I loved Franzen's Freedom and really couldn't wait to get into this novel. I listened to this on audiobook (it helped that my favourite reader, George Guidall, recorded this in unabridged form). George does a brilliant job, as he always does. The story is long and complex and funny and sad. It has the right mix of obnoxious characters and those who evoke sympathy. I liked it and I loved bits of it. The last part of the book was brilliant and in the end I was really sad I'd finished it.

JONATHAN FRANZEN'S TOP TEN RULES FOR WRITERS (as given to The Guardian on 20 Feb 2010)

with additional commenty comments by me :


1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

Hmm, well, maybe. I can't think Hugh Selby had very friendly thoughts when he wrote his brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn, it reads like he wants to shove all of us into a landfill site and have done with the human race. But quite often that's a good attitude for a writer to have. Some books you walk around and poke sticks at, they're designed that way; some books you take your machete and hack into the meat and the filth and the hell with any bystanders getting splattered, they shouldn't be bystanding so close if their fine suits mean that much to them. Some books you can have round for tea with mama. So I disagree with rule 1.

2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

Garrison Keillor musta got a real fat wad for Lake Wobegon then. Likewise Dickens. I'm not sure what this rule really means. Maybe it's just like a tie with a drawing of a fish on it.

3 Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

Okay JF okay. Deep breaths - put your head between your legs.

4 Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.

Agreed - I recently jacked in a novel because I found to my horror that it was written in the SECOND person. You do this, you say that. Nooooooooooooo! That's just wrong. Only one book gets away with that, which is An American Tragedy by Theodore Drieser, which is quite brilliant. But after that one - no second person! You is fired!

(Now... E Annie Proulx - look away now!)

5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

Naw, I think I see what he's getting at but naw. If you marshall your research well, you create a world, you're doing good. Who was that woman who lived in a box in England and wrote about Alaska? I reviewed it too - my memory is going down the drain. Ah yes, The Tenderness of Wolves. Anyway, that was pretty good. So no to rule 5.

6 The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

Sounds like bollocky bollocks to me. Does this actually mean anything?

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Ah, grasshopper, you have much to learn. Come on, JF, you're a great writer, don't bullshit us.

8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Also wrong because these days employers can firewall all porn and gambling and social networking sites. (But here, they don't think of Goodreads as a social networking site, so shhhh, don't tell them....!)

9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

He's galumphing again.

10 You have to love before you can be relentless

That's from a Christmas cracker, i bet.


*********

Anyway, The Corrections is one of the few books which made me want to find out what the guy wrote next, which was Freedom (what a crap title).

The Corrections has one really naff section, where it turns into a stupid farce about post-Soviet Lithuania and gangsters and stuff, really bad. Otherwise I thought it was tough, tender, relentless even, but sadly, full of interesting verbs. Fail yourself, Jonathan.

Amerika’da Ortabatı’dan New York’a uzanan modern bir aile destanı. Enid’in elli yıllık evlilik hayatının ardından tek isteği bir Noel’de son kez, bütün ailenin bir arada olmasıdır. Aynı aileden kök alan bu farklı hayatlar sonunda bir araya gelir ve aralarındaki çatışmaların kökeni ortaya çıkar. Kitap, evli bir çift ve üç yetişkin çocuğu üzerinden 20.yüzyılın sonunda Amerika’daki sosyal koşulları çok iyi yansıtıyor. Evin annesi Enid’in düşmanı, yaşlandıkça daha da kırılgan hale gelen ve hastalığı sonucu gri sislerin arkasında kaybolup kendine ayrı bir dünya inşa eden kocası Alfred. Alfred’in karşı kutbu ise evi tam bir istifçi gibi dolduran ve sürekli toplumsal statü gereği isteklerle gelen karısı, Enid. Kitabın belli bir baş karakteri olmamasına rağmen, gündelik hayatla dahi baş edemeyen, ne birbirleriyle ne de ayrı yaşayabilen bu yaşlı çift ve hayata dair yaşadıkları hüsran o kadar güçlü bir yoğunlukla anlatılıyor ki hikayenin merkezine onları alıyorsunuz. Bence bu kitabın en güzel yanı gerçekçiliği, çünkü karakterleri yazarken bir çok sosyal ve kültürel yönden değişim ve dönüşümleri de aktarıyor. Geçmişten günümüze öyle bir noktaya geliyorsunuz ki bir noktada karakterlerle aranızda bir tanıdıklık gelişiyor, hayatlarına yeni yönler vermiş eski komşularınız ya da okul arkadaşlarınızla yeniden karşılaşmışsınız gibi hissediyorsunuz. Ya da bir tartışmanın ortasında olma hissi o kadar tanıdık ki, tartışan çiftlerin, kardeşlerin ya da ebeveynlerin arasında o kaosu sonuna kadar hissedebiliyorsunuz. Öyle ki, bu tipte bir sahneyi okurken kapıyı çarpıp ortamı terk eden olma isteği kabarıyor içinizde. Bu gerçekliğin çok belirgin hissedildiği bir diğer nokta da Alfred’in demans süreci. Gemi yolculuğu sürecinde tanıdık olmayan bir ortama geçtiğinde yön duygusunu tamamen kaybetmesi, sanrıları ve geri dönüşleri demansın karanlık gerçeğiyle sizi baş başa bırakıyor. Okurken sanırım beni en çok sarsan hatta ezen bölümler bunlardı.

Özetle Jonathan Franzen bu aile romanıyla aslında işlevsiz, modern batılı aile yapısını ele alıyor. Karakterlerin yaşamlarında sosyal ve politik olayların da önemli dönüm noktaları yaratmasıyla aile ve sosyo-kültürel tarihin bir araya geldiği modern bir toplum yansıması çıkmış ortaya. Yazarın tarzı benim çok hoşuma gitti. Lirik, zaman zaman komik -daha doğrusu trajikomik- bir şekilde çatışma, insani kusurlar, başarısızlıklar , hatalar ve ilişkiler üzerine muazzam bir hikaye inşa etmiş. Kitaptaki karakterler ve hikaye hakkında bir şeyler söylemek istemedim çünkü bu aileyi ve her bir detayı okurun kendisinin tanıması kitabın büyüsünü daha etkili bir hale getiriyor bence. Ama şunu söylemeden de geçemeyeceğim. Gary, bütün bahanelerine rağmen senden ölesiye nefret ettim.


"Ben...
Ben hata yaptım...
Ben yalnızım...
Ben ıslağım...
Ben ölmek istiyorum...
Ben üzgünüm...
Ben elimden geleni yaptım...
Ben çocuklarımı seviyorum...
Ben yardım istiyorum...
Ben ölmek istiyorum..."

There is a crowded shelf, among my overflowing bookcases, dedicated solely to books I’m getting around to reading. However much I read, this shelf is always crammed. Most of the books are new, given as gifts on Christmas or my birthday. These are big hardcover titles with tight bindings, handsome dust-jackets, and $35 cover prices. I’m excited to read them, but I hew to a loose first-in, first-out policy, meaning I have to wade through older purchases before I can tackle them (which is part of the reason my literary velocity is always lagging).

The other books on my to-read shelf are older, purchased used for a few pennies (plus shipping and handling). Most are histories and biographies, though I have included several vegetable-books, classics that I should read to better myself, as soon as I can muster the proper will (among them a selection of short stories by Henry James, a poor translation of The Hunchback at Notre Dame, and The House of the Seven Gables).

Also on this shelf are those unconquerable volumes that I will probably never attempt again. These are purchases, written by guys with names like Pynchon, that mock my ambitions with their mere existence (in a fit of rage, I once threw Mason & Dixon into the trash; my mom retrieved it and managed to get a refund at Barnes & Noble). I keep them on the shelf mainly as a form of self-flagellation (though sometimes, when I’m drunk, I can talk myself into giving Infinite Jest another go).

For the longest time, the odd-book on this shelf was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I asked for it one distant Christmas, and upon receiving it, promptly forgot the reasons for having wanted it in the first place. I’m sure, at the time, I thought it’d give my ego a little boost; however, this was ten years ago, and I was also discovering alcohol, which gives the same ego boost with much less effort.

In the years since, I’ve picked up The Corrections now and then, and pondered the vague description on the back cover. The story of a Midwestern family gathering for one last Christmas? The vibe this gave off, a Lifetime movie mixed with a little East Coast condescension, did not exactly excite my blood.

Then Jonathan Franzen went ahead and wrote another book that people started talking about. I wanted to read it for vanity’s sake, so that I could join this conversation, but the thought of having two unread Franzen novels on my shelf was more than I could bear. So, finally, at long last, I read The Corrections.

It was a good choice.

The beginning, however, was not promising. The Corrections opens in the Midwestern town of St. Jude, in the home of the aged Enid and Alfred Lambert. At first blush, they embody all the hallmarks of repressed middle-Americans, at least as viewed by someone who has only seen middle America out an airplane’s window (I know that Franzen was born in St. Louis, but he’s all New York now). Enid is the busybody housewife; Alfred is the lazy husband sitting in his chair. Franzen, never one to be subtle about his metaphors, warns us that alarm bells of anxiety are ringing. Frankly, it took me three attempts to get through the introductory section.

But I kept on, haunted by the specter of another unread book.

I got past the introduction, but still struggled. Part of the problem, I think, is that Franzen is too good and too clever of a writer. There are paragraphs of such sustained wit and singularity that I got exhausted reading them; I just couldn’t stop thinking how hard it must have been for Franzen to come up with this stuff. He really is a dazzling writer, and he does an admirable job sustaining that level throughout, even if he sometimes gets carried away (a description of the weather that includes a “shopping-center sky” may play well in Salman Rushdie’s salon, but not in Omaha).

For instance, a description of Alfred’s workshop/lab:

The gray dust of evil spells and the cobwebs of enchantment thickly cloaked the old electric arc furnace, and the jars of exotic rhodium and sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth, and the hand-printed labels browned by the vapors from a glass-stoppered bottle of aqua regia, and the quad-ruled notebook in which the latest entry in Alfred’s hand dated from a time, fifteen years ago, before the betrayals had begun. Something as daily and friendly as a pencil still occupied the random spot on the workbench where Alfred had laid it in a different decade; the passage of so many years imbued the pencil with a kind of enmity…

As promised by the book cover (and a cover never lies!), a final family Christmas does figure into the plot of The Corrections. But there’s not really a plot, per se. The Christmas gathering is more of a destination, a convenient place where all the plot threads terminate. There is no real climax or resolution, because this is a story of lives, and the only climax to life is death.

The lives in question belong to the Lamberts: the aforementioned Enid and Alfred; oldest child Gary; middle child Chip; and youngest child Denise. Each of these characters gets his or her own discrete time on the stage, in the spotlight. These segments are further split between present-day action, which moves the story towards Christmas, and an extended flashback that fleshes out their early lives and interactions, and helps explain how each person came to be where they are.

This is a novel that rests on its characters, and the characters are marvelous. They begin, each of them, as archetypes: Alfred, the distant, demanding patriarch/tyrant, now suffering from Parkinson’s; Enid, the put-upon, long-suffering housewife; Gary, the type-A high-financier; Chip, the douche-bag left-wing academic; and Denise, the daddy-pleasing daughter. As the story progresses, the characters don’t exactly shed their status as archetypes, but they achieve great depth. We learn about Enid’s faded opportunities and Gary’s depression and Denise’s tangled motivations.

The Lamberts are not what you would call likeable people. (Of course, likability is a bit overrated. I mean, it’s not exactly a difficult trait for a novelist to achieve. After all, even a stone sociopath like Hannibal Lecter can be made likeable). Franzen generously imbues each of his characters with lower traits and baser instincts: shallowness, selfishness, narrow-mindedness, infidelity, greed, and casual cruelty. They are not evil people; none of them twirls a mustache, wears a monocle, and attempts to fly a bomb-laden blimp into the Super Bowl. Rather, their unlikeable traits are what makes them realistic human beings, full of hypocrisies, contradictions, and self-serving rationalizations.

The un-likeability of the characters is probably the most persistent (non-professional) criticism I’ve seen about The Corrections. And to be honest, there were times I almost gave up on the Lamberts. Franzen really pushes you to the edge of what you are willing to accept in a protagonist. Likeability is one thing, hatefulness is another, and there are moments (the way Gary treats Enid, the way Denise breaks up a marriage) that blur the line between dislike and hate.

The important thing, though, is that even though his characters come close to hatefulness, Franzen never hates them. A novelist is like the god of a made-up world, and he or she can choose to be an Old Testament or New Testament god. The Old Testament god/novelist oversees his creations, but doesn’t truly care about their fates. Hell, he or she will sacrifice those creations at a whim. The New Testament god/novelist has not only created his or her characters, but actively loves those creations, even when they err or stray from the path. I was often tempted to give up on the Lamberts, but I never did, because in the end, I sympathized with them, and saw in them things I see in myself. This wouldn’t be possible unless Franzen cared about them as well.

None of this is to say the book is perfect; far from it. A lot of different things annoyed me, from the occasional pretentiousness of the prose, to the sometimes grating, DeLillo-like dialogue, where characters take turns talking past each other. As a work of satire, the novel is scattershot, with Franzen taking a shotgun approach to pop culture. There are riffs on liberal academia, corporations, high-finance, the internet and pharmacology. The sheer number of targets eventually takes away from the story’s core. For example, I could have done without an extended scene aboard a cruise ship, where a doctor lectures Enid on a drug called “Mexican A.” Finally, there is the matter of Franzen’s none-too-subtle, on-the-nose metaphors. Alfred, for instance, as part of his deteriorating condition, has hallucinations in which he is beset by marching feces. Eventually, I would have figured out that the feces-visions had to do with Alfred’s anal retentive nature, and his lack of sexual progression. However, I didn't have to figure it out, because Franzen literally comes out and says Alfred’s visions are symbolic of his anal retentiveness. I guess you can say a lot of things about The Corrections, but “impenetrable” is not one of them.

These things don’t matter, or more precisely, any shortcomings are swamped by Franzen’s brilliance. His depiction of Alfred’s disease is particularly devastating. It was far more effective than my 30th birthday at terrifying me with the ravages of age. The Corrections also does a masterful job of capturing the era of the late 90s (it was published in 2001), while also proving scarily prescient about the then-future (by which I mean today). I don’t know really how to explain it; at times, The Corrections is simply breathtaking.

I try to never give up on a book I’ve purchased. Sometimes that means slogging my way through Moby Dick, and then finding artful ways to say I was bored. Other times it means discovering for myself what the rest of the reading world learned a decade ago.

From start to finish on my third time through this book - my first experiencing it through text and not audio – I was struck anew at not only the bleak, hilarious story it tells but at the beauty of the writing, at the way Franzen knows how to turn a phrase.

One thing I kind of noticed on my own but had my eye made more aware of by a New York Times review of the book was how meta-fictive the book is. The Times – or whatever publication it was I found on the internet as I obsessed over this book – pointed out that, like Chip’s screenplay, Franzen’s book has a “hump” that you have to get over before you really get into it. I would argue that this hump is the first 40 – 50 pages of the book, where the reader encounters Chip in the present tense as he flakes out on lunch with his parents, without yet knowing about his past, specifically about his tragicomic affair with Melissa Paquette. An aside; Melissa’s father, Tom, is mentioned, an almost throw-away reference, later in the book, during Denise’s story
I didn't notice until this third read through, but it significantly increased my incredulity at the author’s artistry.

An example of the novel’s commentary on itself that offers more insight into understanding the book comes much later in the story however. As their Lithuanian marketing scam crashes down around them in a hail of stones and broken glass, Gitanas tells chip that his life is a tragedy that has become a farce. Later, after they have crashed the Stomper and Chip has been stripped and robbed by policemen in ski masks, this idea comes back to Chip, and he realizes that it is the approach he should have taken in rewriting his ailing screenplay. Franzen’s novel goes from great to classic if looked at through this lens, tragedy rewritten as farce. Some people I have spoken to in the course of my evangelizing about the greatness of this book have told me that they found it incredibly depressing. While it certainly has depressing elements and characters that are at times loathsome, and indeed the very premise of the novel centers around the different forms of depression the five main characters experience, depressing would not be on a list of the top 100 words I would use to describe this book. I think this is because I viewed the majority of the potentially depressing scenes not as tragic, but as farcical, especially upon repeated readings. While it may indeed be depressing to witness Gary ranting at Enid at the end of the novel, casting a pall on the only positive thing she has had to look forward to over the course of the story, when the reader considers that Gary has previously tried to avoid his own depression / prove his sanity by getting liquored up and hopping around on a ladder with a running hedgeclipper and gouging his hand, which he then places in a Branola bag, we recognize Gary’s rantings as a further byproduct of his own faults and are able to laugh at his overcompensation. Indeed, Franzen’s entire novel is tragedy re-imagined as Farce. There’s nothing inherently funny about Parkinson’s disease or the depression that many people experience, for whatever reason, in their dotage, but it certainly IS funny that both of these things manifest themselves in Alfred through hallucinations of anthropomorphized turds.

Since finishing this book for the third time, I have had a hard time becoming engrossed in another novel. In terms of scope and story, I think it is closer to Dickens than anything else I have ever read, which is pretty good company to be in...

Ох. Безспорно: 5 звезди за този роман на Франзен, абсолютна наслада. Прекрасен превод на Владимир Молев.

I am trying to start the new year afresh so only a few words for outstanding reviews.

Finally a family saga I enjoyed. Now I know why he is the master of this kind of books. Comedy and Tragedy, this novel has it all.

Ps. All the characters are despicable.

Come correggere l'incorreggibile?

Una correzione presuppone la comprensione dell’errore fatto. Quindi presuppone conoscere ciò in cui si è errato. In questo romanzo invece le correzioni che i protagonisti provano a realizzare ai loro comportamenti, alle azioni e reazioni ai comportamenti altrui non nascono dalla comprensione dell’errore fatto, ma da un’esigenza direi di sopravvivenza, si tenta di correggersi per vivere meglio con sé stessi e con gli altri. Perché nessuno dei protagonisti acquista la consapevolezza dell’errore da correggere? Perché le relazioni che Franzen esamina e racconta sono quelle familiari, nelle quali nessuno conosce prima come ci si dovrebbe comportare, perché, come scriveva Tolstoj, ogni famiglia è infelice a modo suo e le famiglie felici sono solo quelle del Mulino Bianco. Eppure la famiglia Lambert, formata da Alfred ed Enid ed i loro figli Gary, Chip e Denise è una famiglia uguale a mille altre, a milioni di altre famiglie americane alle prese con le “correzioni” che la conformista esistenza della famiglia middle class americana impone alle madri come Enid, malata di apparenze e ossessionata dal Natale tutti insieme in famiglia, verso un marito come Alfred, anaffettivo, dedito al lavoro fino a quando, una volta raggiunta la pensione, si ammala del morbo di Parkinson e verso i tre figli, alle prese ognuno con i propri fallimenti personali e professionali e con le correzioni che a loro volta sentono di imporre ai genitori. Fino al finale, dove c’è chi resta nudo davanti a sé stesso e agli altri tormentati membri della famiglia, perché la sofferenza, la malattia e la morte incombono ed hanno la meglio sulle apparenze.
Franzen è grandioso nel dare tridimensionalità ai personaggi del romanzo, la cui profondità psicologica viene scandagliata in modo incisivo. L’unico limite di questo immenso romanzo è l’eccessiva verbosità in alcune parti, portate troppo per le lunghe. Comunque da leggere.

The thing about books is, there are quite a number you don’t have to read.
Donald Barthelme

Despite Herr Franzen's picturesque prose and stellar structuring, I could not get past the gloomy, grating, grinding, megalomaniacal, monomaniacal, hypochondriacal, nymphomaniacal bitching, bemoaning, boohooing, bleating and bloated backbiting and bullshit of this family full of neurotic whiners, stretching from the Midwest to the Northeast for an entire 653 pages.

If The Corrections is the Great American Novel, have mercy on U.S. all!!

.
.

I love this novel as much for what it turned out that it wasn’t as for what it actually was. The opening vignette was a deep dive into the subterranean conflicts of a middle class home in Middle America. We're immediately focused on the agony and resentment of the emasculated American male wrought by decades of marriage to a dutiful wife who dutifully domesticates the family and becomes an expert in polishing the façade. In our initial meeting, the retired Alfred has dug himself such a deep trench in his family’s basement (and his existential ennui at the loss of his manly day job) that he hasn’t been able to finish a chore in weeks that once would have taken him half an afternoon. Meanwhile, the wonderfully unromantically named Enid bustles around the home trying to prop both it and her husband’s dignity up… but do so in a way that no one else would ever notice. Petty squabbles about money abound (the gun introduced the first act is a five thousand dollar check that drives the action), intergenerational embarrassment and sadness are the foundation of most of the action, and sexuality twists itself upwards through every crack it can find. It had all the props set up for a modern, literary version of the sort of mid-century Gruff, Male American Author treatise on the emptiness of the nuclear family experiment that I just can’t possibly read one more of.

And you know what, it is that. Those books are certainly in its lineage. It takes that framework at the start, it uses its metaphors and wrings out its sentences to paint us such a minutely detailed picture we can’t possibly mistake where we are and why. But here’s the thing… this book is no purebred. It’s the bastard child of a mixed family that slowly reveals that whatever its direct parentage, there’s a Wonderland at the end of this rabbit hole. Once its got its feet under it, trust me, you do not want to miss this tea party. This book is Tolstoyan in its ambitions, and Dickensian in its scope. It’s postmodern in its experiments with form, and very traditional in its choice of focus. The constant stream of its psychological examinations suggests the heights of modernist fancy, but episodes of amazingly straightforward vulgarity and uncomfortably direct descriptions peppered throughout the narrative reminds us that this book was written in a country that was about to produce the Jersey Shore and insist that grandmothers become aware who Paris Hilton is. I need all the literary labels my education has exposed me to to make sense of it. This isn’t in the interest of dust-jacket advertising, but an attempt to nail down each of the tools that Franzen makes use of here.

The farther I got into this book, the more I penetrated into the heart of what makes this particular family tick, the more enthralling it became. The narrative reminded me of that Charlize Theron Dior commercial where she walks through the long, Versailles like hallway and strips off her couture as she goes. Only in this version, her makeup and her jewels would have gone as well, and her famous Turn Plain and Slightly Overweight for Oscar character from that movie would appear at the end. The more this book stripped down, the more I couldn’t look away. Franzen’s arrangement of his character’s appearances and re-appearances is wonderfully stage managed. Despite the long and in depth trips inside the heads of each family members, in my view, the book is ultimately arranged to be an examination of the psyche of the Great American Male after all, the father of the family, Alfred. Alfred the engineer. Alfred the emotionally distant husband and father. Alfred the upright and uptight symbol of all that is Good and Right. His children are broken mirrors of their own reaction to growing up with this man, and his wife a terribly sad monument to how many different ways a human body and mind can possibly find to twist around and protect a piece of stone that can’t see and then can’t bear to admit just how many cracks it has developed.

Chip, the first child to appear, gives us what appears to be the real lay of the land at the start. His chosen persona is the biggest douchebag you could possibly imagine, of the sad college professor in a leather jacket variety. Complete with earring and Derrida tome attached to his hip (but of course). Every sentence about him is just gross, and gets grosser. Chip lives in gross. Its his identity and his philosophy as a teacher to reveal the grossness of society and corporate culture to the youngsters he teaches. But even that is much too time-honored a position (gross professors being the one thing each generation seems to produce enough of, no problem). Chip has to descend even further to pretending that he lives that life while in actuality living another one that depends even more on falsity. In a post-communist state. Online. With men living in the ruins of the sort of oppression he claims to fight. Then finally, finding a tiny bit of honesty in the most ethically horrifying, physically threatening place that he’s ever been. Chip seems an unlikely candidate to be his father’s favorite. But only on the surface. For all his douchebaggery, for all his poses and his  sleeping with students  Chip is the embodiment of the Future. He is so alien to his father, but his intelligence is such big part of his identity (just smart enough to figure out all those big, effete words and sound like he knows what he means), and that very alien-ness seems like such a logical progression to the future that, for Alfred, he is the son he feels like he can rely on as a guide to a time he doesn't know. He is the son he sees as being a part of the way things are now, which, as we’ll find out, is gross and ugly, disguised with better clothes and shinier apartments. Chip is your best guide to that sort of world, because if nothing else, he’s sure to know the password, and he is in absolutely no position to judge you for being there. It’s sad, but less and less surprising, that the slowly deteriorating Alfred clings more and more to this son. He can show him things and know that shock will not overwhelm him. Besides, one thing mom-and-pop generation Alfred and anti-corporate World Bank/IMF protesting late-90s Chip can agree on is that corporations are basically the worst. For different reasons, yes. And the degree to which Alfred admits this is much less. But these two guys are in the same foxhole, however they want to dress it up.

Gary, the second son, is the next child, is apparently the Good Son. The son who stayed on the straight and narrow. He grew up fairly good looking, married a beautiful blonde wife, and became successful in that nebulous American Buisness-y sort of way that allows you to buy a house with a ridiculous amount of gadgets you don’t need and to fight with your wife about nothing at all. His sexuality is not in question. He had children, boys even, and grilled in the back. He stayed faithful to his wife (if for fascinatingly sick reasons) and tried to make his parents happy by coming home for the holidays. He’s focused on his career and Making It, and he wouldn’t dream of having any art with any sort of genitalia in it. But, of course, this makes him his mother’s son. Mothers are the guardians of tradition and the passers-on of small moments, and to believe they’ve done their jobs to the fullest this is what they need from their children. The fact that Gary and his wife clearly reject everything about his parents doesn’t matter, because they do so far away and not in his mother’s hearing. Their sex lives are disturbingly full of it, but their public life is not. Unsurprisingly then, inevitably, our time with him is consumed by a revenge quest for his father. But because this is twentieth century America, on the verge of a twenty-first century of virtual lives and desk jobs, and not fifteenth century France, that revenge quest has to take place in the nebulous world of the corporate jungle. There’s a delightfully absurd sequence in the middle where Gary and his sister go to a convention so he can see about getting that revenge, and then drown in an absolute sea of jargon and amazingly false advertising. By the time Gary faces the dragon, he’s panting and frothing at the mouth so much he doesn't even realize he forgot his armor. It’s a bit of an anti-corporate rant that goes on for a little too long, but its cleverly entwined with Gary’s near psychological breakdown that I can’t hate it. Gary is a study in trying way too hard, and he was the first character I would have spent time with. His battles with his cruel, self-conscious/self-confident wife through their children were worth the price of admission to his chapters alone. If his story is the most obvious of all, it is touching for all that, because it would have been the easiest to solve very early on. If only daddy’s attention hadn’t been turned in a completely different direction.

Then Denise, the sole daughter of the family, is the last of the family to reveal herself. The choice is the most deliberate and necessary of them all. She appears many times earlier in the novel, but always as a projection of another member of the family- her mother or her two brothers. Our first trip inside of her head is an entirely different story. She is the beating heart of the novel and the child whose story is her father’s undoing. Fathers and daughters- it couldn’t have been otherwise. The gradual revelation of Denise’s past and her present struggles are intersected with the ongoing trials and tribulations of her two brothers, which provide a context and a foil for her development. She has enough layers to unravel that it takes a long time to get to her core and therefore, this novel’s, and we need some breaks to remember why it took her so long to peel them all back.

More importantly, she is the character with the most choices to make. She is a woman standing at a fascinating cusp of history for the options of American women. She’s just old enough that if her story had ended, after a few more years of working than usual, with two kids and a dog in her hometown, it would have been more than understandable. She’s also just young enough that there’s more than a small chance that this won’t be her story if she has any desire that it be otherwise (and its clear from the beginning that she’s too smart and driven to believe. She’s young enough that she has choices about her sexuality that exist in a more straightforward and mentally acknowledge-able way than would have been the case even a decade earlier (lesbianism, bi-sexuality, adultery that isn’t life ending, flings and not relationships), but she’s old enough that those choices are still coded in a very unfortunate and twisted way (who is the butch one, guilt about what she does and does not give to men and why). But it’s all there, and, as with most choices that women make, there’s guilt and to spare waiting for her for whatever choice she decides she wants.

We are introduced to a woman of apparently complete, decisive decision. A woman who is a model for the new generation of strong, working women who don’t need to wear shoulder pads to be awesome at their job. She rolls her eyes at her brothers and kicks ass at work. She takes care of her parents and offers more kindness than anyone else we encounter. But it becomes clear, quickly, that, of course, she’s nothing of the kind. We’re taken through the horror house of mirrors that is her (and most other female teenagers’) adolescence, meeting her insecurities and the misguided places that she channels her dreams. We see how this carries through for years afterwards into her adult life as she doubles down on the thing she knew she never should have done in the first place and understand exactly why. The more honesty we encounter, the more guilt, the more self-doubt comes up the surface. There’s this beautifully handled part towards the end of the book where we see Denise reject one choice after another that could possibly have made her happy. Because she’s not after happiness. She was taught that there’s something more than happiness. That happiness is false and lesser than a God who accepts only the Shoulds, and scorns, secretly, offerings from those who are not worthy. And, of course, tells you that you are worthy, or doesn’t tell you anything at all. Denise’s last rejection of her best chance for self-acceptance and an end to her burdens confirms her fate as what she’ll always be: her father’s daughter.

When the family finally ends up together for “one last Christmas,” I don’t think that it will be a surprise to hear that it is a ridiculous hot mess, and full of big and small revelations of various kinds. It probably also won’t be a surprise to hear that even at the crescendo of a moment where each family member has pretty much come to a place where they are the most themselves they’ve probably ever been with each other… there’s a lot of both good and bad in that. I’m comfortable saying that people generally have at least one trait about them that’s admirable/courageous/sympathetic/fascinating and generally have something that’s going to be as petty, small, ridiculous, idiotic or plain mean about them. We get that in each of them. It makes sense, because this Christmas is the break point for the family. They fill it up full of everything they are and then the glass shatters when they hit just that right note. I love the way that Franzen used Christmas in this novel, and had it come back and back again, slowly driving everyone mad with its insistence on coming every year, and its urgency in being more important than anyone cares to admit.

I’m not sure I like the ultimate message. It seems to come too close, after everything it goes through to complicate things, to reverting to that rebellion of baby boomers that only once we free ourselves from our domestic poses, and the sacrifices demanded by the ideal of the happy nuclear family will we be free. I would agree that to a certain extent this is true, if your pose is as apparently false as these people’s are, or as based on ridiculous motives. I don't agree with it in the world we live in now where our families are more about choice than ever before.

But ultimately I allowed it to pass because I think that Franzen complicates it enough that I don’t think that his condemnation is this straightforward. Franzen attaches a tone of nostalgic elegy to the end of Alfred’s life and his undignified final years that isn’t just about the fact that this is about Dad and you kind of come off as a terrible person if you completely hate on well-meaning, limited by his time, morally upright Dad. Instead, Franzen finds something to genuinely mourn about the apparent loss of the expectations that the family puts on each other. Because while we spend a lot of time talking about how expectations limit our authenticity as people and how genuine our relationships can possibly be, we spend less time talking about how expectations means holding people to a standard. It means providing a motivation for each person involved to suit up, so to speak, and put their best foot forward, and be the best it can be. It tells us, gently, toward the end, that sometimes roles are necessary armor. Sometimes they help us become who we want to be, rather than who we are. Sometimes by telling ourselves we are not the kind of person who murders the co-worker who slept with our daughter, we find a way not to do it. As long as we don’t allow a role or the rejection of a role (which is a role in and of itself) to obsess us, to negate us, and to rule our lives (which is the mistake that this family makes), then there is a use for it. This is a message that is still relevant for me in an age where divorce is always an option and where family is more of a choice (at least in theory) than it ever was.

About the only other flaw I can find with this novel is that its choice to focus on this very specific man who is from a very specific time and place, with children who came of age in an era with a very specific societal context, and surrounded by the domestic, mass produced items of life in America in some particular years means that readers who cannot access that particular setting or time period are to some extent excluded from the emotional impact of it. While I was fascinated with how amazingly deliberate Franzen was in rendering these details, it was an appreciation for artistry that produced my trust that he knew what they could talk about. This book is for people who are about ten to fifty years older than I am. I don’t say this in a terrible way. I’m saying that this book is for them, in the way that any other gift would be under a Christmas tree. It’s a statement of sympathy, love and solidarity with a particular generation and the limits they labored under and the freedoms they struggled to negotiate. But their struggles were not mine. Even Denise, the closest I came to finding myself inside of this book, fought with self-identifications and phantom restrictions that came off as dated to me. Her earnestness and her anger reminded me of the older kids and the culture I idealized as a child, of the actors on Felicity, not of people I knew.

Thus, I can tell that this book is a masterwork. I can admire its craft and the clearly towering intellect behind it. I can laugh at its jokes and fall into its extended metaphors, but in the end it’s a masterwork that just isn’t for me. I’m peeking into the intimate conversation of slightly older strangers, and I just don’t belong. It’s strange, isn’t it? I’ve felt perfectly at home in more countries and times than I can count, or even in worlds that never were, but just one generation away and it’s alien nature pricks me on every page. For me, there’s this odd continuum where God is in either in the very particular and known or in the completely removed and impossible to completely understand. The Corrections just had the misfortune to fall into the category of just-familiar-enough-that-it's-slightly-off. But you know what, it still did its job. Because it makes me wish that my generation will have something so particular, something that hits the tin ear of anyone years too young or far too old. Those sort of crafted, made-to-order narratives are rare, and as I said, a gift to anyone who encounters them. I want one, too!

Jonathan Franzen is an outstanding writer, no arguments there. And having only read ‘Crossroads’ prior to ‘The Corrections’, there are obvious parallels. (I am hoping he also writes about subjects other than dysfunctional families, as I have at least two of his other novels lined up for later this year!)

They are both quite different books however, and ‘The Corrections’ has some laugh-out-loud moments in its characters voices, particularly that of Enid, whom I’m sure most of us can identify a family member with.

I definitely didn’t love everything about this book however. Some of the writing did at times strike me as a little misogynistic - some of which I get is intentional from the viewpoint of certain male characters.

I do also feel that perhaps it hasn’t stood the test of time as well as Franzen might have hoped.

Nevertheless, it is an expertly written, epic novel with marvellously flawed and, at times uncomfortably, relatable characters.

جاناتان فرنزن در کتاب اصلاحات ، به بهانه زندگی یک خانواده معمولی ، نگاهی هم به تاریخ و یا چگونگی زیستن مردم معمولی در آمریکا انداخته و این گونه توانسته تصویری کلی از زندگی مردمان عادی در سال های آخر قرن گذشته و سالیان ابتدایی این قرن را نشان دهد .
داستان عظیم او زندگی یک زوج مسن و چالش های پیش روی آنان ، به همراه زندگی فرزندان آنان چیپ ، گری و دنیس را و به همین گونه تلاشهای اینید ، مادر خانواده برای جمع کردن خانواده تقریبا نابود شده خود برای گذراندن آخرین کریسمس در کنار هم را با مهارت به تصویر کشیده .
آمریکا نویسنده ، سرزمین فرصت ها نیست ، آنگونه که فرنزن نوشته دنیای تباهی ، نابودی و زوال است ، هر یک از افراد خانواده به گونه ای به سوگ آرزوهای خود نشسته و گویی حسرت زندگی نازیسته دارند . گر چه در سرتاسر کتاب اصلاحات ، دلار یک عامل بسیار مهم و اثرگذار بوده و فرنزن از این راه فرهنگ به شدت مصرف گرا آمریکا را گویا نقد کرده اما در کتاب او هر از گاهی بارقه های بسیار پر رنگ انسانیت و تلاش افراد برای ایجاد تغییر در زندگی خود و یا بهبود شرایط جاری به چشم می خورد .
نویسنده شخصیت های داستان را از زوایای گوناگون دیده ، افراد کتاب او چنان در مشکلات زندگی خود که آمیزه ای از مشکلات کاری ، مالی ، بیماری و روابط عاطفی غرق هستند که نه فرصتی برای پدر و مادر پیر و بیمارشان دارند و نه علاقه ای به این کار . نویسنده به هریک از این افراد و مشکلات خاص آنها درفصلی جداگانه پرداخته و خواننده را هم با شخصیت آنها ، روابط میان افراد خانواده و گرفتاری های خاص آنان آشنا کرده و البته در اواخر کتاب ، فرنزن همه این افراد را در یک قاب جمع کرده است .

آنچه لمبرت ها را به زوال کشانده ، افزون بر مواد ، الکل و روابط جنسی افسار گسیخته و همین گونه مشکلات جامعه سخت سرمایه داری آمریکاست که تقریبا تمامی افراد را به شکل عدد و دلار نشان داده ، این موضوع به ویژه در رفتار گَری ، پسر خانواده نمود دارد که رفتار او با پدر و مادر بسیار کاسب کارانه است و بیشتر به فکر پول آنهاست تا کیفیت زندگیشان ، اگرچه که گَری در خانواده و میان همسر و فرزندانش شخصیت بسیار رام و آرامی داشته و تقریبا به حساب نمی آید . یکی از جذاب ترین بخشهای کتاب تلاش موفق همسر و فرزندان او جهت نشان دادن تصویری افسرده و محتاج درمان و تلاش او برای انکار بیماری ایست . نویسنده با مهارت جهنم زندگی مشترک و ناکام او را در مقایسه با زندگی کاری موفق او را به تصویر کشانده است .
فرنزن به بیماری آلزایمر پدر خانواده و تلاش او برای کنترل شرایط زندگی که به سبب بیماری هیچ اطلاعی از آنها ندارد هم مفصل پرداخته ، توضیحات او در شرح بیماری و مشکلاتی که پیرمرد در کوچکترین امور زندگی خود مانند خوردن یا دفع غذا داشته ، خواندن آن برای خواننده اگرچه دشوار و ناراحت کننده است اما مهارت فرنزن در نشان دادن این حجم از درماندگی سخت ستودنی ایست .
داستان طولانی اما پر کشش اصلاحات پس از رسیدن کریسمس موعود و پراکنده شدن خانواده به پایان می رسد البته فرنزن داستان تلخ پدر خانواده پس از کریسمس را هم اندکی ادامه داده است .
در پایان باید گفت با وجود منسجم و یک پارچه بودن داستان آقای فرنزن ، شوربختانه ترجمه آقای خاکسار آشکارا به کتاب ضربه زده و ارزش آن کاسته است . خاکسار ترجمه کتاب اصلاحات را مشکل ترین رمانی دانسته که ترجمه کرده ( گفت و گوی منشر شده با خبرگذاری کتاب ایران در فروردین 1400 ) اما از نگاه من ترجمه او به خصوص در ابتدا کتاب ضعیف ، سست و در جملاتی هم کاملا بی معنی ایست . ترجمه پیمان خاکسار در اوسط و اواخر کتاب کمی بهتر شده اما در بهترین حالت ترجمه او متوسط است .
اگرچه آقای خاکسار در ترجمه بخشهای اروتیک ، شهوانی و جنسی که البته در کتاب فراوان هستند موفق عمل کرده است اما او نتوانسته سبک متفاوت نویسنده در جمله های طولانی را به گونه ای روان و بدون لکنت ترجمه کند و همین امر سبب کاسته شدن ارزش کتاب جاناتان فرنزن شده است .