Natasha Walters in The Independent asks about Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections': Do we care much, in that rushed last chapter that Enid "weathered the downturn" in the markets, that Denise "moved to Brooklyn and went to work in a new res
ENGL 243 ~ CONTEMPORARY FICTION ~ ESSAY 1 ~ Due 20/08/07
QUESTION 2 ~ The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
CHARLOTTE FRENCH ~ id 300075543 TUTORIAL ~ Mon 11am, Charles
The last chapter of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections seems less about final revelations for the characters, and more about Enid gradually coming to accept her children for what they are. Natasha Walters in The Independent asks:
Do we care much, in that rushed last chapter that Enid "weathered the downturn" in the markets, that Denise "moved to Brooklyn and went to work in a new restaurant" and that poor old Alfred was installed in "a long-term care facility adjacent to the country club"? (Walters )
The events of this chapter do not seem particularly significant for the lives of all the characters. They are a representation of Enid's acceptance of her life as it has been, her children's' lives, and her acceptance of responsibility for her own happiness. This chapter documents Enid's correction, and while the question of Enid's values is significant in the novel, each of the characters take their own journeys, each of which are given just as much weight as Enid's.
'Correction' is a stock market term for a fall in value, as a result of a previous over-valuation. The value has been 'corrected'. The idea of stock market corrections in the novel does not feature until the last chapter. The corrections are presented as slow in coming, and having finally happened as being of little significance:
The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle let down (Franzen 647).
The stock market term can also be seen to relate to the correction in Enid's values that is given centre stage in the last chapter. She re-evaluates her previous over-valuation of her children, of taste, of class and of high morals. The correction Enid undergoes is also slow in coming. It is not an overnight realisation, but a gradual shift in the importance she places on St. Judean values.
Throughout the novel Enid has overvalued her children, she has invested too much in them. She has therefore always been disappointed in them because they do not match her values. Enid has invested great hope in the prospect of her daughter Denise's marriage, of hosting a "really elegant wedding reception" (Franzen 138). Enid overrates the Midwestern, conservative values of St. Jude. It is because her children choose not to associate themselves with her values that Enid feels so disappointed in them:
It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn't match. They didn't want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends' children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things (Franzen 139).
Denise fulfilling Enid's hopes for her would represent the success of shared values. Enid's dreams do not sit well with the reality of "the noisy restaurant where Denise was ruining her hands and wasting her youth" (Franzen 138).
To make things even worse Denise makes a complete mockery of the St. Judean value ...
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It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn't match. They didn't want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends' children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things (Franzen 139).
Denise fulfilling Enid's hopes for her would represent the success of shared values. Enid's dreams do not sit well with the reality of "the noisy restaurant where Denise was ruining her hands and wasting her youth" (Franzen 138).
To make things even worse Denise makes a complete mockery of the St. Judean value her mother has placed on marriage not only by eloping with her boss, but divorcing him only five years later. It is an intense disappointment to Enid that Denise does not share her values. For Enid and Denise, the idea of food is representative of their differences in both values and taste. While Enid places value on the "foot tall" (Franzen 113) desserts she has recently seen at a wedding reception, Denise is "a judgemental and wildly competitive hipster"(Kakutani 1) who, Enid despairs, would have "picked apart [the party's] specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness" (Franzen 113). Denise's taste is "a dark spot in Enid's vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate"(Franzen 113). Enid wants so much for Denise to share her enthusiasm about the wedding reception, and with it her St. Judean values, but she gives up saying "I guess there's no accounting for tastes"(Franzen 113)
Chip and Gary also disappoint their mother when their values and tastes do not align with hers. Enid overvalues Chip's intelligence, but despairs that he did not go into a practical field of study more in line with St. Judean values of usefulness and application, such as engineering. Chip is so used to his mother's disappointment in him that he actively provokes it by rebelling and wearing leather pants and earrings to pick up his parents from the airport. But at the same time he allows his mother to deliberately mishear his work for the academic Warren Street Journal as having a job at the much more mainstream and respectable Wall Street Journal. While it seems that Chip has done nothing but disappoint his mother, she still places huge amounts of faith in him returning along with his siblings for the one last Christmas in St. Jude, when he has not joined them for the holidays for years. Enid ignores the disappointments Chip has given her, and tries to preserve her illusion that he must somehow align to her values.
As a child, Gary was the one who could be relied upon to preserve Enid's illusions that she was being a good parent. He used to pretend to enjoy playing ping-pong with her, believing that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions. When it comes to the family Christmas in St. Jude, Gary also preserves his mother's illusions as long as possible. He fails to shatter her illusion by telling her that her grandson Jonah will not be coming to St Jude after all. Gary is also quite destructive in his attempts to win his mother's approval by shattering the illusions that Enid has created about her other children's' lives. Gary has strived for the ideals of marriage and taste and class that his mother has so over-valued throughout his life:
He wanted to say to her: Of your three children, my life looks by far the most like yours! I have what you taught me to want! And now that I have it, you disapprove of it! (Franzen 252)
Gary has always tried to live by Enid's values. But he does not realise by presenting Enid with an example of just how materialistic their values are, he shatters one of her illusions. The clash of Enid's idea of taste with Caroline's gives Enid another example of Denise's opinion that "some tastes are better than others"(Franzen 113). This incident provokes feelings of inferiority for Enid, and in emphasising how her taste does not align with her children's' it also reminds her that their values do not align with her ideals.
The bulk of The Corrections turns on the question of whether or not Enid will be able to get all of the children to return home for one last Christmas together in St. Jude. It is really a case of Enid trying to get her children to align their values with hers once more. David Gates claims, however, that the question of the family Christmas is not so significant:
Franzen tucks the more momentous questions into a branching system of subplots, starring each one of the characters in turn and each one equally sympathetic. Will Alfred (a) be put into a nursing home, (b) enter a radical new treatment plan that proposes to restructure his brain or (c) deliver himself with that Hemingway-invoking shotgun in the basement? Will Denise...end up in bed with (a) her financial backer, (b) his wife or (c) both? Will Chip get (a) rich off that screenplay, (b) his married girlfriend back or (c) himself killed during a coup in Lithuania...? Will Gary.... (a) make a killing in biotech stocks, (b) stand up to his crafty wife and mocking children or (c) just keep drinking? Finally, will Enid, the materfamilias, ever get a grip? (Gates 1)
The last chapter of The Corrections is where this last question is finally answered. Gates' opinion seems to be that the answer to this question also, is not as significant as having a chapter devoted to it may suggest. In the last chapter, Enid corrects her over-valuation of her children and their principles and morals, she chooses "not to care that [Denise] still didn't have a man in her life or any discernible desire to get one" (Franzen 648-649).
The most significant correction in Enid's life that occurs in the last chapter is her liberation from the oppression associated with caring for Alfred. It seems that the over-valuation of St. Judean, Midwestern family values that Enid has forced on her children is a reaction to Alfred's under-valuation of them. Alfred's rejection of Enid's values had made her feel "wrong all her life"(Franzen 652). It seems that getting her children to align themselves with her values would have been a victory for Enid. It is only once Alfred is gone from the family home that Enid does "get a grip"(Gates 1) and realise that her children should be free to be themselves:
Gary's materialism and Chip's failures and Denise's childlessness, which had cost her countless late-night hours of fretting and punitive judgement over the years, distressed her so much less once Alfred was out of the house (Franzen 650).
Enid goes on to say that "it made a difference, certainly, that all three of her kids were helping out" (Franzen 650). The corrections that the children have experienced throughout the book have also had an effect on Enid's state of mind. But the significance is that Enid is only one of the characters whose struggles are documented in the novel.
Each of the characters undergoes some kind of correction in the novel. Each character's plot line presents questions that must be answered. But Michiko Kakutani suggests that :
While the story line is propelled by several suspenseful questions -- ... -- the real tension in The Corrections stems from the characters' emotional dramas rather than...contrived plot points (Kakutani 2).
The answer that The Corrections seems to present to Walters' question is that 'we' as readers can neither align ourselves with caring or not caring about where the characters end up plot-wise. The Corrections leads us to care much more about the emotional struggles of the characters, and we are happy that they have emotionally survived their lives so far. As David Gates says:
If you don't end up liking each one of Franzen's people, you probably don't like people (Gates 2).
As readers, we have developed attachments to the characters of The Corrections. We are glad that Alfred is released from his prison of Parkinson's disease. Glad that the other members of the Lambert family have survived life so far. And we hope that they will continue to survive life's battles. Where the book leaves each one of them doesn't seem all that significant, as long as they go on surviving.
Word Count ~ 1801 words including quotes
Sources:
* Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001
* Gates, David. "American Gothic" New York Times, Sept 9, 2001.
* http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902EFDE1230F93AA3575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print Date accessed 12/08/07
* Jackson, Anna. "Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections" Lectures 1-4. Accessed via VUW Blackboard, 2007. Date accessed 18/08/07.
* Jefferson, Margo. "On writers and writing; There goes the Neighbourhood." New York Times, Nov 25, 2001.
* http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E173BF936A15752C1A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print Date accessed 13/08/07
* Kakutani, Michiko. "Book of the times; A family portrait as metaphor for the 90's." New York Times, Sept 4, 2001.
* http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9506E0DD1639F937A3575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print Date accessed 13/08/07
* O'Hagan, Andrew. "Everything Must Go!" London Review of Books, Vol 23, No 24, Dec 13, 2001.
* http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n24/print/ohag01_.html Date accessed 15/08/07
* Tait, Theo. "Lifestyle flavours." The Times Literary Supplement, Dec 21, 2001.
* http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,2180-23194-1931965-2...
* Date accessed 15/08/07
* Walter, Natasha. "Ticks and crosses of a family at war." The Independent, Nov 23, 2001. http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article207251.ece
* Date accessed 18/08/07
