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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She put her large hand in his larger hand, knitted her fingers into his, and pulled him toward the stairs.

In her bedroom, on his knees, he planted his thumbs on her hipbones and pressed his mouth to her thighs and then to her whatever; she felt returned to a childhood world of Grimm and C. S. Lewis where a touch could be transformative. His hands made her hips into a woman’s hips, his mouth made her thighs into a woman’s thighs, her whatever into a cunt. These were the advantages of being wanted by someone older — to feel less like an ungendered marionette, to be given a guided tour of the state of her morphology, to have its usefulness elucidated by a person for whom it was just the ticket.

Boys her own age wanted something , but they didn’t seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function — the role she’d played on more than one lousy date — was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.

Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want — imagining herself as Don Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself — made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the man expected to find. There was no anxiety to his location and appreciation of each feature.

When she unhooked her bra, Don bowed his head and shut his eyes.

“What is it?”

“A person could die of how beautiful you are.”

This she liked, yes.

Her feeling when she took him in her hands was a preview of her feeling a few years later, as a young cook, when she handled her first truffles, her first foie gras, her first sacs of roe.

On her eighteenth birthday her theater friends had given her a hollowed-out Bible containing a nip of Seagram’s and three candy-colored condoms, which came in handy now.

Don Armour’s head, looming above her, was a lion’s head, a jack-o’-lantern. When he came, he roared. His subsiding sighs overtook one another, overlapped almost. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She’d never heard anything like it.

There was blood in proportion to her pain, which had been fairly bad, and in reverse proportion to her pleasure, which had been mainly in her head.

In the dark, after she’d grabbed a dirty towel from the laundry basket in the hall closet, she pumped her fist at having achieved non-virginity before she left for college.

Less wonderful was the presence of a large and somewhat bloody man in her bed. It was a single bed, the only bed she’d ever slept in, and she was very tired. This perhaps explained why she made a fool of herself by standing in the middle of her room, with a towel wrapped around her, and unexpectedly weeping.

She loved Don Armour for getting up and wrapping his arms around her and not minding that she was a child. He put her to bed, found a pajama top for her, helped her into it. Kneeling by the bed, he drew the sheet up over her shoulder and stroked her head as she had to assume he often stroked his daughters’ heads. He did this until she was nearly asleep. Then the theater of his stroking expanded into regions that she had to assume were off-limits with his daughters. She tried to stay half-asleep, but he came at her more insistently, more scratchily. Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.

Thankfully, when he was done, he didn’t try to spend the night. He left her room and she lay utterly still, straining to hear what he was doing and whether he was coming back. Finally — she may have dozed — she heard the click of the front door’s latch and the whinny of his big car’s starter.

She slept until noon and was showering in the downstairs bathroom shower stall, trying to comprehend what she’d done, when she heard the front door again. Heard voices.

She madly rinsed her hair, madly toweled off, and burst out of the bathroom. Her father was lying down in the den. Her mother was rinsing out the insulated picnic hamper in the kitchen sink.

“Denise, you didn’t eat any of the dinner I left you!” Enid cried. “It doesn’t look like you’ve touched a single thing.”

“I thought you guys were coming back tomorrow.”

“Lake Fond du Lac was not what we expected,” Enid said. “I don’t know what Dale and Honey were thinking. It was a big nothing.”

At the bottom of the stairs were two overnight bags. Denise ran past them and up to her bedroom, where condom wrappers and bloody linens were visible from the doorway. She closed the door behind her.

The rest of her summer was ruined. She was absolutely lonely both at work and at home. She hid the bloody sheet and the bloody towel in her closet and despaired of dealing with them. Enid was naturally surveillant and had myriad idle synapses to devote to such tasks as noticing when her daughter had her period. Denise hoped to come forward apologetically with the ruined towel and sheet at the appropriate time, two weeks hence. But Enid had brainpower to spare for the counting of linens.

“I’m missing one of my good monogrammed bath towels.”

“Oh, shoot, I left it at the pool.”

“Denise, why you took a good monogrammed bath towel, when we have so many other towels … And then, of all the towels to lose! Did you call the pool?”

“I went back and looked.”

“Those are very expensive towels.”

Denise never made mistakes like the one she was claiming to have made. The injustice would have rankled less if it had served a greater pleasure — if she could have gone to Don Armour and laughed about it and sought his consolation. But she didn’t love him and he didn’t love her.

At work now the friendliness of the other draftsmen was suspect; it all seemed liable to lead to fucking. Don Armour was too embarrassed, or discreet, to even meet her eyes. He spent his days in a torpor of unhappiness with the Wroth brothers and unfriendliness to everyone around him. There was nothing left for Denise at work but work, and now its dullness was a burden, now she hated it. By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears and working at speeds that only a person working happily could maintain without discomfort.

This, she told herself, was what happened when you acted on an impulse. She was amazed that she’d given all of two hours’ thought to her decision. She’d taken a liking to Don Armour’s eyes and mouth, she’d determined that she owed him the thing he wanted — and this was all she remembered thinking. A dirty and appealing possibility had occurred to her (I could lose my virginity tonight ), and she’d leaped at the chance.

She was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to Don Armour, that he wasn’t what she wanted. She was too inexperienced to know she simply could have said, “Sorry — big mistake.” She felt a responsibility to give him more of what he wanted. She expected that an affair, if you took the trouble to start it, went on for quite a while.

She suffered for her reluctance. The first week in particular, while she worked herself up to proposing to Don Armour that they get together again on Friday night, her throat ached steadily for hours on end. But she was a trouper. She saw him on the next three Fridays, telling her parents that she was dating Kenny Kraikmeyer. Don Armour took her to dinner at a strip-mall family restaurant and then back to his flimsy little house in a tornado-alley exurb, one of fifty small towns that St. Jude in its endless sprawl was swallowing. His house embarrassed him to the point of loathing. No houses in Denise’s suburb had ceilings so low or hardware so cheap, or doors too light to slam properly, or window sashes and window tracks made of plastic. To soothe her lover and shut him up on the topic (“your life vs. mine”) that she least enjoyed, and also to fill some hours that would otherwise have passed awkwardly, she pulled him down on the Hide-A-Bed in his junk-swamped basement and brought her perfectionism to bear on a whole new world of skills.

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