The Corrections

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
read: 2020
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award, James Tait Black Prize

I've been on a good run with reading the past couple months, but I started to flag about halfway through The Corrections. The novel shares some themes with White Noise and other novels that deal with the modern middle-class condition, and I slogged through reading extended passages of middle class misery. The section where depressed, alcoholic Gary resists admitting to his wife that he's a depressed alcoholic because she's manipulative and emotionally abusive, especially dragged. Siblings Gary, Chip, and Denise all rebel against their conventional Midwestern upbringing, but their rebellion does not liberate them and becomes its own prison. The children, along with parents Enid and Alfred, are all wildly unhappy.

At this point, two miracle cures are introduced that promise to fix Alfred and Enid: Corecktall, a potential solution to Alfred's Parkinson's, and Aslan, a Narnia-named and sketchily-prescribed pill that temporarily alleviates Enid's shame and unhappiness. At this point, I was fully expecting a redux of White Noise and the role Dylar played.

The novel goes in a different direction, however. Ultimately, neither Corecktal nor Aslan fulfills its promise, yet this doesn't necessarily mean salvation is lost to the characters in The Corrections. Sylvia, a minor character, provides a template in explaining how she got over the tragic murder of her daughter:

[A]bsolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly.

Franzen takes us inside the characters' heads so much when they are miserable so he can set up these kinds of epiphanies that allow them to transcend that misery, at least potentially. The children come to realize they are running from rather than running to; ultimately rebellion for its own sake holds no more agency than conformity for its own sake. Once they understand that, they can start working towards building the kinds of lives they want to lead.

I, Claudius

I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #14, James Tait Black Prize

It's hard to read Graves' characterization of Caligula and not think George R. R. Martin drew from it heavily in his depiction of King Joffrey. The two share their young age, cruelty, and inflated sense of importance. A Song of Ice and Fire owes a lot from I, Claudius - the story brims with plots and conspiracies, assassinations, strategic marriages, affairs, incest, murder, war, and intrigue. It was a lot more fun and readable than I expected a book that's 80 years old (and is written about things happening 2000 years ago) to be.

There are some interesting meta-textual elements to the novel. The story is written as autobiography. Claudius writes:

This is a confidential history. but who, it may be asked, are my confidants? My answer is: it is addressed to posterity.

There's an early argument between historians Pollio and Livy about the proper way to write history. Pollio holds the truth above all else, eschewing the easy or dramatic narrative for the way things really happened. Livy is willing to take more poetic license, saying, "If I come across two versions of the same episode I choose the one nearest my theme." The young Claudius sides with Pollio, yet I, Claudius is written in Livy's style. This is explained late in the story, with the idea that Claudius gains access to the empire's "secret archives." "Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all." Is Graves winking at us here?

White Teeth

White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
read: circa 2004
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

White Teeth is an example of a modern "identity plot" novel.  The characters are all from different ethnic and religious backgrounds and upbringings - white British, Jamaican Jehovah's Witness, Bangladeshi Islam, Jewish, and mixed race and religion - and they all seem to be trying to figure out how they fit in to modern English society.  It's almost an identity novel for England itself.  What is England in this world where being British can mean so many different things?

A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time
Series of 12 books
by Anthony Powell
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #43, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for At Lady Molly's)

Atonement reminded me of A Dance to the Music of Time, particularly how the lives of the characters were disrupted by the war.  But while the characters in Atonement are mired in the blood and guts of the conflict, narrator Nick Jenkins is mired in red tape.  The war effort is not spared author Anthony Powell's dry wit, and Jenkins spends his time sending paperwork to embassies, helping a lovelorn officer, and (as always) trying to avoid being swept up in Kenneth Widmerpool's machinations.  But it's not all humor; many friends and family members die in the War, and the reader gets the impression that their lives were snuffed out with their stories yet untold, much as a person living then would.

I spent a long time with these books.  None were particularly long but there were twelve of them.  Most had themes, and often the story jumped between time exploring those themes.  For instance, the first book "A Questioning of Upbringing" concerns Nick's relationship with schoolmates Peter Templar and Charles Stringham and issues of class, "The Kindly Ones" features the occult, especially embodied in the odd Doctor Trelawney, and "Temporary Kings" deals with themes of sexual deviance.  Each book can be read as a standalone work, especially since narrator Nick is largely a background character, but reading it in sequence you become fond of the different characters, even the officious, manipulative Widmerpool.

I feel like making this entry a lot longer, to preserve my memory of the characters and the episodes in the different books.  But it's hard to know where to start.  I think I'll just leave it in my memory so I can return to it when prompted, as the narrator is at the very beginning of the novel.

Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #90, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Man Booker Prize

The one word that comes to mind when I think of Midnight's Children is "rich."  The novel is long and suffused with symbolism.  The prose is big and bold, and the narrator has a lot of personality.  The world is an imaginative interpretation of our own, with elements of "magic realism" poking out at the seams.  Themes and symbols appear and are repeated in patterns throughout the novel - religious symbolism, "nose and knees," jewelry, a center part, bodily functions, impotence, parents, etc.  Even though Midnight's Children is a long novel, there's little fat here; the book is intense, page after page.

But how do you analyze a book that gives away all of its secrets?  Saleem, Midnight's Children's narrator and protagonist, is born at the exact instant India acquires its independence, but as if the parallels between his life and that of his country are not obvious enough, Saleem as narrator interrupts the story halfway through to share with the reader four different ways this parallel works.  When Saleem introduces a new parental figure into the story, he explicitly calls it out and notes how it's just another in a long line.  One could write an a long, long book about all the symbols and parallels in here, but Rushdie takes all the work out of it.  But the transparency of the symbolism doesn't make the novel less interesting or less of an intellectual challenge.

The style is very rich and fun, with Saleem writing with a manic energy that gives the impression of a train about to run off the rails.  There's magic and humor and absurdity, but upon finishing Midnight's Children I came to realize that it is fundamentally a pessimistic book.  The story is a tragedy told in a comic style, which distracts you from the progressively more terrible things that are happening.  Is India, despite all its potential, all its fathers and mothers, all its natural beauty and greatness, all its diversity and spirit, ultimately doomed to collapse under the weight of its very worst elements?

The Road

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2010
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The Road is the story of a father and son, surviving together on a doomed post-apocalyptic Earth against the elements, starvation, and rampaging hoards of cannibals.  Death is an inevitability, not just on an individual level but for the human species.  The air, sea, and land is drained of color and replaced with a lifeless gray.  Of the three Cormac McCarthy books I've read, The Road is by far the most optimistic.

The protagonists are an unnamed man and his son, who travel alone through a ruined America.  There is no chance that the boy will grow up to live a normal life, the kind of life the man had before whatever terrible event or series of events left the world so desolate, but they press on anyways.  They flee from death, though they recognize some fates - like being captured by the cannibals - are worse than death.  They take brief joy in simple pleasures like finding good shelter for a few days, or a can of Coca Cola.  Most significantly, the man impresses upon the boy that there is a right and a wrong, and that he cannot compromise his humanity in the effort to survive.  This is the real struggle of The Road - not survival, but maintaining some sort of moral code in a world where society has collapsed.

That said, it is a stark book.  That's undoubtedly by design, but it can make it hard to read; every few pages the major characters get in a dire situation - starvation, disease, marauders - manage to survive, only to be plunged into another life-threatening circumstance a few pages later.  McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.  He has no intention of taking us there.  The struggle for basic human decency underlies the novel, but McCarthy rarely lets you inside his character's heads, so the feelings underlying the actions of the characters and their reactions to what they see are largely a matter of the reader's supposition.  

A Passage to India

A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
read: circa 2010
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #25, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

I've been in India this week (hence the sporadic posting)!  It feels appropriate to review E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, his thoughtful criticism of the Imperial British presence in India in the early part of the 20th century.  I say "thoughtful" because Forster sets up a tale without real good guys and bad guys; the major characters come to realize that the bad intentions they ascribe to each other are sociologically ingrained; they are rooted in a fundamental distrust between Indians and British imperialists.  The story walks a fine line, suggesting that on an individual level, Indians (such as Dr. Aziz) and British (such as Mrs. Moore and Mr. Fielding) can relate as equals, and show mutual affection and respect, but the shroud of imperialism that hangs over everything will poison any efforts to really become friends.