the corrections

so today i finally finished reading jonathan franzen's the corrections. i started reading it ages ago for an english unit, then got distracted and only picked it up again recently. this time, however, i was well 'suckered' into the story and encountered that classic sitch of "oh god i hope this novel NEVER ENDS!" luckily, at 600 pages, a relatively long period of time was able to pass before i reached the novel's finale.

i am SO happy with the book's conclusion! it is so appropriately understated; assuredly anti-climactic without being disappointing. in a sense the whole novel is like that, i guess. every chapter, every paragraph even, seems to draw frenetically upwards towards some grand culmination that never eventuates. in the end, that sense of 'build-up' is actually marked as some sort of never-ending buzz of everyday life - and you come to enjoy its continuation, rather than anticipate its conclusion.

i really wanted to find a quote to illustrate that sensation, but i can't find an appropriate one, because this book is more than the sum of its parts and all that. its effect hits you cumilatively as you push through, and is impossible to gauge through a detached passage. still, much of the narrative seems to be grinding slowly towards to christmas; christmas time facilitating that rough "tying of loose ends" that i guess could be described as the book's 'finale.' i thought i might include a quote about christmas in suburbia, just because it's "topical", and also because i have a personal love for suburbs transformed by festivity. this is from the perspective of enid, the midwestern mother who finds happiness in notions of home, family and simple pleasures - i.e. all the notions that her children have come to resist or resent.

"By night the park was Christmasland. Enid drew breath sharply as the Olds crept up a hill of light and across a landscape made luminous. Just as the beasts were said to speak on Christmas Eve, so the natural order of the suburbs seemed overturned here, the ordinarily dark land alive with light, the ordinarily lively road dark with crawling traffic. The mild gradients of Waindell's slopes and the intimacy of its ridgelines' relations with the sky were midwestern. So, it seemed to Enid, were the hush and patience of the drivers; so were the isolated close-knit frontier communities of oaks and maples. She'd spent the last eight Christmases exiled in the alien East, and now, at last, she felt at home. She imagined being buried in this landscape. She was happy to think of her bones resting on a hillside such as this... The spectacle was nothing more than lights in the darkness, but Enid was speechless. So often credulity was asked of you, so seldom was she able to summon it absolutely, but here at Waindell Park she could. Somebody had set out to delight all comers, and Enid was delighted."


x magda