'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.
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