"Where Olmsted County News Comes First"

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Absolutely the most stunning writing. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is a comic textbook of family holiday shenanigans for the modern era. Franzen has a wild style: for example, starting the novel with a fragment which sets the dark mood many of us know when the first gust of holiday wind screams through a garishly decorated storefront, “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.”

The story follows Enid and Alfred Lambert, a seventy-something Midwestern couple, and alternately, their three rather ungrateful children through the anxiety of the holidays. The tension between the generations and betwixt the siblings is palpable.

Franzen particularly succeeds in showing this fretting by writing in his characters’ diction when narrating scenes. For example, when Enid worries over what to tell her heartland neighbors regarding her daughter Denise’s elopement: “Enid made the best of mortifying position in which Denise had placed her by calling her best friends and sounding thrilled to announce that Denise was getting married soon! To a very nice Canadian man, yes, but she wanted immediate family only at the ceremony, so, and…”

Inserting colloquial diction into the descriptive graf of what Enid said also shows how Enid said it, and reveals more of her character, how she deals with painful family secrets, her superficial relationship with her peers, her inner monologue, all with a few words and no such summary. Franzen is a master of chiseling his characters in an economy of prose thus.

“Enid sidled up the corridor (she needed surgery on her hip but imagine leaving Al at home alone while she was in the hospital, just imagine.)” The inclusion of “just imagine” cannot be read in any other voice than Enid’s shrill exasperation over the situation with her stubborn Parkinsonian husband. The narrator is always part-omniscient and part-protagonist. Franzen is alternately partial to each of his characters such that at the end of the novel it is tempting to wonder whether they are, in fact, versions of his own real family.

Take the comic depiction of Gary, the eldest son of Enid, at his home in Philadelphia. After an argument with his wife, while drunk, Alfred abandons the argument in the kitchen and retreats to climb a ladder with a chain saw to trim a hedge. Of little surprise, he seriously severs his hand in a bobble with the blade. Relatively unfazed, Alfred returns to the house, still tipsy in judgment, and so “he went to the kitchen for a bucket and a mop, and there, in the kitchen, was the liquor cabinet. Well, he opened it.” The colloquial voice here rather than the more formal “He opened it” is one that is at the same time defensive and boasting. It is one of a narrator that has a sense of the ridiculous.

And, delightful, the diction of Laredo Bob, a sweating Texan who works at the plant with Enid’s daughter. “The angel he was married to revealed her sweet, gracious nature mainly by forgiving his tobacky habit and feeding and clothing four children on a single smallish income,” and “Denise seemed to Bob an all-around marvelous and purty creature.” “Tobacky” and “purty” describes his sunken character without Franzen’s having to tell us so.

All through the hilarious holiday apocalypse Franzen pokes fun at his characters while filleting them open so that we can see ourselves in our least proud moments. With everyone fussing to make futile corrections to perfect imperfect lives, Franzen seems to say to the whole novel with ironic sincerity: Well, what can you do?

If you find yourself squirreled away at a family gathering gone wrong this holiday season, a retreat to this book will keep you in good spirits and good company with all limbs intact.