Book Review 04-15-03

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

As always, it takes me a while to get around to new, talked-about novels. I like to let them sit for a while, to find out if I'll still be interested in them after the hype dies down. My opinions on Oprah's club being what they are, I enjoyed the fracas when Franzen refused to be included in it.

All the same, I didn't want to make that the only reason to read a book as massive as The Corrections, a 500-page-plus opus about "a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes," according to its cover blurb. But I read an essay by Franzen in the New Yorker that was fairly well-written and coherent, and so I went down to the library last week to give it a try.

There's a type of musician, my husband once explained to me, who is technically very proficient yet doesn't create anything of lasting value. Yngwie Malmsteen, famous (at least among other guitarists) for his super-speedy guitar-playing, hasn't exactly shaken up the musical world with his output. You can't deny his skill; but there's something missing. Something that has less to do with skill than with having something to say.

It's a disease that afflicts a lot of authors, too, like the guy who wrote an entire novel without using the letter "e." I went back and forth on the question of Franzen-as-Yngwie idea as I ploughed through his novel. Patches of clear brilliance (and thankfully, humor) showed through, but never resolved the overall question of why I should care about his characters.

It didn't help that so much of the material has already been done, by hundreds of other novelists and short story writers in the New Yorker.

The most compelling and (at least to me) least predictable character was the daughter, a talented restaurant chef who falls in love with her employer's wife after a lifetime of being heterosexual. Their love affair is passionate and unpredictable, but has the kind of fallout you'd expect in real life. It was the only section of the book where I didn't skip ahead. In fact, I wish he'd written a much shorter novel about her and left the rest of the family in the background.

There's nothing wrong with being ambitious. But I think too many authors think that "ambitious" = "sweeping melodrama" and you know, that isn't always so. So many patches of this book appeared to be filler, or authorial crank-yanking so as to include clever metaphors, that I lost patience and skipped ahead. And the fact that I could skip ahead and not lose the thread of the story signals, to me, that there's too little actual meat under all the gravy.

I think Franzen is a writer with promise. But he needs to discard the cliches and be more selective, tighter, and more effective as an author. Then the talents that he does have will leap out at the reader, insted of being something the reader needs a shovel and a lot of patience to find.

*And can I mention, once and for all, how sick I am of this subplot? Considering how many writers are also university professors, the constant Hapless-But-Horny Professor and Sexy Undergrad storylines that keep popping up in "literary" fiction is more than a little suspicious. The students are always such hot, ready-for-sex, manipulative, shallow bitches, too. Guys, just quit with the teen-nympho fantasies, OK? Grow up already. It's embarrassing.