Well, I felt a very strong something for The Corrections. I’m refraining from calling what I felt “loved,” because that’s smacks of missing the point. So instead I’ll say it was compellingly readable, emotionally searing, hilarious, tragic, wonderful. I would give it closer to a perfect rating but for a few episodes that seemed dispensable.
The Corrections is about the Lamberts – especially the parents, Enid and Alfred, who have stayed in the midwestern hinterland of St. Jude (St. Louis) and their three children: Chip, Denise and Gary (now adult urbanites who have all resettled on the East Coast). Alfred deteriorates throughout the story due to his worsening Parkinson’s and Enid becomes less and less stable herself, growing increasingly bitter beneath the overbearing pretense of childish optimism, which becomes visibly more skimpy as Alfred’s condition worsens. I just kept thinking (sorry if this sounds trite) that there’s just so much truth here: it’s about the bizarre, private things we all do, about vulnerability, about the snarl of kin having to suffer each other’s company and make functional decisions with one another, it’s even about our limited repertoire (the memories we’ve revisited so many times that they’re strengthened to the point of forming the fabric of our own narrative).
Right after finishing the Corrections, I picked up Franzen’s How to Be Alone, the first essay of which is about his father’s Alzheimer’s, his parents fraught relationship, his own outrageous mother and taciturn father. In the closing essay, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Franzen goes with Oprah’s documentary crew to revisit his childhood city, street, even the Transportation Museum. From the occasional disclosure, Franzen himself seems to be a bit of a composite of the siblings in the Corrections (at least taking snatches here and there from Chip and Denise), and the rest seems heavily influenced by autobiography. This novel is what got Franzen invited to Oprah’s Book Club and, and disinvited.