A Lion to the End

This is how novels about family are usually written: There are the grown-up children who vow never to be like their weird and crazy parents. (Dad sleepwalks naked/Mom claims she’s vegetarian when her rich vegetarian next-door neighbor is around; Mom and Dad are most likely Republicans living in the Midwest). Of course, these children lead weird and crazy lives themselves, although they wouldn’t admit any of this until halfway through the story. This basic plot is made interesting by anecdotes scattered here and there, such as the disastrous dinner table conversations where one child says something about his sibling that he or she isn’t supposed to—e.g., the other brother being gay, the sister having smoked pot in the bathroom, etc.—the rest of the family members jumping in, and then they’re all talking, yelling and cursing at the same time. A stroke of tragedy would hit them, and they all realize family is important and they always have one another no matter what.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is a novel about family, but because it’s Jonathan Franzen, the prose is so much more elegant, the characters more layered and complex.

Where The Corrections departs from the basic plot (as described above), aside from the rather rich characterization, and the fact that this isn’t simply and solely about family, is in the ending. You reach that final sentence in the story without feeling fluffy with happiness and inspiration, but a rather sickening jab on the stomach when the truth hits you: that people, your parents and yourself included, don’t change—or refuse to change. That the parents you believed were crazy are crazy after all.

However, Franzen successfully paints the irony in it all. Alfred, the family patriarch, is crazy not because he has Parkinson’s and is slowly beginning to lose his grip on reality, but precisely because of his refusal to change, his unbending determination to kick against the rather powerful seduction of modern-day, capitalist America:

He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string….

Much better, Alfred thought, to stay out of the basement, to work with what he had. It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, and individual thing. No matter how little that thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash as object that you knew wasn’t trash.

Modernity expected this designation and Alfred resisted it.

His three children are reciting the modern-day mantra to “take everything easy”, all blind and unquestioning. Chip, the middle son, goes to Lithuania to work on a website, the purpose of which is to defraud American investors. Easy money. Quick cash. His moral justification is that he feels more sympathy for the Lithuanian people than the greedy, fat-bellied American corporate kingpins. Gary, the eldest, can’t say no to his own children. His eldest asked him for a surveillance camera, and he just gives in after making a weak argument against it. And then Denise, the youngest, throws away a very good and stable job because she was infatuated with the boss’ wife. Enid, the matriarch, drowns her cares away by taking Aslan, the miracle pill, that is not even allowed in the U.S.

And yet, it is Alfred who is crazy.

Tradition versus Modernity, Old versus New, Then versus Now. In this sense, The Corrections is an articulation of some kind of a farewell to the past and its consequences on those who are caught in between. Alfred refuses to jump from the fence and land on two feet on the side where his children are. Enid, for her part, desperately makes the same jump, but she finds her other foot caught on the other side. She then limps, awkward and unsure, so she is regarded  as weird and crazy (labels she has carried even before) by those who can run with ease in the vast field of the present and the future.

Alfred was indeed a lion to the end. And Enid, well, she was “seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.”

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