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.

White Noise

White Noise
by Don DeLillo
read: 2019
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

White Noise is fundamentally concerned with the human fear of death. Jack Gladney is obsessed with it, and he finds his wife Babette—whom he had assumed was too full of everyday concerns to similarly obsess about it—feels the same. Despite Gladney's career success and the variety of situations with his blended family and many children, death is never far from his mind.

I kept waiting for Gladney's friend Murray Jay Siskind to emerge as some sort of passive-aggressive villain, but he never really did—or did he? He does advise Gladney that to kill is to act counter to death, which isn't really great advice.

Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
read: 2014
Modern Library #96, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

I was going to write this post on the parallels between slavery and the Holocaust, but the Wiki page covers this pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Choice_(novel)

One thing that stood out to me on reading Sophie's Choice was the attention narrator Stingo pays to names. Early on he describes how he got the nickname "Stingo" (a corruption of "Stinky" for less-than-stellar hygiene habits). An early benefactor "bore the jaunty name of Artiste." He describes Gundar Firkin as a name that "sound[s] odd or made-up." He loves the names of his fellow flatmates "for nothing other than their marvelous variety" before he even meets them. He notes that love interest Leslie Lapidus' name rhymes with "Ah, feed us."

There's something meta-fictional going on here, and I don't know that I've entirely pieced it together, but I think a lot of it is set up for the character who presents Sophie with the titular "choice": Fritz Jemand von Niemand. As a work of fiction, presumably all the characters names are fabricated, but von Niemand's is invented even within the context of the novel, chosen by Stingo "because it seems as good a name as any for an SS doctor." Stingo takes similar liberties inventing an elaborate backstory for von Niemand, and this backstory is integral to explaining how a human could do some of the things the Nazis did in the Holocaust. Ultimately, this story rings false to me, and I think it's supposed to ring false - but the alternative is an incomprehensible evil.

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
by Flannery O'Connor
read: 2013
National Book Award

According to the Wikipedia page for one of the stories in this collection, Flannery O'Connor once said:

 "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."

The collection contains stories about a family getting murdered by a serial killer, a 5-year-old who drowns himself, a father who so neglects his son that the child hangs himself, a one-armed man who abandons a mute girl at a diner, and many more. It's not hard to see why most would categorize them as "hard, hopeless, and brutal."

"Grace" is a difficult theological concept as it is (as defined by the Catholic Church), "free and undeserved." It's easy to feel that the central characters in O'Connor's stories are "undeserved." They are frequently short-sighted and act against themselves and their best interests, usually with tragic results.

O'Connor generally does not portray the artists in her stories favorably. In modern America, we often value the independent mind and spirit, the iconoclast, the maverick. O'Connor does not share this view. One example is "The Partridge Festival," where a young would-be writer returns to the hometown he disdains out of a fascination with a spree killer, who he sees as "a man who would not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors." But when he meets the man, he finds a lunatic. He runs from his true calling, sales:

Selling was the only thing he had proved himself good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.

It's hard not to wonder how O'Connor felt about her own vocation, especially considering how laborious she found the writing process, as described by editor Robert Giroux in the introduction. Did she forsake some more natural grace? Or did she feel she was doing God's will with her writing? Maybe she was uncertain - one memorable story, "Parker's Back" tells of a man who is inspired to impress his very Christian wife by getting a large tattoo of Jesus on his back, only to have her throw him out of the house for idolatry. This is not an easy set of stories to read, and it sounds like it was equally difficult for O'Connor to write.

Invisible Man

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #19, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

Invisible Man gets grouped with Native Son a lot, as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were friends and contemporaries and both novels deal with the travails of a young black man in a big city and what that says about larger society. So I expected Invisible Man to be a similar book, a naturalistic take on the sociological factors that oppress African-Americans. There's some of that in the novel, but there's also an absurdist element that wouldn't be out of place in Kafka, Pynchon, or Chesterton. Nothing that happens is fantastic in the strictest sense, but the opening sets the tone for the novel: our (never-named) protagonist / narrator is living underground, lit by 1,369 light bulbs powered by stolen electricity, constantly playing the same jazz record over and over. Through the course of the novel, the narrator travels with a white man to a wild black bar, gets experimented on as a patient after a chemical plant explosion, is taken in by a kindly woman with a cartoonish caricature bank of a black face, becomes a famous spokesman for the Communists, and becomes a hated figure and target in riots that engulf Harlem. The book teeters on the edge of sanity for its duration.

The narrator seems buffeted from by forces on all sides, never able to define who he is. Is he the good boy student that his college (and white society) want him to be? Should he throw in with the unions or the Communists? Should he rebel against white society all together? He is a symbol of the impossibility of a black man defining himself in an oppressive world, but part of his plight is in being a symbol, someone who keeps changing his identity according to the whims of those around him. Only when he disengages from all society, becoming invisible to all (including the blacks and the Communists) does he acquire his own voice.

Invisible Man is justifiably considered one of the great works in American literature, so I was fascinated to see what else Ellison wrote. However, it was Ellison's only novel, even though he lived another forty years. That's amazing.

The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
read: 2010
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #81, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

When I started the Time 100 greatest novels list, The Adventures of Augie March is the first book I picked up.  Mostly because the list on their website is alphabetized by title.  Which is kinda weird.

Like the protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas, the titular Augie March is not a remarkable figure on the face of things, nor an obviously heroic one.  His adventures are interesting and often amusing, as he holds a series of jobs, nearly gets adopted by a rich couple, and falls in love and travels to Mexico to train eagles.  But they don't really follow a narrative arc, and it's hard to discern what lessons we are meant to infer from Augie's experiences.  This lack of clear message makes the book feel honest, and Augie's optimism in the face of uncertainty feels real and refreshing.

All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award


Cormac McCarthy is one of the most interesting novelists working today.  I laid out some thoughts on his writing in my review of The Road, but I think I sold him a bit short.  This is what I wrote:

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.

Having just finished my fourth McCarthy novel now, All the Pretty Horses, I realize that I was wrong.  McCarthy is dealing with many of the same themes and issues as the other great writers, but he's coming at things from a different angle.  To McCarthy, talk is cheap, and thoughts are even cheaper; it's action that reveals character.  He's not always going to spell out what going's on in the characters' heads, but their actions open a window to their minds and souls.


The question of fate looms large in All the Pretty Horses.  The novel is open to the idea of a Christian God who controls the destiny of His subjects.  This is laid out early in an exchange between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins.  Cole suggests that if Rawlins' parents hadn't met, he never would have been born.

Rawlins lay watching the stars.  After a while he said: I could still be born.  I might look different or somethin.  If God wanted me to be born I'd be born.

And if He didnt you wouldnt. 

Fate, God, and destiny show up repeatedly in the story.  Blevins is petrified he will be killed by lightning because his family members were all killed by lightning.  Cole himself is a born horseman, who "if were begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway."  Alejandra's aunt notes the trouble her families women has with men and hopes it's not "tainted blood" or "a family curse."  When Cole returns to the ranch towards the end of the story, the workers tell him "that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other."  However, Cole later tells Rawlins that America, his land of birth, "ain't my country."  There is a capriciousness to birthrights.


Fate is a major topic in a conversation between Cole and Alejandra's aunt after he is released from prison.  She makes the analogy to

A tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz.

She suggests in the next breath a "puppet show" where the puppet strings "terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on."  All the Pretty Horses is open to the idea of a Christian God, but it doesn't matter.  Because if God exists, His will is virtually indistinguishable from nihilistic randomness.  And ultimately, how can we know if something was fated to happen, or whether it just happened to happen?  The aunt makes this point also:

In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been.  There never was. 

The closest McCarthy gets to laying out some sort of theory, some method to God's madness, is Cole's thought that pain exists as some sort of currency to create beauty.  "The blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."  It's not clear whether this is a blessing or a curse; Rawlins says early on in the novel that a good-looking horse or woman is "always more trouble than what they're worth."


How is a person to act in a world where he does not have control over his destiny?  The book makes two suggestions.  The first is acceptance.  Cole's mother leaves his father and he cannot keep the farm, but he bears this pain without fighting back, even accepting the divorce.  The judge who exonerates Cole near the very end of the tale is another model of acceptance.  He tells Cole that "I sure didnt want to be a judge," but ultimately ends up taking on that role out of duty to his country.  "I think I just didnt have any choice.  Just didnt have any choice," he says.


The other option is raging against destiny.  Alejandra's aunt describes wanting "very much to be a person of value" when she was younger.  "If one were to be a person of value that value could not  be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune.  It had to be a quality that could not change.  No matter what."  Cole subscribes to this philosophy.  Later in the book he tells the judge that his greatest regret is not attempting to intercede when Blevins was killed.  The judge asks him "Would it have done any good?"  He replies, "No sir.  But that dont make it right."  Very early on, McCarthy tells us that "all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise," in a rare instance of the narrative voice telling and not showing.  In a way, All the Pretty Horses mirrors the Book of Job, except unlike Job, Cole does not humbly accept his suffering and trust in God's plan.


There are no easy answers.  Cole's father wastes away, "thin and frail," with "sunken eyes."  Blevins, takes great pains to avoid death by lightning but in doing so sets off a chain of events that results in his death.  Alejandra's aunt tries to set up a better life for Alejandra, but it is unclear whether her machinations will be successful.  Cole's quest to find Blevins' horse's rightful owner, and with it possible absolution in the eyes of Alejandra's family, fails.  So is man to accept his fate, or rage against it?  McCarthy leaves both doors open, but behind each is suffering and death.

The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #60, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

Franny Glass of Franny and Zooey also reminded me a bit of Kate Cutrer, narrator Binx Bolling's distant cousin and sometime love interest in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.  Like Franny (and The Bell Jar's Esther Greenwood), Kate slips into depression not because of a disastrous event that happened to her, but just as a reaction to everyday events around her.  She falls into a malaise where even the process of getting through her day is overwhelming to her.

Bolling is in a similar funk, though it manifests itself differently.  He professes to contemplate the point of existence but seem to spend a lot of his time avoiding such contemplation.  He goes through his job mechanically, has shallow affairs with his secretaries, and, as the title betrays, watches a lot of movies.  The novel is narrated in first person, but the story is in what Binx doesn't tell you as much as what he does.

Looking back on the story, I think of John Cheever's Falconer, another book that raises a lot of questions without spelling out the answers.  I imagine I'll want to revisit both books down the road sometime.

Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2000
National Book Award

Caution: contains spoilers.

I read this back in college, for fun.  It was after Time had named Philip Roth the greatest living American author in their millennium issue.  Most critics have read this as a tale of a lower-middle-class Jewish young man trying to assimilate into upper-class life.  I read it as a love story.  In that vein, two parts stand out: when Neil confesses his love after playing a night-time game in the pool that is possibly an innocent lover's flirtation, possibly a manipulative effort to coax emotion by making Neil feel insecure and abandoned, and likely something in between.  The second part that stands out is the climactic, "If she had only been slightly not Brenda…but then would I have loved her?," which in a deft non-sentence sums up the course of nearly every failed relationship in human history.  Roth is one of my favorite writers, and this was a fine introduction to his work.

There were other stories in this collection, but I honestly don't remember a thing about them.

Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
read: 2010
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

I guess I don't get it.  Gravity's Rainbow has some great parts - I love the argument Roger Mexico has about  the correlation between Slothrop's sexual conquests and locations of V-2 rocket attack sites and how it it is just a statistical oddity and has no predictive value - but man, it is disjointed.  I think that's probably part of the point, but I'm not a big "the novel as craft" guy.  The Wikipedia page on Gravity's Rainbow states that "The number of episodes in each part carries with it a numerological significance which is in keeping with the use of numerology and Tarot symbolism throughout the novel."  But really, who gives a shit?

I do think I would gain something by re-reading the book, and I enjoy Pynchon's writing style.  I'll save that project for my forties though, maybe.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
read: circa 1996
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #10, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award

Another required book for school, read during my sophomore year of high school.  We had been required to read East Of Eden the summer leading up to that school year, and while I liked both books, 1500+ pages of Steinbeck was a bit much (especially since we ended up giving short shrift to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and pretty much everyone post-1950).  I also thought East Of Eden was a better book.  I understand why Grapes of Wrath is more important historically: it captures the dust bowl, the migration to California,  and the misery of impoverished rural folks of that time period.  I just found the more personal story of sibling rivalry in East Of Eden to be more affecting.

I have Woody Guthrie's album Dust Bowl Ballads, so whenever "The Ballad of Tom Joad" comes on in shuffle I get a little plot refresher.  I remember that Tom Joad is the main character for most of the book only to disappear towards the end.  This led to a debate in English class as to who the main character was, with the class coming to the inarguable conclusion that the family was in fact the lead character.  I still find this pretty unsatisfying.