The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. National Book Award

(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  The long-suffering mom of a crazily dysfunctional family struggles to reunite her three wayward children for one more Christmas before their intimidating dad succumbs to dementia.  The novel centers each of three long sections on each the three grown children and the mess that he or she has made of his or her life.

The youngest son is a college instructor who follows a predictable path to ruin as he embarks on an affair with a manipulative female student.  He then drifts to New York City and gets involved in investment fraud. The older son is married to an emotionally stunted woman who goes to great lengths to turn their three sons against him. His section is compelling in a train-wreck kind of way, but it's hard to like him what with his addiction to internet porn (he sends off his lonely youngest son at one point so he can log on). The daughter is a chef who contemplates having an affair with her boss even though, like her brother's choice to bed his student, it is an appalling stupid move to make. I quit reading in her section because the novel had grown simultaneously too boring and too depressing to follow any further.

To be fair, Oprah loved this book (though the author, apparently, didn't love Oprah), and so did Publishers Weekly, Booklist, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.  But I didn't. And I wasn't the only one, judging from the fact that out of 1,000 reviews on Amazon, this book has an average of only three-stars.

What didn't I like about the 300-out-of-576-pages that I managed to read? Mostly that the author seems uncomfortable with fiction as if his background is in nonfiction, and he would rather be writing that. For every good scene (such as one early on when the youngest son is in an expensive, upscale grocery store, and decides to shoplift a huge raw fish by stuffing it down his pants), there are scenes clogged with dry description that bog down and go nowhere.  It seems a deliberately difficult book to read.

For example, if you, the reader, can plow through the wet-cement narrative about Lithuanian investment fraud in the earlier sections, you're going to be stopped dead later on by the 20-page infomercial (disguised as a press conference) for an experimental drug.

Then the book has a deeper problem that is hard to put into words. The closest I can get is to say that it has an unpleasant nihilistic feel as if everything is meaningless and people are to be regarded with contempt. Take the scene on the cruise ship when a passing character goes into a long, detailed description of the torture-murder of her daughter.  What is this scene even doing in the novel? Does it even have a purpose except to disgust the reader?

This leads to the very long scene (also on the cruise ship) in which the patriarch, who has dementia, hallucinates that he's chatting with his own feces.  The author's tone is inconsistent and hard-to-read. What is he going for here? Comedy?  Surrealism? Pathos?  All three? You got me, and The Corrections gets one star out of five. I'm just glad I found this novel at the library and could give it back.

If you're truly curious, you can find The Corrections on Amazon through this link:

The Corrections: A Novel

Noteworthy Links:   Wonderquest - Science Q/A! The Connection - Tech blog! Author site - John the Eunuch Historical Mystery series, Cozy Mystery List for all your cozy mystery needs, Obsidian Bookshelf - reviews of gay-themed fiction.
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