Book Review: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Title: The Corrections
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Picador
PP: 576 Pages
ISBN: 9780312421274
Source: Personal Copy
Genre: Literary Fiction
Rating: 5/5Funny but piercing, THE CORRECTIONS is a witty epitome of an American family in which the old-fashioned world of civic virtue and moral values vehemently collide with worldly greed, lust, and in-law hostility. The immediate ambience THE CORRECTIONS affords is one of depression, anxiety, and looming alarm. It poses the ultimate question that is ineluctable to all of us in an up-front manner: what life is for? Speaking under the breath, Franzen is really asking what life is for if it’s not for happiness. The novel develops in the silhouette of the idea that people who think they are happy are not really happy. The sadder scenario is the futility to gauge and to remedy this issue.

THE CORRECTIONS begins with a call for family reunion. After almost fifty years as a wife and a mother, as her children have gone separate ways to cruel reality of their lives, Enid Lambert is determined to make changes in her life. As her husband, Alfred, loses his sanity to Parkinson’s disease, she sets her heart in bringing her family together for one last Christmas in St. Jude. She confides her plan in her daughter, Denise, though of whose immoral lifestyle, which includes pre-marital sex and affair with married men, she strongly disapproves. Alfred’s diagnosis has become Enid’s underground extension of her intelligence and persists in connecting the affliction with Denise’s announcement of her affairs to her father. Denise feels obliged to help her mother reunite the family.

Chip Lambert is the single knucklehead who is forced to resign from his teaching job shortly before securing tenure due to a subversive affair with a student that has gone backfired. He now occupies his time with freelancing for a small paper whose name his mother has mistaken as the Wall Street Journal and he has no intention to disabuse her from the deception. He also thrives to conceive revenge on the college in the form of a screenplay that will expose the narcissism, treachery and hypocrisy of the drama. Until the play comes to fruition, each day the fine-tuning of the script becomes a day in which all his expenses are paid for with Denise’s money.

Gary Lambert is pathetically sandwiched between his repugnant wife (who calls him depressed at his mention of St. Jude and camouflages her animosity toward him as an ostensible concern for his mental health) and his parents. Gary suffers from a make-believe depression and a deepened sense of isolation that is the product his Caroline’s cunning manipulation of and forming allies with his sons in the house. Caroline’s inveterate hostility and standoffishness toward his parents are also conducive to Gary’s feeling that the nature of family life is changing for worse: the togetherness, filially, and fraternity are not valued the way they were when he was young. Not only his wife has carefully nudged the life of the boys to a manner that snubs their grandparents and minimizes their involvement, Gary also realizes that the till of his marriage no longer contains sufficient love and goodwill to cover the emotional cost that he and his sons have been separated from his parents.

THE CORRECTIONS comprises multiple layers of social niches that converge to one central theme that is not ulterior in literature: the meaning of life and the search for happiness. The circuitous musing of life’s purpose is coated with domestic drama, sexual affair, globalized greed, hands-on mental health treatment, and inescapable senility. Chip struggles with the indignity of being out of a job and being penniless; but ironically the luxury at the tip of Gary’s finger does not ensue happiness. His marriage pricks his mind and his entire life has been set up to be correction to his father’s. Chip feels misunderstood but he never notices how badly he himself has misunderstood his father, whose struggle with fraternal bonding does not hinder him from loving his son.

Peeling off the humor, openheartedness, drama and brawl, THE CORRECTIONS affords sarcasm on the ineptitude to be honest with our feelings. It mocks the way our culture attaches too much importance on feelings to an incorrigible extent in which people try to correct their thoughts to improve their feelings. THE CORRECTIONS calls for the awakening of the lost feelings in relationships that are usually rooted in family. The novel is poignant, brutal, and funny. It might have struck a discordant note in weathering spasm of hatred but it is, after all, a true-to-life and contiguous to certain walk of our life.