It started out a duty-read, one of those books that inspires vague unease. “I should have read that,” says the voice in your head; “everyone has read it but me.” It feels like they all know the world it invokes, the ideas it plays with, whether it’s any good. You shamefully don’t understand; you have missed out on some cultural reference point (like…uh…not having read or even seen lord of the rings…).
These type of feelings prompted me to buy The Corrections last july. I saw it at the Adelaide uni library booksale, and decided now was the time to bridge that gap of ignorance. For 2 dollars I could become in-the-know, belatedly; the book’s moment had come and gone, so it was a pretty fair price, a reasonable exchange. I handed over my coin and took it home. And I placed it on a bedside table and I looked at it. And I looked away.
And then I went away, 7 months later, and took this talisman of my ignorance with me – for now, I thought, surely I would have time to read this and many other things, and patch together a bridge to enable me to scramble over that gap.
And, unexpectedly, I actually did pick up the book, and open it, and begin. And now I can say:
I liked it. I liked its ambition; it clearly wanted to be one of the great American novels. And that it doesn’t quite hit the mark does not make it a failure: the book doesn’t collapse for its flaws, it is strong enough to carry them.
(The explanation given for Denise’s attraction to drop out of college, for instance, and become a chef was not convincing – it was too abstract and didn’t read as if from experience. Denise altogether was somehow not quite believable; you could see Franzen imagining her, even fantasising about her a bit – you were aware of that, instead of forgetting the artifice and becoming immersed in the character.
The critics quoted on the blurb say it’s a generous book, written with generosity. But that was also something I wasn’t quite convinced by: with Alfred, yes. But not – despite the end – with Enid. The scene in which she sits alone on the cruise ship, a little drunk and crying in despair at her situation – until she finds a $10 note and cheers up and forgets it all; this seemed pretty damning, if not scathing. She had plenty of flaws, but this didn’t seem deserved. (And the ending with its Go Enid cheer seemed a little forced.))
What I did like though was the way that Franzen gently, even masterfully, let go of the main model for the book. Think about Jekyll and Hyde: the model there is of the split self, of the double; you find examples of it everywhere in the story – and it’s what gives the story meaning. Franzen sets up his story with a model – corrections to behaviour of financial markets etc – but very gradually shifts away from it, until you get to a beautiful moment in the book where he writes, ‘The correction, when it finally came …’ – well I’m not going to write any more in case there is anyone else out there who also has not yet read the book. But it’s a moment when the book opens and different possibilities are allowed in. So skilfully done.
And the start is excellent – tightly written, not a word or image out of place. That unease: “Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety…By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of “bell ringing”…except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound…”
***
When we left the men’s haus on the Mt Wilhelm trip, the sun was just rising. Everyone inside scrambled out of bed and came out to shake hands and say goodbye. I was given two bunches of dried flowers. Martin had picked them on Friday and hung them upside down under the haus’s eaves to dry.
They managed the trip back down to Kundiawa ok, with me in the back of the pmv/ute and about 18 other people + baby + child + bags of market goods. (This is a normal sized ute, not a big one. I’m not even going to pretend it was comfortable, particularly on the rough roads; but it was definitely bearable: you develop a certain kind of intimacy with your fellow travellers when you are together like this for 3 hours.)
And then from there they came with me in a comparably luxurious coaster/mini-bus ride down to Goroka (seats. Inside. Relief. And our bus wasn’t hijacked by raskols. All good.)
Today some hang from my bookshelf, in a bunch like a crowd of faces, each one a hustler, seeking out my eye.
s
No comments:
Post a Comment