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All in the Family: Commentary on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / COMMENTARY |
| Author: Peter Filkins |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2002 |
| Size: 2,881 Words, 16,959 Characters |
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Once in a while a novel comes along that is as much a part of the cultural moment as it is a commentary on the society from which it springs. With the ill-fated brouhaha set in motion when Oprah Winfrey decided to "uninvite" Jonathan Franzen onto her show after he expressed reservations about being selected for her book club, The Corrections became just such a novel. Even before that, it was bent on rigorously examining our times and the ways in which we think about them. One would have to go back to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or, before that, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, to think of books that have come to define their eras as much as The Corrections sets out to do.
Such novels stand as markers on the cultural highway, their appearance signifying a shift in both how books are written and how they are read for years to come. This is not to say that they will hold up with time. The first two examples are read by few these days, the former because Rushdie has written better works, and the latter because the yuppie novel was, almost by definition, perishable goods from the start. Pynchon and Heller, however, are still read and studied, as are other great pioneers of the past, such as Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby remains the epitome of the kind of book an age comes to be read by, rather than that which a contemporary audience simply reads.
Whether or not The Corrections will hold up under time's scrutiny is impossible to say. However, given the often-brilliant writing with which Franzen adorns his novel, most fiction these days pales next...
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...t made the correction possible [namely, human love and fraility] also doomed it" counters the naive buoyancy that allows the Lamberts to squeak through. Still, it is the way that each of these characters stares down the future with a combination of blind hope and devil-may-care grittiness that makes The Corrections both a compelling read and a savvy corrective to much of contemporary fiction.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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