The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen's first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), marked him as a writer with a real grasp of our edgy, info-saturated historical moment. Then, silence. Nine years. A long time for any novelist, nearly eternal for one as gifted as Franzen. Who knows what deserts he wandered, what deals he struck with what devils, but his massive new book, The Corrections, has the feel of something fought for. Suddenly, all bets are back on.

If we were expecting something along the DeLillo, Powers, Wallace axis, something speculative and self-contradictory and postmodern — I was — we need to regroup. The Corrections owes more to Salinger's Seymour and Buddy Glass than to Philip Glass. You do not have to search for the story; indeed, it finds you right away and locks you in. Flipping back and forth between the lives of the three grown-up Lambert children, Chip, Gary, and Denise, and their parents, Enid and Alfred, who are aging with an almost violent acceleration in the American heartland, Franzen delivers a stunning anatomy of family dysfunction.

Yes, there are a million novels on just this theme, but none move so perfectly between black comedy and tragic pathos; none are written with such swooping lyric intensity; none make so overt the link between the kitsch — the junk food — of Middle American dreaming (turkey in the oven, the kids all home playing touch football) and the unhappy realities it tries to stave off and cannot. What this man writes is true, and what is true indicts us. The Corrections transcends its many wonderful moments to become that rarest thing, a contemporary novel that will endure. Reading, we feel what Enid at one point thinks about the coming of night: "It was coming...fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward." Amen.

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