The Corrections

When Alex said we should read The Corrections, outwardly I was like, "Okay." Inwardly I was like, ":(" because it had been sitting on my bookshelf, taunting me, for like two years now. I lugged that thing to college and back and never even opened it. I'd kind of resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't ever going to read it, but I'm glad that I did. Good book club choice, Alex! I ended up loving The Corrections.
Which isn't to say it was all roses. I don't really enjoy criticizing things, because as someone who's never written a book or a movie, I don't feel like I'm qualified to judge what someone else did. Which is why I was a horrible English major and would be a God-awful critic. Regardless, I had some serious problems with The Corrections when I began it. Namely,the violently anti-Midwest sentiment! Which, yes, I know, was part of Gary's character and not necessarily a reflection of what Jonathan Franzen himself thinks. But seriously. Take this paragraph:

"The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbituate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you."

Well, okay then, what's the point of even living? I know I meant for this paragraph to illustrate how much I hated certain parts of The Corrections, but what this actually shows is that The Corrections is so depressing because it's so well written and so, unfortunately, true to life. It was a good book! But it made me sad. Here's hoping that The Moviegoer will be a bit lighter (figuratively. Literally it is about half the weight of The Corrections). As always, feel free to read along with us and check back at the end of the month for our super-insightful reviews (usually something like "I enjoyed this").