Book-It 'o9! Book #18
Jun. 13th, 2009 04:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alivemagdoleneMore of the Fifty Books Challenge! This was a library request.
Title: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Details: Copyright 2001, Farrar Straus Giroux
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century-- a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collusion with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Frazen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd heard the hullabaloo about the author refusing Oprah's official stamp of endorsement which interested me, and also the idea that it got the endorsement in the first place I liked since about 75% of my all time favorite fiction also happens to belong to the Oprah Book Club. In Look Both Ways, the author uses quotes from this book to open several chapters.
How I Liked It: This book debuted on September 1st, 2001 and if there was an unluckier time to make grandiose statements about the state of American ideology, it was possibly right before the stock market crash (and even then, it probably wouldn't have been this bad).
Many of the greatest books of course bear stamps of their era of issue. Perhaps it's the fact that eight years later is not soon enough away from this period not to find this book's picture of America almost hilariously dated. If critics accuse American Beauty as being rich with end-century hubris, this book is frothing with it and a good dose of dot com boom fattened smugness, too. A particularly hilarious scenario played out reads
"But then, Chip had no reason to be sensitive. Since D____ college had fired him, the market capitalization of publicly traded U.S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent. In these same twenty-two months, Chip had liquidated a retirement fund, sold a good car, worked half-time at an eightieth-percentile wage, and still ended up on the brink of Chapter 11. These were years in America where it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat. In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell [his screenplay], the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose. Judging from Julia's negative response to his script, the American economy was safe for a while yet." (pg 103)
Franzen's fans herald him as a profit, since in the final chapter (a sort of epilogue) of the book, he opens with
"The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contractions too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they'd been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she'd seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off; she'd helped her mother pass out leftovers to homeless men in the alley behind their roominghouse. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts." (pg 563)
Or is that even funnier than the first passage I quoted?
All dated irritations aside, the characters are rather hard to get around. This book centers around (what else?) a dysfunctional family and the book is divided into chapters/sections wherein each member essentially tells his or her story (while keeping the text in the third person). The characters are all fairly two-dimensional and seem more like stereotypes at times than identities. Gary(the oldest son)'s storyline especially is rather truncated. Gary's particular affliction (as we are informed on the flap) is fighting Depression yet after fights with his shrew/whore wife about whether or not he's actually ill, it pretty much flatlines. Say what you will about the other characters, but at least their storylines more or less have endings (if uneven, at times implausible ones).
This book is either hilarious or hopelessly inane, depending on how you choose to read it. Frankly, I think there were plenty that would've found (and did find) this book obnoxious and poorly written even before history rendered it hopelessly dated less than two weeks into its release.
Notable: In the storyline of Chip, is the wayward middle child lured into Lithuanian politics. How? Well, his newly ex-girlfriend is still married in name to the corrupt deputy prime minister of Lithuania lures Chip into international money fraud by the fact Chip is over twenty thousand dollars in debt to his sister alone (and oh! his failing screenplay!). Why this is notable is the way it's portrayed. Of course the Lithuanians are corrupt. Of course there's shadowy dealings with Russia. Of course Russia and Eastern Europe are the bogeymen that would don Arab apparel within two weeks of this book's release. The idea is almost quaintly 80's (when "we" worked with Saddam against the Soviets) and at the same time yet another marker of swiftly the face of The Enemy can change.
Title: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Details: Copyright 2001, Farrar Straus Giroux
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century-- a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collusion with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Frazen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd heard the hullabaloo about the author refusing Oprah's official stamp of endorsement which interested me, and also the idea that it got the endorsement in the first place I liked since about 75% of my all time favorite fiction also happens to belong to the Oprah Book Club. In Look Both Ways, the author uses quotes from this book to open several chapters.
How I Liked It: This book debuted on September 1st, 2001 and if there was an unluckier time to make grandiose statements about the state of American ideology, it was possibly right before the stock market crash (and even then, it probably wouldn't have been this bad).
Many of the greatest books of course bear stamps of their era of issue. Perhaps it's the fact that eight years later is not soon enough away from this period not to find this book's picture of America almost hilariously dated. If critics accuse American Beauty as being rich with end-century hubris, this book is frothing with it and a good dose of dot com boom fattened smugness, too. A particularly hilarious scenario played out reads
"But then, Chip had no reason to be sensitive. Since D____ college had fired him, the market capitalization of publicly traded U.S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent. In these same twenty-two months, Chip had liquidated a retirement fund, sold a good car, worked half-time at an eightieth-percentile wage, and still ended up on the brink of Chapter 11. These were years in America where it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat. In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell [his screenplay], the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose. Judging from Julia's negative response to his script, the American economy was safe for a while yet." (pg 103)
Franzen's fans herald him as a profit, since in the final chapter (a sort of epilogue) of the book, he opens with
"The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contractions too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they'd been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she'd seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off; she'd helped her mother pass out leftovers to homeless men in the alley behind their roominghouse. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts." (pg 563)
Or is that even funnier than the first passage I quoted?
All dated irritations aside, the characters are rather hard to get around. This book centers around (what else?) a dysfunctional family and the book is divided into chapters/sections wherein each member essentially tells his or her story (while keeping the text in the third person). The characters are all fairly two-dimensional and seem more like stereotypes at times than identities. Gary(the oldest son)'s storyline especially is rather truncated. Gary's particular affliction (as we are informed on the flap) is fighting Depression yet after fights with his shrew/whore wife about whether or not he's actually ill, it pretty much flatlines. Say what you will about the other characters, but at least their storylines more or less have endings (if uneven, at times implausible ones).
This book is either hilarious or hopelessly inane, depending on how you choose to read it. Frankly, I think there were plenty that would've found (and did find) this book obnoxious and poorly written even before history rendered it hopelessly dated less than two weeks into its release.
Notable: In the storyline of Chip, is the wayward middle child lured into Lithuanian politics. How? Well, his newly ex-girlfriend is still married in name to the corrupt deputy prime minister of Lithuania lures Chip into international money fraud by the fact Chip is over twenty thousand dollars in debt to his sister alone (and oh! his failing screenplay!). Why this is notable is the way it's portrayed. Of course the Lithuanians are corrupt. Of course there's shadowy dealings with Russia. Of course Russia and Eastern Europe are the bogeymen that would don Arab apparel within two weeks of this book's release. The idea is almost quaintly 80's (when "we" worked with Saddam against the Soviets) and at the same time yet another marker of swiftly the face of The Enemy can change.
