#43 - The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
It took me a long time to finish reading this novel. Not because I didn’t love every word of it, but because of some phenomenon in which even though I was captivated on just about every page, and the writing is fresh and quirky and incredibly relatable, the actual pages flipped by slowly. I read it in hardcover, and it clocks in it at about 565 pages at that rate, and yet after 30 pages I felt as though I’d been reading for hours. Franzen packs so much reflection and discovery into every sentence, that the reader definitely gets her bang for her buck out of every word.
The Corrections is the story of the Lamberts of the midwest and their East Coast headed children. Being from a family of 5, the only girl in between two boys, I saw some major similarities between my family and the Lamberts. The dynamics between siblings about “helping out,” the constant combination of worry and resentment about your siblings and your parents, the body-crippling love you feel toward your family and the smoke-out-your-ears rage this love can sometimes produce - Franzen presents a completely specific and unique family that, while each character is entirely his or her own individual, represents so much about the traditional American family. Or perhaps any family at all. The screwups, the optimism, the disappointments, the projection of one’s own faults onto those of one’s family members, the resulting guilt - it’s all here.
One thing that struck me very strongly was the depth and breadth of Franzen’s research, and the seamlessness with which he writes about it all. From the array of Denise’s cooking, to Gary’s manic attempts at control, to the tormented psyche of 6-year-old Chip, to the thwarted pathways of Alfred’s Alzheimer’s-seized brain, to the indestructible optimism of a Midwestern mother, Franzen has created poetry out of an enormous capacity of subjects.
The Corrections is terribly painful but also terrifically rewarding. As in life, many of the book’s triumphs come at a heavy cost, and the book is ultimately a masterful manifestation of what it means to be a family in a society that puts such desperate emphasis on mental health, normality, and success.
Still summer, still not reading anything of importance. I’m officially hooked on the True Blood books but I still haven’t forayed into watching the actual series. I’m worried the Sookie I’ve built up in my head won’t be played the way I want her to be by Anna Pacquin, even though in my head she’s a perfect fit. Also, Bill in my head is way sexier than Stephen Moyer and listen, I’m just not ruining that.
Whenever I’m going through a tough time I tend to pick up specific, possibly silly things that take my mind off my emotions, and out of reality for a while. Harry Potter got me through the heartbreak of losing my first love. School plays got me through family illnesses in high school. A summer practicing archery got me through a particularly intense yearning for independence from home.
It’s summer, which can only mean one thing: beach reads! High literary handiwork and decades or centuries of critical praise is fun and all, but I, for one, could not subsist on vegetables alone. So this week, I indulged in a little confectionary dessert.
In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov brilliantly manipulates the reader with prose that is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. Nabokov’s writing is ironic, hilarious, dark, dangerous, sexy, absurd and, well, beautiful. Reading Humbert Humbert’s narration is like watching a trainwreck: I was fully aware of what a total psycho he is, but also completely mesmerized by him. 
After reading both White Teeth and On Beauty, there are so many things I want to personally ask Zadie Smith to write about now, in the year 2011, for her next novel. Where her characters may be frustratingly recognizable from one novel to the next, her commentary on the very tangled webs of social issues is unparalleled in my reading experience. 
After a long hiatus that started out with broaching Dickens’s Bleak House and degenerated into wildly inconsistent work schedules and a short stint in South America, I’m attempting to restart this with some regularity. 
I love, love, love this book.
Well, I would like a plane ticket to the Italian countryside now, please and thank you. 