Why can’t you ever write a plain sentence like “He finished his
drink, left the pub and went home?”
—Kingsley Amis to Martin Amis
Some very good books have been written by misanthropes. One
certainly can’t accuse Dawn Powell of being keen on people, or
Evelyn Waugh of cutting anybody slack. But their books are
satirical novels, their characters largely conceived to
illustrate, or prove, just how awful everybody is.
I am not sure if Jonathan Franzen is a misanthrope, but he demonstrates in
his new novel The Corrections
a dislike for his subjects that is sharp and unflinching. He humiliates
these awful people in public and in private, shows us their social and
intimate incapacities, and brings us internal monologues that reveal
petty, selfish motivations. The Corrections is not, however, a satirical
novel. Franzen was clearly after a broader stroke, and as a result the
novel hovers somewhere between Goodbye Columbus and
[1]
a Big Portrait of American Life.
James Wood dubbed a subspecies of the long novel
“hysterical realism.” These are the heavy tomes that
spill ambition all over the floor of
Barnes & Noble.
Pretentious and clever, they set up complex series of parallelisms and
hint
at deep layers of meaning.
Puns and clever
names abound. Each bizarre coincidence, each brazen analogue,
doppelgänger, and paranoiac symbol sucks a little more meaning from the book
until we are left with just
a web of unexplored options, a mere mosaic
of
