The corrections

Book Review submitted by: Stephen J. Hage, <a href="mailto:SteveH9697@aol.com">SteveH9697@aol.com</a>

This book falls into the “serious fiction” or “literary fiction” category which means it is not genre fiction.  Its focus is on psychological depth and character rather than narrative and plot; and on that score it delivers with a capital D.

The main characters are Alfred and Enid Lambert living in St. Jude, a nondescript Midwestern suburb.  They’re getting on in years and their children have moved out and on.

Franzen’s gift is his ability to describe situations that are desperate and intense using allusion.  Here’s an example from the first page:

“Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude.  Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he’d been sleeping since lunch.  He’d had his nap and there would be no local news until five o’clock.  Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.  He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.

Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.  It was the alarm bell of anxiety.  It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send school children to the street in fire drills.  By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of “bell  ringing” but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead  letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound.  Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood.  Then Enid and Alfred—she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table—each felt near to exploding with anxiety.”

The passage paints a pretty clear picture of who Alfred and Enid are and what’s going on in their lives.  But, it does it on the oblique allowing you to sneak in and watch what’s happening from inside the characters’ heads.

My first thought on reading it was, “I wonder if Franzen will be able to sustain this level of intensity.”  I didn’t have to wait very long to find out.  He does.

The “hook” he uses to draw you through the story is Enid’s burning desire to gather the family home one more time for Christmas dinner.

The emotion I feel most when reading authors with the talent to write serious fiction this well is envy.  Names like Wolf and Hemmingway come to mind.

All writers use words and all words are the same; just a sequence of letters.  Ultimately their skill is revealed in how well they can string those words together in ways that allow you to get into their head and “see” what it is they’re trying to say.  Some are crude.  Some are facile.  Some are entertaining.  And then, there are those like Franzen, who make not only the story but the words themselves come alive.

Read this book and treat yourself to a good story and an archetypal example of exactly what the term “serious fiction” means.