About Family, Man

Post 863:

I have this weird affliction. I’m a terrible multitasker but I always have five or six things going at the same time. I’m writing four books concurrently even though it’s basically a method recommended by no one. I learn five songs at a time until I hear a sixth that I like; all the words get jumbled up into one giant song. I can never read one book. It’s gotta be at least three, usually five or six.

This is one of the reasons it took me so long to read The Corrections. The other reason is that it’s freaking long and freaking good and I didn’t want to miss something along the way.

I’m probably the least important person in the world to review this 2001 winner of The National Book Award, but I’ve never let a thing like not mattering stop me.

Franzen’s book is dense. Between five and six hundred pages. And he has some sentences that take rereading. Anyway, I’m glad I read it. I know it won awards for being socially prescient and marking the flaws in society, but I liked it for the heart.

The Lambert Family is dysfunctional in crazy ways. The oldest brother is sometimes depressed but tries hard, the younger brother is wayward but has a strange sweetness, and the daughter is successful and admirable but given to self-destruction and tunnel-vision. The mother is full of love and overbearing and blind to reality and the father is devoted and one-note and closed off to other people’s emotional needs.

Sounds like they’d all get along, right? Not even close. They make each other miserable, but in the end (spoilers) they more or less stick together. The Corrections is not a fairy tale and it paints a pretty bleak picture of the rifts that can form between generations (often hilariously), but the Lamberts with all their flaws and grievances muddle through and are undoubtedly who they are because of each other. There is something simple and old-fashioned about that, but screw it. I was always partial to the classics.

Franzen is a brilliant writer. He mocks materialism, masculinity, modern education, motherhood, and tons of other things that start with M. In the end, though, I think he’s really calling family what it is. A little society of people going a million directions, willing to go one way (the best they can) when it matters.

Some of the situations are extremely sad and some are absurdly relatable. We feel every character’s plight equally so it’s impossible to hate anyone. We’re part of the family, and that’s never a bad thing.

Cheers and see you after.