fter The Corrections was selected by Oprah for her book club, Jonathan Franzen said some ill-considered things. He worried aloud that the Oprah logo would taint his book with corporatism, tag it as middle-brow and scare off male readers. The result was that Ms. Winfrey gently rescinded her offer that Franzen appear on her show, and certain literati indulged their schadenfreude in the pages of the New York Times. Still, Franzen ought to be relieved that he didn’t say publicly what, to read The Corrections, was probably on his mind: that Oprah exemplifies the therapeutic culture to which his novel was meant to stand as a corrective.

Franzen is to all appearances a leftist, even a Marxist of sorts. His fear, expressed in a 1996 essay, of “writing fiction that makes the same point over and over again: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine” seems to represent a problem with repetition rather than with the thesis itself. Strong Motion, his 1992 novel, culminated in an earthquake and toxic spill that were the result of a chemical company’s effort to hide its noxious byproducts by pumping them into the earth. Franzen’s ambition as a writer has been to connect “the personal and the social,” an effort that in Strong Motion required an elaborate apparatus of coincidence: our hero’s girlfriend was a seismologist who could lecture on earthquakes, his father a Marxist historian with a ready account of the American assault on nature from colonial times, his mother a shareholder in the reckless corporation. The shameless use of coincidence, the left-wing populism, the prodigious narrative energy—all of these were reminiscent of Dickens, and they articulated, more powerfully than any manifesto, Franzen’s wish to become our Dickens: a novelist both great and greatly popular.

No one is in a better position to grant the second half of such a wish than Oprah, whose blessing typically translates into the sale of hundreds of thousands of books. But The Corrections, too, involves an attack on corporate chemistry, this time of the pharmacological variety. Franzen has invented a drug called Aslan, which disables feelings of shame. The drug most potently affects Chip Lambert, a disgraced former assistant professor who wants to enjoy the good life (imported cheeses, expensive wines) and a good conscience at the same time. He loves to shop and loves to critique consumerism. Aslan temporarily suspends this contradiction and puts him under the spell of an appallingly well-adjusted young woman whose entrepreneur parents are her “best friends” and who proclaims—as any Oprah-ite would like to—“I love myself. What’s wrong with that?”

he short answer, of course, is capitalism, under which the left suffers a vexed relationship to human happiness. This happiness is its goal, but it would rather no one arrive there without bringing everyone else along. It—we—also believe that unqualified declarations of self-love must be mistaken as long as consumers are condemned to the ritual of Tantalus: reaching for a marketed happiness that always withdraws the moment it is about to be grasped. For this reason the left has always been suspicious of therapeutic accommodations to the world as is, whether administered by drugs or—as on daytime TV—by hugs and confessions. Yet if the good society becomes nothing more than the daydream of critical theory, attachment to the ideal comes to seem a stubborn neurosis, not a politics.

Something like this is the background to Chip Lambert’s decision to liquidate his library to raise some cash with which to treat his girlfriend, Julia, to the costly pleasures of New York living. Otherwise she won’t have sex with him. Chip sensibly chooses to sell off his Marxists first:

He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each one of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society. ... But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue.

This is hardly the funniest or most acute passage in Franzen’s wonderful novel, but it does reveal that, during the ’90s, the old nightmare of those Frankfurt School thinkers, and the boast of Maggie Thatcher—There Is No Alternative—finally seemed to come true. Chip “no longer wanted to live in a different world; he just wanted to be a man with dignity in this one.” The other world having been canceled, dignity in this one consists of a flush bank account, the ability to afford a filet of “wild norwegian salmon, line caught” for $78.40.

Dignity is meant to replace shame, which, therapeutically considered, is proof of ill health. How much this notion of mental hygiene differs from that of Adorno, in whose Minima Moralia—maybe Chip’s copy can be found somewhere for $5—we read that the mark of the healthy, undamaged individual is to be afflicted by the general unhappiness: “What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is?”

The Corrections mostly consists of long, brilliant character studies of the various Lamberts, and the study of Chip is the first we read. We watch him collapse into an attitude long ago assumed as a matter of course by his siblings and parents: that the pursuit of happiness is just as advertised. But that is the only point they would agree on. As it turns out, one can write a good novel that makes the same point over and over again—consumerism is an infernal machine—by understanding, as Dante did, that the population of the inferno is diverse and has arrived there by different means.

ary Lambert, the overachieving eldest child, has a beautiful wife, three precocious kids, a cozy banking job, a nice house in a good neighborhood, and a top-of-the-line security system protecting it all. But, like “correction,” “depression” has several senses, and it has begun to seem, when we meet Gary, that his mood and that of market are parting ways:

He estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3 (i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven or even thirty-day highs. ... Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two elder sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted sense of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.

This, of course, is protesting too much, and before long it is evident that Gary is depressed, for good reason. His decision to not be, as his father was, and in the words of Strong Motion, “an odious Male,” has undermined his authority at home, and his wife is making a final bid to destroy that authority altogether. She wants Gary to concede his depression, in which case his perceptions will forfeit their truth-content altogether and become mere illustrations of a disease easily treated by one or another serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

His sister Denise has likewise put herself in an impossible situation. Gary’s wife insists that “work was the drug that ruined your father’s life.” Work is also Denise’s drug, and incessant work as a chef has spared her the necessity of deciding how to live, and with whom. Both her yuppie boss and his lefty, do-gooder wife exert a powerful attraction on her. When the couple breaks up, she thinks, “Easy for you guys. ... You can split in two.” Her commitment to the virtues of desire, in opposition to the repressed lives of her parents, has done little but to manufacture still more unsatisfied desire.

Thus do the Lambert children, their lives designed to correct for the inadequacies of the parental model, arrive, one by one, at an impasse. Then all three are catapulted back for “one last Christmas” in the Midwestern exurb of St. Jude (named for the patron of lost causes), where they find the previous generation’s domestic arrangement an even worse shambles than before. Correcting their parents’ lives by their own, they also have been subjected to corrections, in the market sense, which mercilessly show up their own positions as, well, overvalued.

This account of a novel remarkable for its abundance of bright and apt detail, its living complexity, may be too schematic; but Franzen’s warm sympathy for his characters should not obscure his systematic cruelty. Thoroughness and understanding are, after all, attributes of any professionally conducted session of torture and interrogation. Franzen has composed his novel carefully, so that virtually no detail, however autonomous and right, does not find a kindred instance somewhere else in the story.

Writing about Paula Fox’s novel Desperate Characters (in which a bite from a possibly rabid cat allows a woman to commune with the general social madness all around her), Franzen detected the woman’s “strange wish to be harmed.” It is also worth noticing that, for all their eagerness to be happy, both Chip and Denise deliberately burn themselves with cigarettes, and Gary receives his own self-inflicted stigmata from an electric hedge-clipper. This is unconscious shamanism, the wish for a lucid and articulate wound. It flies in the face of another precept of Gary’s wife: “There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering.”

Alfred Lambert, patriarch of the clan, is a child of the Depression—the economic one—and a quoter of Schopenhauer, and may therefore be taken to know that suffering is, if not useful, then inevitable. But The Corrections is no more a paean to his and Enid Lambert’s generation than it is to their children’s. The senior Lamberts are decent and loyal people. But they are also bigoted, repressed and traditional—the father a tyrant, the mother a dizzy optimist. Franzen does not withhold his characteristic sympathy from them, but nor does he spare them his analysis.

he Corrections is such a thorough, honest and scrupulously realistic novel that few have noticed there is something very curious about the Lamberts. To discover it requires doing a little math. Alfred is 79 years old for most of the novel, and Enid is 73. Their eldest child is 45, their youngest 32. This means that these overwhelmingly conventional Midwesterners only began to have children when the wife was 28 and the husband 34, and continued having them until she was 43 and he 49: nothing impossible, but certainly unusual for people of their demographic. A recent New Yorker essay by Franzen implies that the Lamberts are based in part on his own family, where the generations may have been just as widely spaced. In any case, the structure of the fictional family has allowed him to write a novel of generational conflict in which a crucial, intervening generation is missing—namely, the people who came of age in the ’60s and early ’70s. There were certainly apolitical hippies, and fanatically anti-hippie radicals, but for a few years a good portion of the American left embodied a promise, entirely absent from the pages of The Corrections, of a life both ethical and devoted to pleasure.

Since then the dream of personal happiness has become captive to the market while the left has wounded itself with its well-founded pessimism and grief. Franzen’s neat, local solution to the problem is to have concocted an exceptionally bitter pill that is nevertheless a pleasure to swallow: A harrowing tale of boom-time depression animated by rich, old-fashioned characterization and plotting. He should have exulted when Oprah chose to give her imprimatur to The Corrections. Who but Chip Lambert was going to tell Oprah’s fans that “the for-profit nation-state, with a globally dispersed citizenry of shareholders, is the next stage in the evolution of political economy”? What other page-turner were they going to read that superimposes the most novel features of our consumer environment on the most ancient relationships—those between husband and wife, parent and child?

There is a certain genius in writing a novel equally about consumerism and family life. The ability to choose among available products, the endless expansion of discretionary income, is the consumer ideal. In a consumer society, to belong to a family is therefore the ultimate affront: We did not choose these people. Perhaps then the exaltation of the family, universal across the political spectrum, needn’t be so reactionary after all—not if in its small way that obdurate and unprofitable institution is an example of the limits of capital and the necessity of the pursuit of happinesses other than one’s own. Maybe this is the use of unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.

Benjamin Kunkel also writes for Dissent and the Los Angeles Times.

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