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On the Web Mon Dec 07 2009
Joshua Ferris on The Corrections
As is customary this time of year, publications are coming out with their "best of" lists, but with this year bringing the end of the decade near, there have been a slew of "best books of the decade lists" on which our current Book Club selection, The Corrections, features prominently. Back in September The Millions placed the book at #1 on their Best of the Millennium list (to some disagreement to their readers). Here, the Guardian reviews all those publishing smash hits and past Book Club selection author Joshua Ferris discusses what makes The Corrections so great:
It was merciless, it was skewering, the family at its heart full of bicker, betrayal, and many other varieties of familial sport - but the artist assembling and synthesising it all for the pleasure of the reader was possessed, thank God, of a voracious emotional intelligence, capable of mollifying all that was ugly and unlikable in his individual characters with empathy and humour. Oh, it's compulsive reading! The copy I have is a hardback containing 568 pages, and not one of them flags. The sentences are rollicking flickers of genius, one brilliant-dense paragraph meeting another, narratives vectoring into the outlandish and the unexpected while remaining ever committed to the realist's agenda. We might have forgotten, by the time the book landed, that a literary doorstopper of the first order of seriousness could also be unabashed entertainment. More likely Franzen simply knew that all comedy is deadly serious, and that the fraudulent online sale of post-Soviet Lithuania, for example, or a stolen salmon fillet sliding down the hero's underpants, was the low-brow fallout, the comic carryover, of a writer dividing the sadness of a declining family by the sadness of a declining culture. The book was a howl: against greed, against selfishness, against the axiom of American happiness, finally against the tyranny of family holidays.
Find out what else Johsua Ferris has been reading in his contribution to The Millions's Year in Reading.
