Alfred is sick. He was once a confident and able man. A man who might have been a little anal retentive, but also someone who could do things. A former railroad engineer, a builder and a planner and someone who left a solid, well executed mark on the world.
But as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections begins, we quickly see that Alfred, although “still an imposing” figure, is in trouble. He is succumbing rapidly to Parkinson’s disease and dementia. Soon, he’s reduced to having conversations with hallucinatory faeces. Lots of faeces. Faeces that are conspiring against him.
For a good part of the rest of the book he sits in his basement, where he has gathered all the things that he has saved and fixed over the years. Things that he thought he would be able to keep on saving, and fixing, but which are all beyond him now. In a moment of lucidity, he sees that he has lost his grip on this accumulation of a lifetime and ought to just “pitch the whole damn lot of it”. Which is horribly poignant. But it’s not so much of a punch in the guts as his other big moment of clarity. This is when he tells his daughter Denise: “Just have fun and be careful.”
The situation is awful. He is naked on a bed. He has been talking nonsense: strange confused memories and jabber. He has just wet himself - and also wet Denise, because he lost control of his bladder just as she was gripping his leg. She is about to clean the mess but he says: “Leave that to your mother … I never intended to involve you in any of this. You have your own life. Just have fun and be careful.” He says it again to show it was no fluke: “I want you to go and have fun. And be careful.”
And oh sweet lord. It is moments like this one that cut through the hype and hot air, the nonsense and impossible expectations surrounding Jonathan Franzen. This is why his novels will be read for decades to come and will matter for decades to come. He understands something fundamental. He knows how a father feels for his daughter, and he is able to boil it down to one beautiful, heartbreaking end-of-the-tether cry: “Just have fun and be careful.” It is almost every parent’s dearest wish and deepest longing for their child: Please don’t get hurt. Please be happy.
When it arrives in the book, it is an extraordinary moment. And all the more so because it is a quiet one - a space of steady calm amidst all the fizz and babble of the rest of this gigantic book. In one quick instant, the wee-stained, shaking, naked, pathetic old man is made noble. He has done terrible things in his life. He has been a generally inadequate father and an abusive, appalling husband. Even in this finest moment he still thinks his wife should be made to clean up urine.
And yet he also takes this chance to express a deepest sentiment of humanity, the ultimate expression of familial love. He latches onto the thing I’d hope I could also cling to, and pass on to my own daughter, if I had lost everything else. I find it hard to think of any one individual scene from a modern book that I have found as moving.
It helps that his shot the heart comes amid all the other sound and fury of The Corrections - the moments of non-communication, hundreds of the messages that don’t get through or are wilfully ignored. All of which also certainly adds to the truth of his portrayal of the dysfunctional family - adds to the notion that this is one of the truest books about family we have.
It’s notable that when Time magazine produced their list of the All Time 100 Novels, “family” was the thing they immediately went for, in the first line of their review of The Corrections : “If family is a machine for making you crazy, has there ever been a machine better oiled than the Lamberts?”
Superficially, this is bang on. The novel reads like a catalogue of the faults and problems of the Lamberts and all the ways they wind each other up. Alfred the brute turned turd-man. Enid who doesn’t want to know about anything that challenges her view of the world. Their variously messed-up children, lost in their own mistakes, trying not to come home for Christmas, arguing incessantly.
Yet I’m wary of suggesting that the family in The Corrections is simply about madness and disaster. On a deeper level, Franzen also brings out the most endearing qualities of the Lamberts. Yes, we get to see them at their lowest ebb and know them at their very worst - and yet somehow this helps us appreciate them more deeply.
Franzen has made the Lamberts real and allowed them sympathy, while moments like that exchange between Alfred and Denise are electrifying. We come to know that in spite of everything, there is also good in these people. We see how they are redeemed by each other. We are shown, in short, into the heart of a family.
