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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (5285)	2/16/2002 11:05:17 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6089

I"m really glad I'm listening to the abridged version. Here's part of a too-long review in TNR of The Corrections. It talks about the good and the not-good. This excerpt is the final part of the review, which has more positive comment toward the beginning. James Wood is the reviewer. I like him, but this review is waaay too long. <Too often Franzen's narrative style relaxes into debased journalism. At times, one is struck by the novel's somewhat inartistic language: "Denise had never been a crier, but her face was crumpling up"; "Her effortless good looks ... movie-actress thin"; "Enid and Jonah were a lovefest"; "He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid"; "What gave him the real techno boner, however, was a radio-controlled toy automobile"; "she glommed onto the belief that she was gay"; "And so she worked her ass off"--and so on. It is as if Franzen has not heeded his own words about how to write against the age in a way that is not also of it. The Corrections is a big book, and the prose, in its long course, is likely to cross a few plains and flats. But as soon as one compares this language of smart commentary with the language of truth that also runs throughout this book, one is struck by the superfluousness of the former. Alfred's awkward refusal to describe his illness as anything other than a inconvenient "affliction" is worth paragraphs about neuroblastomas, glial cells, mitochondria, and neurofactors. Sometimes a single sentence lances the heart with its clear and sharp rightness. Franzen describes a familiar contrast in Denise's childhood: "She'd gone to school in a bright modernity and come home every day to an older, darker world." Yes, we think, we know this division. Or when Alfred, in a moving final scene, is dying, trapped on his bed, desperate to undo the belts that are tying him to the bed but unable to, Franzen finely writes: "He was like a person of two dimensions seeking freedom in a third." It might be Alfred's epitaph. Likewise this novel, which swerves between various dimensions, some richer and freer than others. If it can be said that it unwittingly enacts a fine argument against the viability of a certain kind of social novel, it must also be said that it purposively makes a fine case for the vivacity of another kind of book, the novel of character. This is--or this should be--what Franzen means by the taking of refuge in "authentic" sentences. It is easy to imagine that the press of modernity makes authentic encounter uniquely difficult, that we are all belated exceptionalists; but this is postmodern provincialism, surely, and Franzen, in his heart, seems not to buy it either. We are not uniquely doomed by modern conditions. And if we are doomed, then we are doomed in rather old-fashioned ways, as Cervantes and Sterne and Svevo knew. We are doomed because humans always flow over their targets; their souls are gratuitous and busy, congested with aspiration and desire. This is the dark theme of Franzen's novel, this is its truest touch. All the rest is "social news" and may be turned off, as it deserves.> tnr.com