Family dramas
at Christmas are as traditional in most households as the turkey itself. In
Franzen’s The Corrections the “are we all going to Mum and Dad’s this
year?” question becomes the fraught backdrop to the sudden breakdown of Alfred
Lambert, the family patriarch, into the by turns raving and blank world of
Alzheimer’s. The family undergo a series of personal epiphanies (“corrections”)
as they come to realise that Alfred’s apparent eccentricity, which with diminishing
control he attempts to disguise, is not just forgetfulness, but the slow and
then sudden destruction of the mind of the man they thought they knew.

Enid, Alfred’s wife of almost 50
years, increasingly disoriented by and desperate about Alfred’s behaviour,
creates a paradisiacal vision for herself of her problematic children uniting
in one last happy family Christmas in small town St Jude’s. For her, this
vision becomes all consuming in her world of coupon-clipping resentment at her
lost years and the injustice of Alfred’s early retirement. The more she cajoles
her children the more they withdraw into their childhood reactions to
parenthood and the more undesirable a return to the actual home of their youth
becomes. Alfred too, sensing still his own decline, desperately tries to
analyse his anachronistic, previously unchallenged self-righteousness and
authority, whilst surreptitiously urinating with less and less control into tin
cans and hiding them in his basement den.

The asset
stripping of Alfred’s former employer, the MidPac Railway, and near-theft of
Alfred’s original amateur-scientist’s patent, by the corporate raiders who, in
due course cynically float a new “miracle cure” for his illness derived from
his patent to a greedy stock market, symbolise the ironic undermining of every
Mid-Western value Alfred stands for and represented to his children. Only as
Alfred degenerates do his children begin to realise how they too have deviated
from the regime he enforced. Chip, the youngest son, forced to sit for hours at
the dining table until he ate his greens, spectacularly self-combusts in his
academic career as a left-wing feminist lecturer after an amphetamine fuelled
motel romp with a student who immediately shops him and dumps him. He turns his
subsequent lack of success as a scriptwriter into a short-lived career writing
web releases about a wholly fictional blossoming of the Lithuanian economy in
order to attract never-to-be-seen again US investment dollars from gullible
Mid-Westerners like his father. Chip’s sister Denise sleeps with a succession
of married men with the same gruff detachment (but not the morals) of her
father. Eventually she presses the self-destruct button on a promising career
as a chef and plunges into a nervous implosion about her very sexuality, before
realising with final crushing guilt her own involvement in the beginning of her
father’s decline. Gary, the eldest and ostensibly the least rebellious sibling,
lives prosperously as the investment director of a moderately sized bank in an
apparently idyllic reflection of his mother’s longed for family utopia. But as
Gary greedily tries to acquire more than his fair share of the very stock
floatation which might save his father’s health, the proposed Christmas reunion
and his wife’s adamant refusal to participate, generates the breakdown of his
own family, with Gary himself, in a hypochondriacal anticipation of his
father’s mental illness, degenerating into accelerating vodka-fuelled paranoia.

Franzen’s own
father died of Alzheimer’s. The sudden avalanche of his decline and Franzen’s
own realisation of its extent, before Alzheimer’s was a commonly understood, is
reflected in the guilty realisation of the Lambert children of the horror the
has become Enid and Alfred’s life. But it is the episodes Franzen writes from
Alfred’s perspective which are the most chilling. For the 5 million Americans
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and their families, Franzen presents a frightening
prediction of hallucination, paranoia and associated physical loss of control.
Alfred battles with nightmarish excremental demons, frantically tearing off his
pyjamas and swaddling himself in nappies made of bath towels in an eerie
mirroring of infancy. His moments of lucidity and apparent normality lead the
long-suffering Enid into the self-delusion that Alfred’s condition may be
episodic and curable, until he plunges her into renewed horrors of
degeneration. Franzen, eventually came to long for the release of his own
father from the husk of his life, believing that he had battled in vain to hold
himself together against its ravages and that even at the end, when all memory
and function were gone, there was still a spark in his father’s brain that was
trying to simply die. In “The Corrections,” Franzen gives us a picture of how
that spark feels in Alfred’s head and it is not a pleasant picture.

It would be
wrong though just to view this as a book about Alzheimer’s, pertinent as that
may be, and regardless of the unnecessarily frequent amateur textbook
explanations. Its ambitions appear to be greater in its depiction of a world in
need of correction, albeit a predominantly white, educated, middle class world.
It has biting comments to make about thinly disguised global corporations (who
in due course experience the partial retribution of their own market
“correction”), the new economy, the emergence of new “democracies,” the
consumption of media and our reaction to it, amongst other things. But
Franzen’s depiction of Lithuania for example, with it’s apparent metaphorical
significance, seems just that, entirely without realism. The cynical marketing
of big drug companies, right down to the quasi-legal selling of banned
anti-depressants to Enid by the unctuous ship’s doctor on a cruise ship in
“international” waters off the cost of Rhode Island, is no doubt immoral. But
one senses Franzen’s own disgust has undermined his fiction – the corporate
liar is always more than the mere cipher he depicts. Individuals do protest
violently against capitalism, but few petty thieves are tempted by newfound
moral fury to suddenly batter a corporate spokesperson with a length of timber
and no hope of escape at the ceremonial opening of a computers-for-schools
project, as a character does here. Brian Callahan, a mechanism for instigating
Denise’s own self-discovery, is a character with the depth of an ashtray, who
effortlessly progresses from a privileged lacrosse playing schooling to
overnight millionaire by effortlessly creating a new piece of music sampling
and search software, before discovering an interest in the funding of Denise’s
new restaurant venture before turning equally diletanttishly to funding an
underground film maker. The bit-parts and players of the novel are often
jarring and serve mostly to emphasise how good Franzen is when on home turf: he
is at his best when writing more affectionately (and bitterly) about what one
senses is his own experience – his eye is wry for the minutiae of family
relationships, motivations and settings with their comic/ironic detail.
However, this is a long novel which drags on the occasions when Franzen, who
clearly loves writing, becomes intoxicated with the exuberance of his own
verbosity. He would have benefited from a more forceful editor who might have
curbed his tendency to embellish with intrusive list of details (I got the
message that Enid’s cellar was full of junk after Denise disposes of a sheaf of
silver dollar plants whose dollars had fallen off and a jar of brandy-pumpkin
spread that had turned a snottish grey-green; I didn’t need the jar of brandied
kumquats turned brown gunk and a host of similarly defunct foodstuffs and
bric-a-brac, no matter how cleverly described.)

Criticisms
notwithstanding, Franzen has written a wry, thoughtful and ultimately moving
novel about family life and the horror of mental illness. Given the picture
Franzen creates, we can only hope we will be amongst the lucky ones.

Links:

·       
Review of The
Corrections by Christian Perring

·       
The
Corrections available at Amazon.co.uk

© 2002 Dominic Myers

Dominic
Myers is managing director of Blackwell, UK. 
He lives in Oxford.

Categories: Fiction, Relationships