Diane's Reviews > The Corrections

Whoever said you can't go home again must have been caring for a sick parent. Grief, frustration, anger, shame, feeling helpless — all that plus a sincere desire to do everything you can to help, but ultimately you know you will fail in your mission to save them. Fond memories of home get pushed aside in the wake of a million tasks: doctor visits, medical forms, cancer treatments, prescriptions, adult diapers, and the inevitable move to a nursing home. Worst of all, you must witness over and over again the panic of a person who can't remember how to speak.

It took me nearly 20 years to read Jonathan Franzen's award-winning novel, "The Corrections." At first I avoided it because I was tired of books about dysfunctional families. Then I chose to boycott it after Franzen snubbed Oprah and made some questionable comments about women.

And then this summer, I read a profile of Franzen in The New York Times ("Jonathan Franzen is Fine With All of It") that made me decide to finally read The Corrections. I tried to set aside my irritation with the author's obtuseness so I could form my own opinion of the novel.

While this isn't a perfect novel, it is a damn good one. The story follows Alfred and Enid Lambert, elderly parents living in the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude. Alfred has dementia and poor Enid needs help. They have three adult children: Gary, Chip and Denise. The novel moves from person to person, weaving together all five lives as everything builds toward a big family visit at Christmas.

I'm glad I waited to read this book until later in my life, because if I had read it when I was in my 20s, it wouldn't have resonated as much with me. The story of adult children dealing with elderly parents is one I could relate to, having been the primary caretaker when my mother was dying of cancer. There is so much that felt true in this book — each child was a fuck-up in their own way, and the parents are both victims and perpetrators of emotional abuse.

There is beautiful writing in this book. There are funny scenes and emotional scenes and scenes that I think could have been cut. (Did I really need to read a long description of Chip trying to fuck a couch after his girlfriend dumps him?) But overall, this is a novel I would recommend to readers who like literary fiction and family dramas. And I'll give Franzen the highest praise I can give to an author, which is I'd like to read another one of his novels. I think I'll try "Freedom" next.

Meaningful Passage
"Ringing through the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of 'bell ringing' but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred — she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table — each felt near to exploding with anxiety."