I've been consumed and possessed by The Corrections for the past three days. Finally finished it this morning. Am terrifically glad to have done so if only to be out from under its depressing, absurd spell:
this morning I awoke with about ten times the usual despair and anxiety thinking "Oh god. My father has Parkinson's and my whole family is falling apart due to long-delayed and finally inevitable failures of ambition and personality." This feeling persisted for several minutes until I finally realized that those aren't my problems, those are the Lambert family's problems, and while I certainly have my own worries that are similar it does not help to be so absorbed that I cannot separate them at all.
This is all very similar to the several nights of nightmares while I was reading Crime and Punishment during and after which I suffered torments for having killed an old woman with an axe.
Anyway, it's a good book. I say reluctantly. A very good book. Despite Franzen's idiotic posturing about Oprah's book club, despite his dopey jacket picture in which he looks like every literary jackass you ever knew, right down to the manly but well-groomed stubble and the perky but not-untrimmed hair. And despite the fact that to some extent its power derives from playing on fear as much as any horror novel does -- in fact, come to think of it, perhaps I should classify it as a horror novel. Only instead of being set in an abandoned warehouse or a decaying castle it's set in an abandoned and decaying Midwestern railway household. Unheimlech indeed.
It's also pretty funny, though I have less capability to laugh while simultaneously paralyzed by horror than many people do. I can appreciate that it should be funny in a horrible, grotesque way, though -- in the way that your own crippling credit card debt or impossibly decaying family situation or anxiety-induced hysteria is both grotesque and funny.
That's the key to why this book is so good -- it is very, very relatable. I've got Jane Austen on the brain, but it's merciless and unflinchingly observant of the lies our society tells itself in the same way Jane is -- although I do think that Franzen might have benefitted from laying off the David Foster Wallace and laying on the, say, F. Scott Fitzerald or somebody. The weakest parts are the semi-magical-realism/science fiction bits. And though society's medical obsession is one of the main targets of the book -- and I don't know how he could have written it out -- it's so easy, in a way, that it plays right into that weak magical link.
Come to think of it, maybe real magic, of the kind afforded by fiction, is what is missing from this relentlessly fiction-dispelling novel. This is a book in which not only is there no Santa Claus, the very biggest problem is probably that we wish there were one. And that's a bit of a conundrum for a fictional medium. But, of course, it's an old conundrum. And the book is still very good. And I am still very glad that it is very, very over, and I can get back to my own personal nightmares, of which I certainly have enough.
(I dreamed last night, by the way, of telling a group of people assembled in a dining room about my dreams. None of which were very interesting. I really don't think that no-reality-testing-in-dreams thing works for the dreams of somebody who has a whole lot of difficulty separating narrative from [ostensible] reality.)
Yeah. Maybe the theme of this entry is that, once again, my inability to separate my imaginary life from my lived one can be extremely, even viscerally troubling.
this morning I awoke with about ten times the usual despair and anxiety thinking "Oh god. My father has Parkinson's and my whole family is falling apart due to long-delayed and finally inevitable failures of ambition and personality." This feeling persisted for several minutes until I finally realized that those aren't my problems, those are the Lambert family's problems, and while I certainly have my own worries that are similar it does not help to be so absorbed that I cannot separate them at all.
This is all very similar to the several nights of nightmares while I was reading Crime and Punishment during and after which I suffered torments for having killed an old woman with an axe.
Anyway, it's a good book. I say reluctantly. A very good book. Despite Franzen's idiotic posturing about Oprah's book club, despite his dopey jacket picture in which he looks like every literary jackass you ever knew, right down to the manly but well-groomed stubble and the perky but not-untrimmed hair. And despite the fact that to some extent its power derives from playing on fear as much as any horror novel does -- in fact, come to think of it, perhaps I should classify it as a horror novel. Only instead of being set in an abandoned warehouse or a decaying castle it's set in an abandoned and decaying Midwestern railway household. Unheimlech indeed.
It's also pretty funny, though I have less capability to laugh while simultaneously paralyzed by horror than many people do. I can appreciate that it should be funny in a horrible, grotesque way, though -- in the way that your own crippling credit card debt or impossibly decaying family situation or anxiety-induced hysteria is both grotesque and funny.
That's the key to why this book is so good -- it is very, very relatable. I've got Jane Austen on the brain, but it's merciless and unflinchingly observant of the lies our society tells itself in the same way Jane is -- although I do think that Franzen might have benefitted from laying off the David Foster Wallace and laying on the, say, F. Scott Fitzerald or somebody. The weakest parts are the semi-magical-realism/science fiction bits. And though society's medical obsession is one of the main targets of the book -- and I don't know how he could have written it out -- it's so easy, in a way, that it plays right into that weak magical link.
Come to think of it, maybe real magic, of the kind afforded by fiction, is what is missing from this relentlessly fiction-dispelling novel. This is a book in which not only is there no Santa Claus, the very biggest problem is probably that we wish there were one. And that's a bit of a conundrum for a fictional medium. But, of course, it's an old conundrum. And the book is still very good. And I am still very glad that it is very, very over, and I can get back to my own personal nightmares, of which I certainly have enough.
(I dreamed last night, by the way, of telling a group of people assembled in a dining room about my dreams. None of which were very interesting. I really don't think that no-reality-testing-in-dreams thing works for the dreams of somebody who has a whole lot of difficulty separating narrative from [ostensible] reality.)
Yeah. Maybe the theme of this entry is that, once again, my inability to separate my imaginary life from my lived one can be extremely, even viscerally troubling.
0 Responses to “possessed”
Post a Comment