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WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
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WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
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 Winfrey gently rescinded her offer that Franzen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 didnt 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 companys
effort to hide its noxious byproducts by pumping them into the earth. Franzens
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 heros 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
energyall of these were reminiscent of Dickens, and they articulated,
more powerfully than any manifesto, Franzens 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 proclaimsas any Oprah-ite would like toI love myself.
Whats 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. Itwealso
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 oras on daytime TVby
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 Lamberts 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 wont 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 didnt have Julias long, cool,
pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didnt have Julias grapy smell of
lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didnt have Julias artful tongue.
This is hardly the funniest or most acute passage in Franzens wonderful
novel, but it does reveal that, during the 90s, the old nightmare of those
Frankfurt School thinkers, and the boast of Maggie ThatcherThere Is No
Alternativefinally 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 Moraliamaybe Chips copy can be found somewhere
for $5we 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 againconsumerism is
an infernal machineby 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 lifes 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. Garys
wife insists that work was the drug that ruined your fathers life.
Work is also Denises 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
generations 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 Franzens 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 Foxs 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 womans 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 Garys wife: Theres
absolutely nothing useful about suffering.
Alfred Lambert, patriarch of the clan, is a child of the Depressionthe
economic oneand 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 Lamberts generation than it is to their
childrens. The senior Lamberts are decent and loyal people. But they are
also bigoted, repressed and traditionalthe 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 missingnamely, 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.
Franzens 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 Oprahs 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 relationshipsthose 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,
neednt be so reactionary after allnot 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 ones 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.
WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.