Books
High art lite. Nicholas Blincoe deconstructs the most hyped novel of the year
Published 10 December 2001
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen Fourth Estate, 566pp, £17.99
ISBN 1841156728
The news about The Corrections, the celebrated novel by Jonathan Franzen, is that it works. Franzen aimed to link mental depression to economic depression, and he does this in poignant, non-trivial ways. Franzen talked of his own struggle with depression, and his hope to connect this private experience with a public context, in an essay entitled "Perchance to Dream", published in Harper's in 1996. At 15,000 words, this essay was already pretty long. But it is only completed by the publication of this novel, all 566 pages of it. I believe The Corrections is a triumph. But it is a triumph that leads, as depression often does, into a black hole.
The title of "Perchance to Dream" is drawn from Hamlet's soliloquy, one of the great manifestos of depression. It is an interesting essay, perhaps especially if one is a writer. After laying open many of the anxieties familiar to novelists, Franzen concludes that the writer's job is to speak to and preserve a community of isolated individuals: book lovers. Franzen sees readers as lonely beings, hopelessly attached to an art form that has long since lost its cachet. In his view, today's culture cheerfully and extravagantly values only what is most disposable: celebrity, blockbusters and comfort TV. In short, modern life is rubbish and novels are a way for melancholic dissidents to make a collective stand.
It is not clear from his essay whether Franzen believes that the cultivation of melancholia is a strategy forced on us by contemporary capitalism; or whether there is something essentially melancholic about fiction. The later novel reveals that Franzen does regard depression as essential. Although he lampoons other miserabilists, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and all Scandinavians, he nevertheless posits an underlying structure of depression to the world, and this depression cannot be separated from global economics.
The Corrections is the story of the Lamberts, a Midwestern family. Each of the five members takes centre stage in turn, their stories unfolding in isolation, just as their lives do. The parents, Alfred and Enid, ceased to relate long ago, falling out when Alfred refused to buy into the stock market. Alfred regards his refusal as essentially moral. Enid responds by organising holidays where, for a few days by a lake, the couple can be hassled by timeshare salesmen; or Scandinavian cruises where she can attend aspirational talks on money management. One such talk explains the title of the novel: a "correction" is the so-called "mechanism" by which markets re-evaluate overly optimistic speculations. Viewed like this, a correction is never a downturn or a depression: it can be regarded with equanimity as a good thing, a cheerful thing.
Franzen's title is ironic. These corrections only appear to work, and only on the surface. As the novel closes, Enid finds that a series of corrections has made her life happier: her husband has eased himself into death, leaving her with enough money for one person to live comfortably, especially as an economic downturn has reduced the relative wealth of her neighbours. From this happy position, she can choose to believe that her children, too, are happier.
For much of the novel, Alfred is seriously ill and suffers the depression common to ailing old age. But we soon learn that Alfred has been depressed for much longer. The tell-tale sign is his refusal to speculate on the market. As Freud once said, the depressive is in a similar position to a bankrupt whose investments have failed and who can bear no further expense. The depressive withdraws into himself, attempting to conserve his emotional energy in a world that he sees as fallen and barren. Alfred might justify his fear of the market as a moral position, but he is as incapable of financial investment as he is of emotional investment.
In "Perchance to Dream", Franzen stated: "Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?" He sees the huge proliferation of cultural "stuff" as rampant and baseless speculation. In the essay, he focuses on TV and magazines. In the novel, he includes film, music and celebrities. And it is not merely "product" that Franzen attacks. Worse even than mindless cultural pap is anything with pretensions to rise above the no-brow. So art films are worse than Hollywood, New Wave music is worse than any jingle, and writers who conspire with celebrity culture are worse than the celebrities themselves. Here Franzen attacks a sneering English novelist who is rude about baseball and engages starlets in conversations about darts. The darts is a giveaway. We can assume that Franzen is attacking the real English novelist Martin Amis, whose Money covered very similar ground 20 years ago - and if it did so with less cool bitterness, it was at least a more exuberant engagement with the "enemy".
Franzen believes it is morally right to retreat into melancholia. But are his axioms good? Is all contemporary culture, and its means of dissemination, so terrible? The Corrections depicts the internet as a tool used only to access pornography and to defraud small investors. Yet it has other uses. I accessed Franzen's original essay at www.norfolklibrary.org/franzen.html. Can Franzen really hold that a complete disdain for all elements of contemporary culture is noble rather than reactionary?
"Perchance to Dream" rightly sees the debate about high and low culture as the inspiration for much contemporary art. But Franzen argues that the novelist should stand aloof from this debate. To put the now infamous row with Oprah Winfrey into perspective, Franzen's problem with her endorsement was primarily about economics. He objected to the cross-marketing of his book with Oprah's show. He did not primarily view it as a high-low culture clash. Yes, Franzen believes his book is better than most popular books - that he is working, as he put it, at the "high art end of things" - but he believes this is because of its willingness to abide with painful problems. Specifically, the painful problem of forming a community of lone depressives when, by definition, these people are unable to invest in the idea of community.
Franzen believes he is right to withdraw from our culture. Is it possible to imagine an artist in any other field complaining that there is too much art out there? Would a 16th-century portrait painter condemn the rise of Elizabethan theatre because it adds too much additional speculation to the world? Novelists tend to be better educated than other artists. Dancers, actors, designers, musicians and fine artists all have to sacrifice a part of their education to practise their creative skills. Yet despite their comparative advantage, novelists often have the least appetite for culture. Evelyn Waugh was still being rude about Picasso in 1960. Franzen provides a manifesto for this kind of philistinism.
As an artwork, The Corrections is an improved version of a 19th-century novel. The improvements are many. It is sharper, the jokes are tighter. If the plot requires coincidence, it is accomplished with some wit. If it is necessary for a character to impart new information, Franzen finds a dramatic context for the character to open his or her mouth. One reviewer has said that it is "not Tolstoy". No - but it is a deliberately backward-looking book.
Much has been made of Franzen's attempts to avoid cliche by writing blindfolded in the dark. Franzen can touch-type, but it does not explain how he avoids cliches. While the sum of it is greater than its parts, every part of The Corrections is utterly familiar. The plot revolves around a family Christmas, and nothing could possibly happen at a family Christmas that is not familiar to the entire western world. In a lengthy sequence set in Lithuania, Franzen displays no knowledge of the former Soviet Union beyond ordinary American prejudice. Above all, the familiarity lies in the timbre of the prose, which recalls that other writer from the Twin Cities of America's Midwest: Garrison Keillor. The Corrections may avoid the whole high-low debate by defining its own brave dark space. But it is a gloomily folksy space, and I would hate to be on the inside with those particular folks. At the risk of offending the many millions who may buy The Corrections, I can do without an audience that wants only to be reassured that nostalgia and depression are evidence of a brave dissidence. In my part of the world, we call such folks cranks. Surely it is possible to express criticism of the here and now, and yet anticipate a happy future audience.
Nicholas Blincoe's new novel, White Mice, will be published by Sceptre in February
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