#1: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

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September 25, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 36 2 min read

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coverGrowing up in Scotland, I knew several farmers who pronounced with Delphic confidence on the weather. On a clear December day they would forecast a blizzard; in the middle of rain they would claim a drought was coming.

In the spring and summer of 2001, people who were listening could hear The Corrections coming. This oddly titled novel, by this interesting writer, was finally about to emerge. It was published on September 1st. and, despite everything else that happened that autumn, there was an unusual degree of excitement around the book, not just among critics but among readers. People read it, people talked about it, people registered that something important had occurred.

The novel itself opens with a storm. “You could feel that something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder.” In the gorgeous, cascading pages that follow, those gusts blow through the Lambert family. Illuminated by Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant prose, bill paying, grocery shopping, depression, Christmas holidays, a walk to the corner shop become subjects of breathless interest and, often, wild humor. Over and over he gives us the deep pleasure of seeing the world around us – and the world inside us – in new ways. For once, the prophets were right.

Snow on the mountain. The winged horseman is coming. Read The Corrections.

Read an excerpt from The Corrections.
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is the author of a collection of stories and eight novels, most recently Mercury. In July, she published The Hidden Machinery: Essays About Writing. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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The Prizewinners Revisited

Lists Notable Articles Prizes
April 23, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 4 4 min read
A while back, I put together a post called "The Prizewinners," which asked what books had been decreed by the major book awards to be the "best" books over that period. These awards are arbitrary but just as a certain number of batting titles and MVPs might qualify a baseball player for consideration by the Hall of Fame, so too do awards nudge an author towards the "canon" and secure places on literature class reading lists in perpetuity.With two and a half years passed since I last performed this exercise, I thought it time to revisit it to see who is now climbing the list of prizewinners.Here is the methodology I laid out back in 2005:I wanted to include both American books and British books, as well as the English-language books from other countries that are eligible to win some of these awards. I started with the National Book Award and the Pulitzer from the American side and the Booker and Whitbread from the British side. Because I wanted the British books to "compete" with the American books, I also looked at a couple of awards that recognize books from both sides of the ocean, the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The IMPAC is probably the weakest of all these, but since it is both more international and more populist than the other awards, I thought it added something. The glaring omission is the PEN/Faulkner, but it would have skewed everything too much in favor of the American books, so I left it out.I looked at these six awards from 1995 to the present awarding three points for winning an award and two points for an appearance on a shortlist or as a finalist. Here's the key that goes with the list: B=Booker Prize, C=National Book Critics Circle Award, I=International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, N=National Book Award, P=Pulitzer Prize, W=Costa Book Award [formerly the Whitbread]bold=winner, **=New to the list since the original "Prizewinners" post11, 2003, The Known World by Edward P. Jones - C, I, N, P9, 2001, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - C, I, N, P8, 1997, Underworld by Don DeLillio - C, I, N, P7, 2005, The March by E.L. Doctorow - C, N, P **7, 2004, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst - B, C, W7, 2002, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I, N, P7, 2001, Atonement by Ian McEwan - B, N, W7, 1998, The Hours by Michael Cunningham - C, I, P7, 1997, Last Orders by Graham Swift - B, I, W7, 1997, Quarantine by Jim Crace - B, I, W6, 2007, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz - C, P **6, 2005, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - B, C **6, 2004, Gilead by Marilynn Robinson - B, P5, 2007, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson - N, P **5, 2006, The Road by Cormac McCarthy - C, P **5, 2006, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - N, P **5, 2005, Europe Central by William T. Vollmann - C, N **5, 2005, The Accidental by Ali Smith - B, W **5, 2004, The Master by Colm Toibin - B, I **5, 2003, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard - I, N5, 2001, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey - B, I5, 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - C, P5, 2000, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - B, I5, 1999, Waiting by Ha Jin - N, P5, 1999, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - B, C5, 1999, Being Dead by Jim Crace - C, W5, 1998, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott - I, N5, 1997, American Pastoral by Philip Roth - C, P5, 1996, Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge - B, W5, 1996, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser - N, P5, 1995, The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie - B, W5, 1995, The Ghost Road by Pat Barker - B, W5, 1995, Independence Day by Richard Ford - C, P5, 1995, Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth - N, P4, 2005, Veronica by Mary Gaitskill - C, N **4, 2005, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - B, I **4, 2005, A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry - B, I **4, 2005, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, C **4, 2005, Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie - I, W **4, 2004, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - B, C4, 2003, Brick Lane by Monica Ali - B, C4, 2003, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor - B, I4, 2003, The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut - B, I4, 2003, Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins - N, P4, 2002, Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry - B, I4, 2002, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor - B, W4, 2001, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - B, I4, 2001, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett - I, N4, 2001, John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead - N, P4, 2001, Oxygen by Andrew Miller - B, W4, 2000, The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins - B, I4, 2000, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, W4, 2000, Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates - N, P4, 1999, Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan - B, I4, 1999, Headlong by Michael Frayn - B, W4, 1999, The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin - B, I4, 1997, Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid - C, I4, 1997, Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty - B, W4, 1997, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan - I, W4, 1997, The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick - I, N4, 1996, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - B, I4, 1995, In Every Face I Meet by Justin Cartwright - B, W
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Every Day I Open a Book

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April 8, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 10 5 min read
I remember the moment, the slow walk across the second grade classroom, to one of those bookshelves that could be pushed around on wheels.  This one was parked, though, and I was heading for it. What was I thinking at the time?  That, I can’t remember now, I can only recall the purposeful walk, as if something about that bookshelf called to me.  And when I got there, I found a book that would change my life.  Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary. I don’t know why I picked it.  I shouldn’t have.  I was one of the worst readers in the class, and I can remember tearful sessions with my parents at home as I tried to make my way through the simplest of texts.  This book was far more difficult than anything I’d ever attempted to read before. Perhaps it was the story, of Henry Huggins determined to take a stray dog home, the uncooperative bus driver indifferent to the delivery of Henry’s heart’s desire.  At the time I had no dog myself.  Did I want a dog, was that it?  I can’t remember.  Perhaps it was Henry’s quiet insistence in keeping this companion, his inventive persistence at achieving his goal.  Maybe Henry’s example inspired me, helped me to teach myself how to use the dictionary so I could to make my way through this book filled with difficult words. Because I needed a companion too.  Outside the closed door of my room, my parents’ inexhaustible battles played themselves out, arguments I could further muffle by entering the world of a book, though I couldn’t have put this into words back then, I’m sure.  But I must have understood that I needed to learn how to read, in order to open the invisible door I sensed was there.  Once I’d navigated Henry Huggins, other books easily followed, other companions: Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and then, as I grew older, a succession of adventure books set on fantastic worlds, packed with swords and gunplay.  I wonder now, as I write this, was all that drama a way of domesticating the domestic warfare still waged by my mother and father, a way to ease the sting of conflict? Or was some form of escape the secret desire, the traveling to the distant worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, following John Carter to Mars, Carson Napier to Venus and David Innes to the center of the earth.  Even now, I can’t believe that I can remember their names, or that Mars was called Barsoom. Whatever the desire, I read so much that eventually my parents forced me to go outside and play, and they talked to each other—and I overheard—of taking me to a child specialist to see if there was anything wrong with me.  And still I devoured books, increasing the real estate inside me where I could find a place of my own, where my heroes always managed to slip away from disaster. But no book could prevent the disaster that occurred when I was eleven, when arguments seemed to serve no further purpose, when my mother tried to stab my father with a knife, when on another occasion she strangled him with a towel around his neck, his head stuck between two rungs of a banister.  In both cases I worked my way between my struggling parents, and at this moment as I write I’m struck by a new thought, that perhaps all those years of reading adventure stories had given me a vocabulary of action, a means to save my father’s life, as if I’d been preparing, through books, for those charged moments without knowing it. Some poison had been leached by that violence, and in the months and years that followed my parents reverted back to the rituals of verbal sparring.  What had set all this in motion, the steps to that terrible brink, and then the retreat?  I couldn’t know. A change had occurred in me, too.  My beloved adventure books had somehow lost their adventure.  I would still read obsessively, but now dutifully, because the literary rituals of crisis and escape felt somehow empty—what I read no longer gave me what I wanted, though I didn’t yet know what I wanted. One day in seventh grade I ordered my usual stack of books from the Scholastic Books Service; one of them was an abridged version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  A little skeptical, I figured I could skip past the peace parts if they proved too boring.  When the nine or so books I’d ordered finally arrived I saved Tolstoy’s novel for last—even abridged, the book was 500 pages long, longer than any book I’d ever read before.  But its length was not the challenge, not in the way the vocabulary of Henry Huggins had been for me years ago.  The challenge was of an entirely different order. I can remember the moment I realized I’d stumbled into new territory.  I was sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard, beneath the clothesline, in the shadow of a tree.  I set Tolstoy’s novel on my lap, then picked it up and checked the page number.  Page 73.  I can actually remember the page number.  And what most struck me was that, after reading 73 pages, of a novel titled War and Peace, nobody had died yet, there was none of the action that I’d come to expect from all my previous reading.  And most surprising, I didn’t care.  Because I knew that this was already the best book I’d ever read.  And nobody had died yet.  Now how could that be? Here was action of a different sort: the action of the heart, the revelation of interior lives, the drama of inner conflict, all of which gave voice to my growing awareness of my own secret self.  Here was a vast world that wasn’t Mars, or Venus, or the center of the earth.  What had once been the pleasure of escape was now a pleasure of a different sort—that of a journey, a way to map inner landscapes.  And a way, perhaps, to make sense of the tangled knots of my family, what we’d tied ourselves into. But never quite to make sense, never to completely unravel, because the books I read now offered no easy solutions, and that was the confounding joy of them, the messy truth no matter how elegant the prose or canny the structure. Such books gave me my future, not so much my future as a writer, though of course there is that, but my future as a human, a fallible human engaged in the futile attempt to know oneself and others. Each new book, like Zeno’s arrow, gets closer to but never hits the target.  There is no easy or final understanding, but without the attempt, who can bear to live the isolation that is the alternative?  And the more I read, the more I think that all readers have secret histories connected to the books they love, the books that have served for them as havens, or interventions. So every day, I open a book.  Its words were once the thoughts of another human being, thoughts that could have remained private but are instead lined up in row after row on each page.  An invitation to begin, to take the first steps into another mind, to step and step until there are no steps but instead the blessed drama of art’s illusion delivering the pith of human contradiction, the greatest gift of one mind offering itself to another, the foreign air we best breathe.
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36 comments:

  1. I loved this book as much as anyone else, and it’s one of my favorites to be sure, but I don’t agree it is the #1 example of exceptional writing of the decade. And, after reviewing your entire list, I have to ask, why didn’t Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ even make a showing? I mean, did you read it?

  7. I kinda saw this coming. While the list was being dribbled out I kept wondering when I’d see _The Corrections_ pop up. And here it is. Probably my favorite book of the decade.

    I wouldn’t have thought to include short story collections on my very own personal best-of list, but maybe that’s why _Oblivion_ didn’t do as well. Or, to be completely honest, maybe _Oblivion_ wasn’t 100% awesome. Because it wasn’t. It was good, but not even _Brief Interviews_ good.

    As for Mr. J. S-F… I thought his first book (_Everything Is Illuminated_) was much better than _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_. But that’s just me.

    Finally, regarding _Tree of Smoke_ (which I’m currently reading); maybe it’s just too new? Too recent? I’m about 100p into it and so far it doesn’t crack my top 10 list, but maybe it gets way better or something.

  8. So not! I’d be willing to see this on the list but number 1? No way. It’s a good book (I guess–personally, I prefer Franzen’s essays) but not at the top. On the other hand, it is silly, as Lydia mentions, to assign merit numerically. Compelling–and I was glad to be a part of it–but I need to remember that part too.

  9. Keep in mind that this #1 slot goes to the book with the most votes. Everyone picked their 5 favorites, in no particular order. This just means that the most people had The Corrections on their list. Whether it was anyone’s favorite, #1 book, we can’t know.

  10. You made the right choice. There has been a backlash against the book, really more against Franzen personally than the novel itself. It’s true that he handled the whole Oprah thing in a way that made him look like something of an ass, and some of the non-fiction stuff he’s written since has been, at best, ill-advised. But the novel itself is just simply remarkable and deserves its place at the top of your list. Considering said backlash, a brave choice.

  11. Margot, since everybody else seems to want to use the comments to grind their ax against Jonathan Franzen, I will point out that you’ve written the best piece of the 20 on the list, in my opinion. Beautifully written and summing up much of the excitement that surrounded the book, a book by an author, who, at the time, wasn’t considered a master.

    I was working at an independent bookstore when The Corrections was released, and I’d just started to think of fiction as something more than a diversion. This was the first book that I remember being excited about in advance. A storm is an apt metaphor, I suppose.

    (As an aside, I remember seeing the galley in the back office in the owner/buyer’s pile. Attached was a note from the sales rep. It said, “I know you don’t think you can sell Franzen, but don’t overlook this one.” Things have changed, haven’t they?)

  13. Oh come on.

    “People who were listening” to what, the marketing copy in the New York Times? This was the most pre-hyped novel I’ve ever seen, and the biggest disappointment.

    First page, thrid paragraph: “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.”

    That’s not writing, that’s posing. No one with taste above the level of a high-school poetry class could continue reading past these two sentences. The Corrections is crap.

  14. Well, yes it was hyped, but think back to when it came out. It was published on September 1, 2001.

    I read my review copy in the days immediately following 9/11. Despite the competition for my attention from real world events, I finished it. But because of its association in my mind with 9/11–an acute visceral association–I could never bring myself to re-read it.

    Strange to say, when fall rolls around I tend to pick up and re-read Moby Dick, if only a few chapters.

  15. In other news, the Academy Award for Best Picture doesn’t always go to the best picture! Usually I’m happy if the winner is in my top fifty. The Corrections is on my list of top fifty fiction books of the decade, somewhere in the middle, but more importantly, it’s funny. If you’re going to single out an American book, it might as well be one with good jokes.

    I’m still more interested in the list of also-rans, since this seems likely to turn up a higher proportion of oddball picks.

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  17. This is an excellent novel and a worthy pick. Works like The Corrections make me stand up and cheer for the future of literature. It’s not perfectly written but it takes taste “above the level of high school poetry” to appreciate this novel’s important place in contemporary literature. Good choice.

  18. The Corrections #1? Ahead of The Cloud Atlas and 2666? No way. Sorry. Corrections is well written and mildly diverting, but it’s really just a family soap opera. You have other books on your list far more daring and well written.

  19. Enough with the lisiting and the besting. Unless you’ve read them all, you’re just burping in a whirlwind of presumptuous narcissism.

  20. Cynthia writes, in part: “you’re just burping in a whirlwind of presumptuous narcissism.” Seems like a pretty good description of Franzen and the novel. And you don’t have to read every novel to recognize the deficiencies of any one of them. Logic fail.

  22. This is a deserving choice, but I’m a little surprised, because it somehow seemed to have become cool to dislike this book (probably because of Franzen’s public persona).

    The biggest miss on the list in my view is Wallace’s Oblivion. This book is hugely underrated right now, but I think people will look back on it as a genuine step beyond Infinite Jest (whereas Brief Interviews was more of the, admittedly brilliant, same). Everything depends on The Pale King of course – it’s too early to understand the shape of Wallace’s career, but for the best writer of his generation not to appear on this list is a shame. Especially when Pastoralia, from a similarly-minded, very talented, but manifestly lesser writer than Wallace, is so high up on the list.

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  24. … The backlash is funny. Great book.

    Interesting how the DFW fans continue to beat the drum. And he’ll always be free from backlash a la lil Kurt Cobain as it’s not good to criticize the departed.

    Great list no matter what the muckrakers say. Anything that gets the conversation started is worthwhile. The publishing business is suffering.

  25. I decided to read The Corrections because I had heard it was “serious” in some sense — seriously literary, I suppose. I thought it would be hard to read. Not hard, but tedious, for me. The commenter above who calls it a family soap opera was not far off the mark. Words that I’d use to describe The Corrections (and I carry no feelings of vitriol for Franzen — I can separate my opinions about the Oprah brouhaha from his work) include funny, peculiar, unpleasant, interesting, and at times memorable. But not great literature, and certainly not something I’d put on this list.

    I was pleased to see the short story collection, which I loved.

  26. The real problem with Franzen’s book is that its themes and topics are so trite. Oy! My family is so crazy! You should see! Compare with the themes of 2666 and The Cloud Atlas (and others), and there’s just no comparison. It’s like comparing an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Gravity’s Rainbow. And by the way, I’m not a DFW fan and hardly consider him beyond reproach.

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  29. I thought “The Corrections” was a good book. Not the greatest ever–the voyage to Eastern Europe at the end was more adventure shlock than anything, to me–but if I were going to write up my own list I’m sure it would make my top 5, too, so I won’t much argue.

    And then I’m just going to throw this out there: DFW, way overrated. Although I’m very sad he killed himself, I’m even more sad that his death is creating a cult of worship around him, as if his imaginitive powers were anywhere near those of a Roberto Bolano or David Mitchell.

    I do have to ask, however: how did Margaret Atwood not make this list between The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake? Is there a greater novelist alive today than Margaret Atwood?

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  31. I’m a little late to this conversation, but I think a lot of the language used to deride Franzen’s book is very interesting. I read it and found it interesting, although not my favorite by a long shot. And I loved Cloud Atlas, for one. But to claim that Cloud Atlas is better because it deals with quote unquote major themes, while The Corrections is simply a “soap opera” is insulting. The idea that the family novel is lesser has been around for a long time, used to discredit much of the literature written by women, and, ironically, is what Franzen was trying to distance himself from when he turned down Oprah.
    I think that the other line of inquiry going on here, about conventional novels vs. those that push the envelope of the genre, is very interesting. But to say that Franzen’s themes are somehow lowbrow or pedestrian is silly.

  32. The CLoud Atlas and 2666 are not better books simply because they pursue grander themes than The Corrections, though that is one reason they are both better books. Remember, we’re talking about the best book of the millennium, not just books we happen to like or don’t like. In that contest, a certain amount of conceptual daring counts for a lot, if the execution is also well done. There’s nothing original about writing about a messed up family. Franzen isn’t trying anything different or difficult. He’s just doing a good job at telling a very conventional story. Stephen King does the same.

    And it’s certainly not inherently lowbrow artistically to write about family life. One can write very deep, surprising novels about family life. I hope one day Franzen gets around to writing such a book.

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Best of the Millennium

#3: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Best of the Millennium
September 24, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 13
I read Cloud Atlas with two contradictory impulses: first to let loose a yodel, dance a fandango, wrestle an alligator, seize strangers by the hair and hold them firmly until they, too, read this shockingly beautiful Matryoshka doll of a book; second, to pout alone in the darkness under my desk. My first reaction was as a dazzled reader who saw each movement of the book as David Mitchell one-upping himself with his genre-bending (historical, mystery, science fiction), his sublime prose, his broad and breathtaking ideas. The other was as a writer who was intimidated almost to petrification by the mere idea that such a book exists and was written by someone of my generation. It is hard not to make sweeping pronouncements after having lived this book, and, still under its spell three years after I read it, I would say: yes, yes, yes, this is the way novels should be written, with such electric ambition, with such exhilarating sweep. Read an excerpt from Cloud Atlas. More Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far) Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers
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