Dope.

I have a review out this week in the Austin Chronicle. My editor there, Clay Smith, is undoubtedly the best editor I work with, and I'm happy with the work we've done in the last three years - has it been three years? Jesus.
But the Chronicle is going through the pain shooting through the print media since advertising money took a hike at the beginning of the year. The obvious place to cut out the fat is books -- I've posted about this before. In consequence, my review this week was intolerably squeezed. So I'm doing something I should, perhaps, not do -- I'm pasting in my full review of The Corrections. I wouldn't do this if I thought this site was attracting thousands, but it attracts tens, so I'm pretty sure I'm safe.
In Slate this week, Christopher Caldwell and Judith Shulevitz wrote about The Corrections, too. I love Slate's Book Club -- it is, I think, a brilliant use of the Net. And this week's dialogue was fascinating to me because, as a man who reviews @ ten books a month, I've thought a lot about what reviews do. With Non-fiction, it is somewhat easier to figure out a review. Unless the book is extraordinarily well written, non-fiction is pretty easy -- you reach in there, grab the pearl of content, and run away with it in a direction of your chosing.

Fiction poses a much more delicate task. I have no interest in book reporting -- the details of the plot you can gather from the book jacket, as any college student knows. I think I am of the impressionist school -- I want to want to know how a book makes an impression on the sensibility of an educated reader. On the other hand, I think too much impression ruins a review -- there has to be internal and external constraints in the review. It is hard to spell these out. You have to check yourself for unfair shots -- for instance, when Shulevitz uses her knowledge of Franzen's article about his Dad's alzheimers to criticize his portrayal of Alfred Lambert, the father in the novel, that was an unfair shot. You have to think hard about treatment - novels are made from a hard-to-analyze mixture of character, style, and plot, and there are those who favor one of those factors over the other, and there are authors who are manifestly incompetent at one (Dreiser, for instance, with his notorious prose clumsiness) who are brilliant at another. This is where I particularly like the way Slate's book club brings these usually hidden buoys and markers in the reader's soul to the surface. It exteriorizes the reviewers internal constraints by making one reviewer confront another. If you regularly read the New York Review of Books, you'll notice that most of the novel reviews suck. Why? Because the NYRB doesn't exactly know how to approach fiction, unless it is fiction written by a dead or a safely Central European writer -- same diff. Perhaps this goes back to the reign of Gore Vidal, who in the seventies exercized a malign influence on the fiction reviewing in that mag. It has never recovered. Vidal didn't recognize any constraint on his impressions other than his overbearing ego. He was the armored reader, and his hostility made it impossible for him to read. His review of Gravity's Rainbow is a classic of its type -- it is like reading an armadillo critique haute cuisine. Here we have a a conflict of tastes so manifestly baseline that we know the conjunction is a mistake.
So here is the longplaying version (although not long enough) of my review.

The Corrections
Author: Franzen, Jonathan
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 25.00

"The Correction, when it came, was not an overnight bursting of the bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year long leakage of value�"

The English Romantics, circa 1800, came back with a wonderful term from the continent: zeitgeist. It was probably Coleridge, with his esoteric cast of mind, who fastened upon the word first, but it was William Hazlitt who, wonderfully, anglicized it as "the Spirit of the Age."

What did it mean? It meant that history was no longer reducible to chronology - no longer the clock God wound up, ticking off monarchs or presidents at regular intervals. No, history was an emergent property, a pattern straight out of the dark unruly unconscious of the people. History, like the Kingdom of God, is within you.

Franzen's novel captures the spirit of the age, specifically the nineties (a decade that began in 1996 and ended, in confusion and sorrow, with the stealing of a presidential election and the bombing of the financial center of the world). 90s America discovered a new frontier, marked on its extreme boundary by the Greater Fool - that mythical last purchaser of high cap, negative dividend stock. 90s winners were full of irrational exuberance, while the decade's discards were full of radio talk show resentment. Forty-six year old arbitrageurs learned to pronounce cool (kewwwl) like sixteen year olds. Sixteen year olds learned to arbitrage. This is what the postwar world looked like - the first postwar world, really, since 1919.

Frankly, I'm surprised, I'm fucking shocked, Franzen is this good. He was not a writer I thought capable of this novel. A couple of years ago, Franzen was put on Granta's "best novelists under 40" list - of which there is no more depressing gauge of the mediocrity of hip. I thought I had good reason for paying no attention to him.

I didn't. The trick of his authorial voice we have also heard in David Foster Wallace and David Eggers. It is all about having that perfect SAT score intelligence -- this is the adolescent side of it -- edged -- this is the adult side -- with that retracting irony which, of course, reflects a class contradiction - for as soon as our A+ student climbs up the ladder of meritocracy, he looks down and sees that it is disappearing under him; that dumb and dumber are the real thing in this country; that the standards are perpetually lowering, that his boss, the biz student, got through four to six years of secondary education and read nothing more challenging than "7 Habits of Highly Effective People;" that the serious books he read are dismissed by his contemporaries as adolescent, while the adolescent movies they watch are discussed as if they were serious; that, in short, he is, if not the Underground man, at least the Upside Down one.

At the heart of Franzen's novel is a classic American situation. The three Lambert kids - Gary, Chip and Denise - are on the outskirts of middle age. Their parents, Enid and Alfred, live in St. Jude - your basic composite Midwestern city. Alfred has retired, after working his whole life for a railroad company that was swallowed up and deconstructed in a typical quickie acquisition - the kind of thing economists counsel us to accept in the name of 'efficiency.' Enid is now having to put up with Alfred's decay, his Parkinson's, his silences, his inanition, his spiritual heaviness. Enid is your classic Vance Packard Status Seeker type, suffering from the lifelong frustration of getting no cooperation from her family. Now she wants the kids to come for one last Christmas celebration in St. Jude's, after which they will decide something about their father.

The book is structured around long sequences devoted to each member of the family - although the child's point of view is held onto to the extent that Enid and Alfred come as a set, inseparable until the horrible end. Chip is an ex-academic, bounced out for violating his college's sex code. He ends up partnering with an ex-deputy minister of Lithuania trying to pull off a dot.com fraud. Denise is a super-chef in Philadelphia whose sex life describes a Borromean ring: she's having sex with both the owner of her restaurant and his wife. Gary is a rich investment manager in Philadelphia, married to Caroline, a wealthy woman who, employing all the multiple strategies of passive aggression, has let Gary know his parents are d�class�.

A intricate subplot involving a wonder mood altering drug, Correcktall, is woven into these elements. Alfred patented the basic process being used by Axon, the start-up bio-tech company that is marketing Corecktall.

The panic at the heart of Franzen's comedy is easily recognized by anybody over 35 - it is the awful realization that we are turning out JUST LIKE OUR PARENTS. Denise's bisexuality, Chip's leather jacket and skim milk Marxism, Gary's incredibly cool Italian suits all prove insufficient to defer that fundamental recognition of creeping likeness.

There's a small pile of novels (Invisible Man, J.R., Infinite Jest) on my shelf that I've read three times at least - twice as a reader, for amusement, and once, as a writer, to figure out the magic tricks. The Corrections is going on that pile.