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Despite all of the hoopla surrounding it, Jonathan Franzen's novel is a great read

by Adrienne Martini

Poor Jonathan Franzen. Here he stands at the zenith of his literary career, having won the National Book Award and written what some critics are calling the "Great American Novel," and everybody's mad at him. Franzen's new book, The Corrections (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $26.95), has perched firmly on the New York Times best seller list for 18 weeks, he's been interviewed in every conceivable media setting, and yet he can't celebrate because a lot of people don't want to come to his party.

Why? Franzen has bitten the hand that offered to feed him—or at least has snapped at it—has insulted the intelligence of millions of female readers, and signaled alarms in the brains of many already touchy (and often, bitchy) book reviewers who are now choosing sides in this ludicrous literary debate. Which is whether "high art," as Franzen categorizes his fiction, should be reserved for a small pocket of the intelligentsia or whether the masses are worthy of exposure to elevated ideas and graduate-level prose.

Honestly, you don't know whether to pity Franzen or to put him down as arrogant. At times he shows signs of compassion and vulnerability, and at others, he's haughty and disparaging. Oprah is mad at him because after she chose him as the 42nd novelist to participate in her televised monthly book club, Franzen told the Oregonian that although Winfrey had "picked some good books,...she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe..." Oprah responded with the terse statement: "Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection...We have decided to skip the dinner and we're moving on to the next book."

Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives, one of Oprah's previous picks, told USA Today that he is "...furious that [Franzen] could presume his work was more interesting, more difficult, more challenging than the work of [Oprah picks] Toni Morrison or Joyce Carol Oates or Andre Dubus or even me." And Dubus, whose Oprah pick, House of Sand and Fog, won the 2000 National Book Award, vented to the New York Times that Franzen's carping is "...so elitist it offends me deeply. The assumption that high art is not for the masses, that they won't understand it and they don't deserve it—I find...reprehensible." Thus, by insulting Oprah, Franzen has also blanketly dissed all authors under the lucrative logo of Winfrey's imprimatur, including Maya Angelou, Jane Hamilton, Wally Lamb, Ursula Hegi, Ernest Gaines, Anna Quindlen, Maeve Binchy, and Isabel Allende.

Margo Jefferson, fuming in a New York Times column entitled "There Goes the Neighborhood," is piqued at Franzen for implying that Oprah's picks are mostly "women's books," and intimating that to be "endorsed by a mass culture entrepreneur is like marrying down in an Edith Wharton novel: the social taint may forever exclude you from the circles you aspire to..."

On a "Fresh Air" interview, Franzen whined to National Public Radio interviewer Terry Gross that he was worried because men at book signings have mentioned they are "put off" by Oprah books. We don't know how Terry Gross feels, but David Kipen, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, is annoyed that Franzen called an Oprah endorsement a televised "kaffeeklatsch," mainly because, "Lost in all this [hubbub] was a rare opportunity for high culture and mass culture to break bread together around Oprah's table." (As if this were a literary Geneva Convention of sorts.)

Franzen even makes fun of himself (sort of) in a recent New Yorker piece called "Meet Me in St. Louis" (the city where he grew up and which serves as the setting for the novel). A producer whom Franzen identifies only as "Gregg" is shooting a "short, visual biography" for the Oprah show and is clearly frustrated when Franzen refuses to be filmed in front of his boyhood home. Reading Franzen's account, we feel frustrated, too, until he opens up a little and quotes Proust to explain his mulishness: "The reality that I had known no longer existed." But it was a moot point, because shortly after this agonizing session, Oprah, having been apprised of Franzen's less-than-flattering responses to her invitation, summarily disinvited him.

The unkindest cut of all is a piece in Flak Magazine (found at: Salon for snubbing Oprah and being obliquely praised in the New York Post for snubbing Oprah..." Ms. Lipman then poses the question: "...[W]hat happens if you get a really good photo that doesn't look like any other photo that's ever been taken of you? If you're Jonathan Franzen, you use the photo." (But wouldn't the rest of us do the same thing?)

So what can Jonathan Franzen be thinking? True, he's not entirely unknown; he has written for Harpers and the New Yorker, but his first two novels, crime/terrorist stories in which large cities are targets of destruction, weren't exactly blockbusters. The first, The Twenty-seventh City, in which a female police chief formulates an elaborate plan to make St. Louis a Marxist stronghold, generated only small ripples in the vast ocean of the sink-or-swim publishing world; and the second, Strong Motion, which centers around a chemical company with diabolic plans to destroy Boston, simply sank.

In effect, Franzen has sullied his own success, because The Corrections is truly a dazzling accomplishment: 566 pages of a galloping, even rollicking, story fueled by the complicated interactions of a highly dysfunctional family, including Alfred Lambert, the father, whose dementia becomes painfully noticeable during a torturous family Christmas gathering; Enid, the bewildered mother, who smothers her family in guilt; Gary, a clinically depressed banker who struggles constantly to balance the passive-aggressive demands of his wife and mother; Chip, the failed teacher/screenwriter screwup, whose irresponsible lifestyle spawns one disaster after another; and Denise, a celebrity chef whose problematic sexuality eventually ruins her career.

Franzen admits that Chip, the screwup, and Gary, the depressive, reflect his own personality. "All my characters are strains of myself," Franzen says in a Poets & Writers interview with Joanna Smith Rakoff, who notes that Franzen "...embodies both the humble charm and earnestness of the Midwesterner and the haughty superiority of the New Yorker." These diametrically opposed characteristics emerge in Franzen's writing as well. In the first three-quarters of The Corrections, the Lambert offspring seem calculated and dismissive of their parents' pain, but they redeem themselves in the last section and become eminently more human. This insightful page-turner will be a tough act to follow, not only for Jonathan Franzen, but for any other writer attempting to tell the story of the modern American family. To make the plot even more involving, Franzen glosses it up with fascinating forays into insider trading, desperate pharmacological fixes, an international Internet fraud, and the hilarious centerpiece of the novel—the ocean liner cruise from hell.

When Franzen's next novel comes out, will Oprah give him a second chance? Probably not, unless she fails to recognize the face in his new and even sexier dust-jacket photo.