On “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen

So, yeah, I was at my parents’ for a few days, alone, and I finally nailed down this piece I’d been on deadline on forever, it felt like, and I just wanted something to pick up and read to get to bed. The book I pulled off the shelf, more or less at random, was the hardcover Corrections that I had bought, read, and loved way back in that innocent year 2001, still with the Tudor Book Shop sticker on the first-edition, pre-Oprah jacket. I intended to read a few pages in an idly-curious-to-see-how-it-holds up kind of way, partly because, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, I didn’t remember it very well.

That night I read about a third of it. I read the next third the next day, reluctantly put it down, and finished it earlier this evening in the club’s periodicals room while a holiday party – drunken stockbrokers, women with too much makeup – boomed away in the library next door. There’s something about re-reading it just now that resonated deeply and powerfully within me. Partly it’s the time of year – I had forgotten that the novel ends with a long, brilliant, dizzyingly kaleidoscopic Christmas scene – and it’s partly that the novel’s tone of melancholic yearning struck the plangent, emotionally wistful chord that always lies dormant within me during December.

Part of the fascination too was in seeing certain nascent themes – rock'n'roll nostalgia, pornography, environmentalism, questions of socioeconomic identity – already taking the shape they would achieve more fully in Freedom, ten years hence. But mainly my sense of absorption and emotional investment was a product of the fact that like him or not, Jonathan Franzen commands my engagement and attention in a way no other contemporary writer does. It’s hopelessly uncool and backwards to speak of fiction as having a “moral vision,” but Franzen’s does; the Corrections is concerned with questions of what it means to be a good person, to live a good life, but in a completely organic way. It’s also by turns frightening, bitter, sexy, sordid, upsetting, often quite funny, and in the end, deeply moving. This, I thought to myself as I staggered out into the frosty city night, is why I read.