Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

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The Corrections: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Amazon.com Review
From Publishers Weekly Jonathan Franzen’s exhilarating novel
tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler’s, only bitter. Franzen’s great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.
All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody’s lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip’s sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen’s satirical eye:
Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts…. Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.
Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map.
— Tim Appelo If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas. In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does. Unlike his previous works, The 27th City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), which tackled St. Louis and Boston, respectively, this one skips from city to city (New York; St. Jude; Philadelphia; Vilnius, Lithuania) as it follows the delamination of the Lambert family Alfred, once a rigid disciplinarian, flounders against Parkinson’s-induced dementia; Enid, his loyal and embittered wife, lusts for the perfect Midwestern Christmas; Denise, their daughter, launches the hippest restaurant in Philly; and Gary, their oldest son, grapples with depression, while Chip, his brother, attempts to shore his eroding self-confidence by joining forces with a self-mocking, Eastern-Bloc politician. As in his other novels, Franzen blends these personal dramas with expert technical cartwheels and savage commentary on larger social issues, such as the imbecility of laissez-faire parenting and the farcical nature of U.S.-Third World relations. The result is a book made of equal parts fury and humor, one that takes a dry-eyed look at our culture, at our pains and insecurities, while offering hope that, occasionally at least, we can reach some kind of understanding. This is, simply, a masterpiece. Agent, Susan Golomb. (Sept.)Forecast: Franzen has always been a writer’s writer and his previous novels have earned critical admiration, but his sales haven’t yet reached the level of, say, Don DeLillo at his hottest. Still, if the ancillary rights sales and the buzz at BEA are any indication, The Corrections should be his breakout book. Its varied subject matter will endear it to a genre-crossing section of fans (both David Foster Wallace and Michael Cunningham contributed rave blurbs) and FSG’s publicity campaign will guarantee plenty of press. QPB main, BOMC alternate. Foreign rights sold in the U.K., Denmark, Holland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Spain. Nine-city author tour.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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“Quick question,” Brian said, pouring coffee. “How would you feel about driving me and the girls back to Philly tonight? Robin wants to get back to the Garden Project early.”

Denise hesitated. She felt positively shoved by Robin into Brian’s arms.

“Not a problem if you don’t want to,” he said. “She’s willing to take a bus and leave us the car.”

A bus ? A bus ?

Denise laughed. “Sure, no, I’ll drive you.” She added, echoing Robin: “Whatever!”

At the beach, as the sun burned off the metallic morning coastal clouds, she and Brian watched Erin veer through the surf while Sinéad dug a shallow grave.

“I’ll be Jimmy Hoffa,” Sinéad said, “and you guys be the Mob.”

They worked to inter the girl in sand, smoothing the cool curves of her burial mound, thumping the hollows of the living body underneath. The mound was geologically active and was experiencing little quakes, webs of fissure spreading where Sinéad’s belly rose and fell.

“I’m just now putting it together,” Brian said, “that you were married to Emile Berger.”

“Do you know him?”

“Not personally, but I knew Café Louche. Ate there often.”

“That was us.”

“Two awfully big egos in a little kitchen.”

“Yuh.”

“Do you miss him?”

“My divorce is the great unhappiness of my life.”

“That’s an answer,” Brian said, “but not to my question.”

Sinéad was destroying her sarcophagus slowly from within, toes wriggling into daylight, a knee erupting, pink fingers sprouting from moist sand. Erin flung herself into a slurry of sand and water, picked herself up, and flung herself back down.

I could get to like these girls, Denise thought.

At home that night she called her mother and listened, as she did every Sunday, to Enid’s litany of Alfred’s sins against a healthy attitude, against a healthful lifestyle, against doctors’ orders, against circadian orthodoxies, against established principles of daytime verticality, against commonsense rules regarding ladders and staircases, against all that was fun-loving and optimistic in Enid’s nature. After fifteen grueling minutes Enid concluded, “Now, and how are you?”

Since her divorce, Denise had resolved to tell her mother fewer lies, and so she made herself come clean about her enviable travel plans. She omitted only the fact that she would travel in France with someone else’s husband; this fact already radiated trouble.

“Oh, I wish I could go with you!” Enid said. “I so love Austria.”

Denise manfully offered: “Why don’t you take a month and come over?”

“Denise, there’s no way could I leave Dad by himself.”

“He can come, too.”

“You know what he says. He’s given up on land tours. He has too much trouble with his legs. So, you just go and have a wonderful time for me. Say hello to my favorite city! And be sure and visit Cindy Meisner. She and Klaus have a chalet in Kitzbühel and a huge, elegant apartment in Vienna.”

To Enid, Austria meant “The Blue Danube” and “Edelweiss.” The music boxes in her living room, with their floral and Alpine marquetry, all came from Vienna. Enid was fond of saying that her mother’s mother had been “Viennese,” because this was a synonym, in her mind, for “Austrian,” by which she meant “of or relating to the Austro-Hungarian Empire”—an empire that at the time of her grandmother’s birth had encompassed lands from north of Prague to south of Sarajevo. Denise, who as a girl had had a massive crush on Barbra Streisand in Yentl and who as a teenager had steeped herself in I. B. Singer and Sholem Alei-chem, once badgered from Enid an admission that the grandmother in question might in fact have been Jewish. Which, as she pointed out in triumph, would make both her and Enid Jewish by direct matrilineal descent. But Enid, quickly backpedaling, said that no, no, her grandmother had been Catholic .

Denise had a professional interest in certain flavors from her grandmother’s cooking — country ribs and fresh sauerkraut, gooseberries and whortleberries, dumplings, trouts, and sausages. The culinary problem was to make central European heartiness palatable to Size 4 Petites. The Titanium Card crowd didn’t want Wagnerian slabs of Sauerbraten, or softballs of Semmelknödel, or alps of Schlag. This crowd might, however, eat sauerkraut. If ever there was a food for chicks with toothpick legs: low-fat and high-flavor and versatile, ready to fall in bed with pork, with goose, with chicken, with chestnuts, ready to take a raw plunge with mackerel sashimi or smoked bluefish …

Severing her last ties with Mare Scuro, she flew to Frankfurt as a salaried employee of Brian Callahan with a no-limit American Express card. In Germany she drove a hundred miles an hour and was tailgated by cars flashing their high beams. In Vienna she looked for a Vienna that didn’t exist. She ate nothing that she couldn’t have done better herself; one night she had Wiener schnitzel and thought, yes, this is Wiener schnitzel, uh huh. Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself. She went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Philharmonic; she reproached herself for being a bad tourist. She got so bored and lonely that she finally called Cindy Müller-Karltreu (née Meisner) and accepted an invitation to dinner at her cavernous ‘nouveau penthouse’ overlooking the Michaelertor.

Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge, and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy in the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack of Cindy’s perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.

Cindy’s husband, Klaus, had yard-wide shoulders, narrow hips, and a butt of fascinating tininess. The Müller-Karltreu living room was furnished with baroque loveseats and Biedermeier chairs in sociability-killing formations. Softcore Bouguereaus or Bouguereau knockoffs hung on the walls, as did Klaus’s Olympic bronze medal, mounted and framed, beneath the largest chandelier.

“What you see here is merely a replica,” Klaus told Denise. “The original medal is in safe storage.”

On a vaguely Jugendstil sideboard was a plate of bread disks, a mangled smoked fish with the consistency of chunk canned tuna, and a not-large piece of Emmentaler.

Klaus took a bottle from a silver bucket and poured Sekt with a flourish. “To our culinary pilgrim,” he said, raising a glass. “Welcome to the holy city of Wien.”

The Sekt was sweet and overcarbonated and remarkably much like Sprite.

“It’s so neat you’re here!” Cindy cried. She snapped her fingers frantically, and a maid hurried in through a side door. “Mirjana, hun,” Cindy said in a more babyish voice, “remember I said use the rye bread, not the white bread?”

“Yis, madam,” the middle-aged Mirjana said.

“So it’s sort of too late now, because I meant this white bread for later, but I really wish you’d take this back and bring us the rye bread instead! And then maybe send someone out for more white bread for later!” Cindy explained to Denise: “She’s so so sweet, but so so silly. Aren’t you, Mirjana? Aren’t you a silly thing?”

“Yis, madam.”

“Well, you know what it’s like, you’re a chef,” Cindy told Denise as Mirjana exited. “It’s probably even worse for you, the stupidity of people.”

“The anogance and stupidity,” Klaus said.

“Tell somebody what to do,” Cindy said, “and they just go do something else, it’s so frustrating! So frustrating!”

“My mother sends her greetings,” Denise said.

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