The Corrections

I was disappointed by The Corrections.  It’s taken me absolutely ages to write this blog, just because I have so little passion for the book.  I think it is, mostly, another case of sky high expectations that couldn’t realistically be met.  Jonathan Franzen’s book is the story of a family; elderly couple Alfred and Enid and their three adult children and Enid’s desire for “one last Christmas” before Alfred is lost entirely to his Parkinson’s.  While I was hoping for some feeling of connection with the family dynamic I didn’t feel it.  Everyone in the book is kind of terrible.

Part of my issue is that it’s a very long book, around 600 or so pages, that starts off with a hell of a long visit to middle child Chip.  Chip is a wanker.  He’s a misogynist.  An ex-collage professor who, even years later and after losing his job for it, still thinks he was the victim after an affair with a student.  He spends much of his time in the early stages of the book being bitter and writing a screenplay about how evil women are.  I do not like Chip.  I think he put me the whole book.  After so many pages with him, I was unwilling to give any time to the people who raised him.  They did a shit job.  He’s an awful person.  His brother and sister aren’t much better, but I have sympathy for them at least.  Eldest son Gary is suffering from depression and so he gets a lot of leeway, their sister Denise is just chronically unable to get her shit together.  She ruins any job that she has by sleeping with pretty much anyone.

I expected something from the book that it never delivered upon.  My family has been through the ordeal of having a member have an incurable and degenerative disease, granted it was Alzheimer’s rather than Parkinson’s, but I still expected some level of familiarity or connection.  That just wasn’t there.  The family dynamic is such an odd one, and it crops up both between the Lambert kids and Alfred and Enid as well as between Gary and his wife and kids.  My problem with it is that rather than interacting with each other, they just try and impose their will upon each other.  Sometimes it’s like they have no connection to one another.  Or emotional maturity.  No-one has any emotional maturity and I think a book essentially about Parkinson’s calls for a dose of it. 

I’m sure there are some parts of the book that I did enjoy.  It certainly picked up after Chip was in it less.  And Denise’s parts were actually pretty entertaining.  But the overwhelming feeling that I am left with is disappointment.  And after leaving it some time, a good couple of weeks, it’s the feeling that I’m left with.  There are no parts of the book that stand out as excellent and I wanted there to be.  I always want there to be when I read a book on The List.  This isn’t like Intimacy.  I can why people could love this book, but I don’t.  I think maybe if I’d been in a different frame of mind when reading it I’d have loved it and would be singing its praises right now; or even if Franzen had started the whole thing by introducing us to Denise rather than Chip the chauvinist.

I’m now reading Momento Mori by Muriel Spark.