Stamped by the big O

>> The Corrections got corrected by Oprah's book club

by JULIET WATERS

The kind of reader who will enjoy The Corrections will probably enjoy it even more after the Oprah book club scandal.

For those who don't know, Jonathan Franzen's epic was Oprah's surprising book club pick at the end of September. Surprising because the novel is such a damning critique of the therapy culture that Oprah has built her empire on. And because the image of Oprah's usual collection of earnest readers sitting down for a chat with Franzen, who in person is notoriously wooden, seemed like a bizarre scene straight from this book.

Chalk her pick up to some kind of September 11 disorientation syndrome, because it soon became obvious how inappropriate it was. Franzen started speaking publicly about his ambivalence at being a book club choice. About not being entirely thrilled at having that big O logo stamped on the second print of 680,000 copies, since he considered many of her book club choices to be pretty lame. He spoke of his concern that her readers might not fully understand the irony of the book's ending.

He was crucified in the media for being the worst thing you can possibly be in America, a cultural snob. Oprah promptly pulled the plug on his ambivalence by cancelling the show and issuing a statement that it was never her intention to "make anyone uncomfortable, or to cause anyone conflict."

True enough. Oprah's intention is to have people weep openly on national television, to confess abuse at the hands of relatives, clergy and teachers, and to struggle publicly with addiction, weight gain, and low self-esteem--but not to make anyone uncomfortable. Or at least not the kind of uncomfortable that Franzen might have brought to the show; the kind where you might have to think as well as feel.

And there's a whole lot of thinking going on in this book. Much of it funny in a deeply neurotic and tortured way, and some of it longwinded. It's both a page-turner and a page-skipper. But at it's core, The Corrections is a beautifully written, entertaining and genuinely poignant book about an American family in the months before their last Christmas together in the Midwest suburb of St. Jude.

Enid and Alfred Lambert are the kind of parents who instantly make one's skin crawl. They bicker nonstop in ways that seem to burrow into your soul like psychic cockroaches. Alfred's narrow, conservative mind is slowly being unhinged by a combination of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Needy, hypercritical, oppressively sentimental, Enid is struggling between her terror at being left alone, and her new found freedom to control the man who has controlled and dominated her most of her life.

Middle child Chip would probably qualify by St. Jude standards as the most fucked up. After losing his tenure track position at a small American college for becoming sexually obsessed with a student, he becomes involved with an Eastern European politician in a scheme to defraud American investors through Lithuania.com. Oldest brother Gary is a successful, materialistic tyrant. Battling clinical depression with biofeedback, his paranoia, rage and denial are driving his wife and children mental. Denise, the youngest, is a sought-after chef who's been featured in The New York Times. Cool, with a sadistic streak, she seeks the attentions of older and married men and, when that doesn't satisfy her, their wives.

Yet, remarkably, under all the years of wreckage from the intimate terrorism this family has inflicted, it starts to emerge how deeply and desperately they love one another. It's too bad that Oprah couldn't get past the bickering and

couldn't allow Franzen to simply be what he was: a difficult, tortured writer, instead of the sage, nurturing Toni-Morrison-type personality she'd prefer. And it's too bad she couldn't remain devoted to the painful, ambivalent realism that had touched her enough to choose this book. :

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Harper Flamingo, hc, 368pp, $39.95