"The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen

I have a confession to make. I have been lying to others about how crap The Corrections is. I was mainly going off the strength of this review, which quotes from Dune so you know it’s good (I mean that seriously, what’s better than Dune?) I’d never actually read the book – well, I had done the classic bookstore flip-through, but I’d never gone through and absorbed every word, beginning to end. And here I was using the book as an example of literary failure. I wanted to make things right. So I sat down and read the whole thing. And?

Dolan is right when he says that Franzen is a crap writer of metaphors. The “sinus” metaphor really does go on for pages, and then Franzen has the gall to reuse it later on. Some of it the writing was so bad that I started to think that it must be a put-on, that Franzen must be sitting somewhere laughing, or maybe emitting a small strangled sound while his lips twist in an approximation of a smile, over what he was allowed to get away with and win a National Book Award. A description of Manhattan executives as “supergentry” is barely technically correct, but what the “super” is doing there is anybody’s guess. And Franzen describes a Midwestern wind as like “Mexican violence.” Stormy like a burrito fart? Come on.

As for the charge of misogyny? I’m not sure if Franzen’s misogynist – not because he’s particularly kind to his women characters, but because all the male characters are loathsome as well. That said, there are an awful lot of scenes where a woman jumps through hoops to get a man interested in her; even the lesbian scenes have the femme partner degrading herself, while her girlfriend gets a kick out of turning her aside. Generally only the worst sort of women (two-timing golddiggers, slutty students who for some reason are obsessed with their distant professors) actually get to the point of consummation. Yeah, actually maybe he is misogynist.

There’s also a talking shit. Dolan doesn’t bother to mention the talking shit, but it’s not as much fun as Mr. Hankey.

The verdict? The Corrections isn’t terrible. The plot hangs together, and I was generally able to make out what was happening (although, come to think of it, Wizard’s Daughter was slightly better at conveying the passage of time). It’s a moving read, in parts. Not many parts, but in parts. And despite it reading like a fictionalization of David Brooks, it’s less egregious than, off the top of my head… Jed Mercurio’s Bodies. I wouldn’t have read it for pleasure, though, and the fact that I got all the way through it should stand as a lesson that lying doesn’t pay.