Jonathan Frantzen: 'The Corrections.'

'The Corrections' is about a family which is at once ridiculous enough to keep the reader at a healthy psychological distance, and realistic enough to resonate, sometimes disconcertingly, with one's own familial bonds. Each section of the novel (after a brief prologue) focuses on different members of the family. The first, entitled 'The Failure', introduces us to one of the two sons, the adolescent middle-aged Chip. Chip is a Marxist academic, former professor and writer of a screenplay that begins with, "a six page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama"  and continues with conspicuously frequent and salacious references to a student character's breasts.  He rails against the cynicism of a consumerist culture, is seduced by a student ("Melissa swung a leg off the sofa and planted a stockinged foot on Chip's leg, close to his hip . . . Through his jeans Chip could feel the deliberate flexing of her toes.") into an Advil fuelled Holiday Inn affair and, at the end of the first section, is aboard a plane to Vilnius where he will defraud American investors. On the face of it then he seems like a thoroughly likeable character. But there is a problem: sometimes he is very likeable and sometimes he is very unlikeable, but rarely at all is he ever anything in between. He doesn't quite fit together. He's not quite three dimensional, at least not all at the same time. He is a dissonant note. But, the dissonance is only really noticeable later on, and is relative to the brilliance with which the rest of the cast is drawn.

The second section, 'The More He Thought About It, The Angrier He Got', a brilliant title and perhaps worth ear-marking for a possible gravestone epithet, is about the other son, Gary, his wife Denise and their children. Gary is a kind of everyman, reminiscent of Heller's imploding bureaucrat in 'Something Happened.' He seems to sink, inch by inch, into a very modern depression, one which he refuses, and one which we, as increasingly incensed, sympathetically incredulous onlookers, also refuse. After all, as he himself acknowledges, "his seasonally adjusted assessment of life's futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit chemically depressed." It is Frantzen's portrayal of Gary's "mental economy", beautiful and skilful, and with both pathos and farce, that for me leaves the most indelible impression, the shape and colour of which I shall remember long after I have forgotten the details. There have been convincing portrayals of mental illness in literature, most notably perhaps Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', but I struggle to think of anywhere else, possibly excepting the aforementioned Heller novel, where the decline or descent into mental illness has been portrayed so impressively. And having lived in London for the past six or seven years, it is increasingly mental illness, in all it's colours and shapes, which for me most defines the human condition. It is what I want to read about, what I want to understand.

In fact much of the book is about the corrections we make to avoid, put off and account for different forms of mental illness, in ourselves and others. Gary corrects his perception of his own place within his family unit. He repositions himself so as to better fit the ideas others, notably his wife and children, have of him. It is a surrender but the alternative is a nomadic isolation and madness by default.  His mother, Enid, similarly makes corrections and readjusts herself accordingly. She convinces herself that Chip is writing for the 'Wall Street Journal', that Gary is her son before he is Caroline's husband, that her daughter Denise is a small-town girl who respects the boundaries of the marriage contract.  Small corrections but cumulatively enough to effect a fundamental shift and upset the balance between the self and everything else.

Enid corrects too her expectations of her husband, Alfred, who spends his days sleeping and disappearing into his blue leather chair in the basement.  Alfred is a superbly drawn character, and, in the grip of Parkinson's disease, the most explicit representation of mental illness. He is ostensibly a loveable, pitiable old man, with familiar and old-fashioned idiosyncracies, but at his core there is an inscrutable darkness which resonates outwards. One of the most memorable sections of the novel is a dialogue between Alfred and his own clammy, spiteful, sociopathic stool:

"Phlblaaatth!" the turd taunted. It had reappeared on the wall above Alfred's bed and hung, precariously, as if flung there, beside a framed etching of the Oslo waterfront.
"God damn you!" Alfred said. "You belong in jail!"
The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drop on the sheets below. "Seems to me," it said, "you anal retentive personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put 'em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail 'em!"

To get away with this kind of thing, three hundred and something pages in, is testament to how completely Frantzen has been able to create a story of subtle resonances, of humour and empathy, and, most of all, of convincing, living characters. This surreal passage does not in context come across as ridiculous, but rather as funny and sad and unflinching. And in that respect, if in no other, this passage, for me, pretty well characterises the book.

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

 

Made up of three sections, each ostensibly recounting a long journey on foot and illustrated with photographs as if to prove it, Walking to Hollywood takes the traditions of memoir and travel writing as its point of departure. If it is either of these things, however, then it certainly falls within the outer reaches of the most generous definition. I came away from this book with the belief that Will Self probably did a lot of the walking which serves as the text's foundation, and also that this was a memoir of an abstract kind, what Jonathan Coe would call "an emotional autobiography." That's about as far as the relationship to non-fiction goes.  

Will Self has often named his late friend JG Ballard as his biggest influence, but it is William S. Burroughs, the man Ballard called the 20th Century's greatest writer, whose ghost can most tangibly be felt haunting the pages of Walking to Hollywood. This is especially true in the titular middle section, in which the narrative of a journey around Los Angeles is continually disrupted by what Burroughs would have referred to as "routines" — bizarre and surrealistic flights of fantasy in which the rules of logic, reason and physics are very much suspended, replaced by free association, paranoia and all the violence of the Id. Take for example the passage where Will Self, the book's central character, visits Pinewood studios, gets into a fight with Daniel Craig's stunt double and witnesses several explosions before liberating Scooby Doo from the set of The Wolf Man. Despite being overwhelmed by love for the animated dog, he sets him free to roam. Or take, for another example, the incident in which our hero grows enormous and green in downtown LA and decides he wants to fuck a car. Or the occasion when he becomes an actor without agency in a pre-written, computer generated riot. All the while, every character is played by a Hollywood actor, except for the narrator, who is played by two. Self is aware that he is being played alternately by Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, although he is not always sure which of them is playing him at any given time.

If this sounds confusing and bizarre to say the least, it is only the tip of an intricate and relentless weirdness which can be partly explained by the fact that Self's narrator is in the depths of a severe psychotic episode. In fact, each of the novel's three distinct sections sees the same narrator, Will Self, suffering from a completely different but equally debilitating mental illness.

In this respect the insanity of the routines is far more focussed and controlled than any comparable work by Burroughs, following as it does the internal logic of a particular psychopathology. Self also has a good deal more respect for the conventions of punctuation, for whatever that may be worth. And as the examples given might indicate, the themes and content of the weird tangents follow and reveal the central ideas of each of the book's sections. Thus, in the section on Hollywood, all Self's delusions and "fugues" grow out of one or another cinematic cliché and focus on movies, actors, simulacra and the death of "the real". Yet with only the narrator's mangled viewpoint to guide us, waves of this madness spill into areas where readers might otherwise hope to anchor themselves in some form of external reality. Characters in the story seem aware that Self is being played by an actor, and are sometimes disturbed by this. In one of the funniest passages in the book, the David Thewlis version of Self appears one morning to meet the camera crew he has hired to follow him on his journey. Unfortunately, when he secured their services he was being played by Pete Postlethwaite and they very much want to know what the hell he's done with Pete. They're worried, they say, that Postlethwaite might be having some form of breakdown. Ever since he hired them he's just wandered around LA, muttering "unbelievable bullshit!"

If this camera crew exist at all, how can they have noticed that the narrator has switched from one imaginary representation of himself to another? Their failure to recognise him and their consequent confusion only make sense in the framework of the narrator's delusional system. If we are to believe that any conversation has taken place outside of the narrator's mind, we are left with no idea what it might have been. Of course there is a nod here to the fact that it is all a fiction anyway, none of it is real, but this removal of any fixed point of narrative reference makes at times for queezy reading.

In the two sections, call them related novellas, that frame the section called Walking to Hollywood, Self's narrator suffers Alzheimer’s and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. These stories are restrained only by the standards of the monster sitting between them. As someone with family experience of all the neurological and psychological conditions Self uses as textual tools in this book, I could easily have felt his occasional willingness to play them for laughs glib and unpleasant, were it not for the fact that the whole text seems to float on an ocean of serious sadness, confusion and anxiety for which these problems become symbolic expressions. In this context the humour is more than welcome.

Walking to Hollywood is undoubtedly a unique book. It is sometimes very funny, often well written, but in honesty it is not always enjoyable. Self's use of repetition can be irritating, his jokes are sometimes painful and the concerns are certainly grim. Not to diminish the book's enjoyable elements — there's always a sense of gratifcation in recognising some appalling satirical truth, and any book featuring Scooby Doo is likely to win my heart — but this novel is not really something you are intended to enjoy. It is uncompromising, unsettling and memorable, which might arguably be greater praise.