of a family wanting to believe in something together and not quite managing it.
Jonathan Franzen at Sea
The parents’ autumn cruise to see the leaves turn in New England and Canada is the novel’s best comedy. The ship’s public rooms are named after Scandinavian writers and composers, the dinner companions are a sexy, rude Swedish couple and a stupefyingly dull Norwegian one, and the ship’s doctor sells Enid a mood pill in named blends with the patter of a car salesman. Under the farce, a grieving mother at Enid’s table carries one of the novel’s darkest stories, and Alfred’s nights in their cabin are among its most harrowing. The section turns on a moment that changes the family’s plans, and Franzen handles it with real cinematic nerve. Nowhere else in The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen do the laughter and the dread sit so close together, and nowhere else is it clearer that the author can write a set piece that works on both levels at once.
Where Jonathan Franzen Overreaches
The novel is not short and does not always earn its length. Denise’s movement in particular leaves the main story suspended at its tensest point and spends a very long time on her history and her romantic entanglements before returning. The writing there is often superb, yet the pacing sags, and readers who loved the first half of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen may feel it has wandered off just when they most wanted to know what happened next.
The comedy has an edge that sometimes cuts the wrong way. Several characters, Gary’s wife most of all, along with Chip’s girlfriend, exist mostly to be disliked, and the narration lingers on sex and bodily functions with a relish that will strike some readers as adolescent. The Baltic subplot, too, stretches a good satirical joke a fair distance past its punchline. Readers should know going in that the book deals frankly with dementia, incontinence, suicidal despair, explicit sex, drug use and casual bigotry.
The Novel Jonathan Franzen Had to Unlearn
Born in 1959, Franzen had been writing for The New Yorker since the mid-nineties and had published two dense, conspiracy-minded novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, which won respect but few readers. This third book abandoned that showy machinery for close realism about one family, and it became one of the defining American novels of its decade, collecting the National Book Award for Fiction in its first year. His later family novels include Purity and Crossroads, the opening volume of a planned trilogy.
Away from fiction, Franzen is a devoted birdwatcher who has written widely about bird conservation. The Corrections has also had an unlucky screen life: a television pilot directed by Noah Baumbach was shot for HBO in 2012 and never went to series, leaving this sprawling family story, for now, best met on the page.
Final Thoughts
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is uneven, sometimes mean and longer than it needs to be, and it remains one of the indispensable novels about families and the ways they fail one another with the best of intentions. Its portrait of an ageing father and the children who cannot decide whether to rescue him is as true now as it was a quarter-century ago, and its comedy still lands.
For the long Thanksgiving weekend, it pairs well with The Ice Storm by Rick Moody, another holiday novel in which the adults behave worse than their children, and with Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which gathers a family at home in a season of change and is far kinder to everyone in it. Read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen first, while there is still time to phone home before the holidays.