The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

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..when as a studious teenager, he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself..

(Alfred Lambert, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen)

I just finished reading The Corrections. I felt as if (while reading the last few pages) I were watching members of my own family say their goodbyes. I started painting a mental picture of their lives as they happened in front of me (these tiny moments with which I will remember them by).

And the blurb said that this is a stunning anatomy of family dysfunction (Esquire). Another one said, “You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table, and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place.” (The New York Review of Books)

My P100 (that’s $2 for you dollar earners) copy has sat on the shelf for more than 5 years now before I actually got to reading it. Blame my incessant habit of buying anything good on sale.

Anyway, here’s what I think about the book.

It’s one heavy reading to do and you have to get ready for a lot of real, sometimes awfully disappointing situations of family life. I think the title is very apt and the novel reminded me of how raising children is as daunting as raising parents.

At some point, I became one of the Lamberts. One of each of the Lamberts. I saw myself in Enid’s frustrations over having to take care of Alfred. I felt Alfred’s regret over not having the time (and energy) to enjoy things he had always wanted to do. I saw in Chip this constant desire to accomplish something and for once, make his parents proud. In Denise, I saw this wild child who has taken it upon herself to take care of her parents when her brothers were clearly dodging this bullet. Gary was a younger version of Alfred in denial of having clinical depression.

The Corrections tells a story of how one family — with each member’s idiosyncrasies, insecurities, and desires — conquers the challenges brought about by growing apart, fulfilling own goals, following society’s standard, and sacrificing conveniences for the sake of staying together for each other.

Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

(Alfred Lambert, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen)

Tags: Books, Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections