TATER

I have just managed to wipe the last remnants of tears from my eyes as I sit to write about an experience I shall never forget.  I can’t remember the last time an author reached out and spoke to my soul so devastatingly and completely.  I am talking all the way down to the cellular level my friends.  From Jonathan Franzen’s opening salvo, to his heart wrenching finale of The Corrections, one is left awestruck and completely imbued with a sense of wonder at his ability to completely render the dysfunction, absurdity, and joy of an American middle class family.

I am left feeling as if The Corrections was a personal story lifted from my experience, reworked splendidly by Franzen, and returned to me as a gift outlining my plight, and educating me through a multitude of insightful perspectives of my familial struggles, victories, and abject failures.  In this opus, Franzen has nailed my midwestern upbringing, turned it inside out, and lyrically rendered it both comic and tragic, absurd and insightful, cruel and loving.  Paradox so moving and true to life, that I am left shaken and awestruck at Franzen’s remarkable talent as a storyteller, and his sagacity of the human condition.

The Corrections tells the tale of the Lambert family set in fictional St. Jude.  It might be Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, or Illinois, or any other fly over state with “unmortgaged homes”, bridge clubs, protestant denominations, Elk clubs, and the Jaycees.  The Lambert’s are a typical dysfunctional american born and bred family, facing the crises of disintegration due to old age, and the patriarch’s downward spiral into Parkinson’s disease and dementia.  The tale eloquently details the drifting apart of values and ideals of the three adult children, and the tearing of the fabric of bonds the family feels as a whole.  The years of impartial healing from the wounds of childhood inflicted by an emotionally distant father, and an overly chastising mother, have left all of the siblings reluctant to be saddled with the responsibilities and compassion demanded of them to face the unraveling of their fictional familial bliss (one created and desperately clung to by Enid, the mother).  What I found truly amazing was Franzen’s ability to create a cast of characters so rich and complex that you are able to see characteristics of yourself within all of them causing a sense of empathy, while simultaneously chastising them in your mind for their utter inanity and cruelness to one another.  I won’t detail the plot in this writing, because I wouldn’t dare cheat you of the slow and delicious unraveling and understanding of these tragic people, nor could I ever hope to do justice to Franzen’s great talent for spinning a mind blowing story.

I connected to this novel in many obvious ways due to the parallels of my own father’s illness, and my family’s response to it, but it goes so far beyond that.  Those of you whom have not had to deal with a family member diagnosed and suffering from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, will still connect undeniably with this tale.  Franzen’s work is so rich and deep, comical and ironic, that  one can’t help but get sucked in and transformed.  His work is both current and timeless, and so delightfully layered that  it crosses the threshold of fiction into an almost unbearable authenticity.  I firmly believe this narrative is one of the great novels of the 21st century, and that Jonathan Franzen has claimed a space for himself alongside the best american novelists.  Any of you in search of a masterpiece to read this summer, will not be disappointed if you chose this novel to explore.  I found it so devastatingly good, that it almost made me want to stop writing altogether.

Take the plunge, I yearn to say “I told ya so!”