‘The great American novel’ (TGAN) is a phrase that both inspired and plagued the ‘great American’ authors of the 20th century. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike all wrote books that were dubbed TGAN, while others from Paul Auster to Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Safran Foer all had a pop at doing the same.But what exactly is TGAN? Something that encapsulates exactly what it is like to be an American, to live in America, at a particular time. Foer’s ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ certainly tried to convey the fragile state of post 9/11 America, but something about his book felt hollow and not as everyman-ish, as all-encompassing as one feels TGAN should be.
Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ hit much closer to the mark, with a character that we could really get our teeth into; a man who encapsulated a huge swathe of American paranoia, and it is from the pen of Bellow that a lot of the conceptions about the TGAN have emanated.
TGANs have notoriously been books that subvert the idea of the American dream without completely debunking it, showing us how and where the image and the reality of America meet; and if this is as precise as one can be in describing it, then Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’ has to be the greatest TGAN to date.
The title rings throughout the novel in a way that I’ve never known before. Permutations upon permutations of the phrase echoing in the different situations of each of the protagonists’ lives, from the medical corrections of Albert, the father with Parkinson’s, to the sexual corrections of his daughter Denise and the editorial corrections of his son Chip as he writes and re-writes his screenplay.
Chiefly, the corrections we see before us are the manifestations of attempts to alter lives. Gary tries desperately to change his life, trying to halt his marriage from slipping into the mould of his parents’, while his own parents fight Parkinson’s and a family that fails to live up to expectations. Chip and Denise stumble from job to job and city to city and seem to watch the walls fall around them just as the last bricks have been put into place.
The linchpin that holds the book together is Enid, the mother who longs for nothing more than one last family Christmas. The idea of American family Christmas rings out with Hollywood images of snow in huge gardens, new woollen sweaters and an air of general family bliss. It is, to foreign eyes at least, the big send off to a year of American success, a time when everyone can acknowledge just how ‘damned’ well they’ve done for themselves and how saturated in happiness their lives air.
By throwing Christmas in early and keeping the idea of it prominent throughout the book, Franzen is able to pull off perpetual contrasts between these perfect Hollywood family images that we’ve all come to know and the grim, confused and often tragic realities that befall his characters.
But this is common fare, no? So why is Franzen’s book so great?
Because he beautifully and subtly crafts onto the novel the particular something that encapsulates exactly what it is like to be an American and to live in America at a particular time.
This particular generation’s problem, their failure in upholding the American dream, is their inability to escape the shadow of their parents. Their inability to craft their own niche in the America of the dawn of the 21st century.
Here we are in a world where children are still living with their parents into their 30s and 40s, getting divorced, accumulating huge debts, having children out of wedlock and generally failing to live up to the image of traditional American adults as crafted in the boom and bust of the 20th century.
Consequently towards the end of the novel, when his father is nearing death and his mother preparing to ‘make some changes in her life’, the failed-adult Chip, back living with his parents and dressed up like a bad imitation of a real adult in his father’s clothes after failing to make it out of Lithuania with his own, can only think of himself as ‘a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food’.
As he slowly faces up to a world without his father and with a different mother to the one he’s known before, he can only see a world ‘colder and emptier than [he] had realised, the adults had gone away.’
This is the great American novel of the far from great American generation.
