Great Expectations

By Richard Lacayo

Here's how you know you have written one of the year's most anticipated novels. In the spring your publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, distributes 3,500 advance copies to reviewers and booksellers. Each comes with a note from your celebrated editor, Jonathan Galassi, the head of Farrar, Straus, who calls your book one of the best that his house, also home to Tom Wolfe, Scott Turow and the poet Seamus Heaney, has issued in 15 years. Next there's a movie deal from the producer Scott Rudin, whose credits include Wonder Boys and A Civil Action. Then you get a dust-jacket photo lit in a way that turns your facial bones into Alpine escarpments. You also get a good-size spread--this one--in TIME, the magazine your late father always wanted to see you in. And in that story you get a sentence he would have loved: The Corrections is one of the great books of the year.

A tragicomic ensemble story about a combustible family, The Corrections ($26; 568 pages) has the absorbing treacheries of married life, the comic squalors of cruise-ship travel and the shenanigans of global capitalism. It also has language that builds in powerful, rolling strides. And it has characters, the separately unraveling Lamberts, who get very deeply under your skin. So who can blame the amiable and soft-spoken author, Jonathan Franzen, if he sounds a little cheeky these days? "You can get a million people to read your book in this country," he says. "It's not a tiny audience for fiction. It's not chamber music."

But even while he says this you can see the doubts digging tunnels under his composure. Because this, after all, is the same Jonathan Franzen who nine years ago was almost ready to call it quits as a fiction writer, figuring that not only was he at the end of his rope but so was the novel in general. When his first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, was published in 1988, he was just 29. The intricate tale of a vengeful woman hired from Bombay to become police chief of St. Louis, Mo., it got good reviews and decent sales for a first novel but never made a dent in the national conversation.

Four years later, the same benign neglect greeted his next book, Strong Motion, about toxic subterfuges carried out by a Boston chemical firm. "Sixty reviews in a vacuum," as he later put it. Franzen began to wonder if literary fiction were going the way of the lyric poem, a deluxe specimen of cultural product enjoyed only by the happy few. When, he asked himself, was the last time an ambitious novel achieved the name recognition of Portnoy's Complaint, to say nothing of Catch-22?

It didn't help that Franzen had produced both books while living a writer's life of discipline and isolation, one that made him feel out of touch with the wider world. After he graduated from Swarthmore in 1981 with a degree in German, he and his wife Valerie Cornell, also an aspiring novelist, had lived in the Boston suburb of Somerville. For years, their days were devoted to writing, their nights to reading. On weekends he worked at Harvard's geology department, tracking earthquakes. By 1994 his marriage had fallen apart.

Two years later, Franzen's unhappiness about the state of fiction led him to publish a 15,000-word essay in Harper's magazine in which he pondered whether the serious novel could survive in a culture consumed by television, movies and the Web. "Where to find the energy," he asked, "to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?" It seemed hopeless to think of the novel as a medium that would change the world. The world wasn't paying that kind of attention. But Franzen refused to give up entirely. Better, as he says now, "to think of fiction as a way of entertaining people who really like to read."

At the time, Franzen was working on a long novel not so different from his earlier ones, full of polemical subplots involving anarchists in Philadelphia, the prison system and Wall Street. He threw away nearly all of it. "The big socially significant characters were not coming alive," he says. Working in a small writing studio in Harlem, he says, "I literally extracted a more personal book from that one." The book he finally wrote focuses on the inner lives and dismal family dynamic of the Lamberts, a couple of whom were minor characters in the book he abandoned. Alfred, a retired railway-bridge engineer and basement-lab inventor, is a man sliding into the mental and physical chaos of Parkinson's disease. His wife Enid devotes much of her energy to denying the seriousness of his condition, but understands it well enough to want all three of their grown children home for a last family Christmas in St. Jude, a Midwestern city with resemblances to St. Louis, where Franzen, now 42, grew up.

Son Chip, having lost his college teaching job for sleeping with one of his students, has found his way to free-market Lithuania, where he is helping a world-weary ex-politician fleece investors over the Internet. His prosperous brother Gary is drinking hard to reconcile himself to a manipulative wife and three sons who are drifting from his affections. Their sister Denise, a celebrity chef, makes reckless thrusts into other people's marriages. As anyone can tell you, "Christmas with the family" is a goal that has trouble written all over it. Trouble ensues.

Franzen's literary heroes are the masters of the paranoid, postmodern novel--William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo--writers who spin huge plots full of manic undertakings and dense riffs on civilization and its discontents. The book he put aside to write The Corrections was cut from that cloth. "It had prisons, race relations, stock-market corrections," Franzen says. "The 'corrections' in the finished book are more personal." The social disorders of the 21st century are expressed mostly through the personal distempers of the three siblings and their flight to the false consolations of sex, careerism and consumerism. "They all lose something in leaving behind their parents' values," says Franzen. "You wouldn't want a marriage like Enid and Alfred's, but when you correct things you get new problems."

Maybe so, but when you correct certain problems in the postmodern novel--its cartoonish characters, its repetitive paranoia and absorption in Big Patterns--you get a better book. The Corrections does not "solve" the mystery of family life, but it renders its mysteries with the fine filament and moral nuance they require. There are already an impressive 90,000 copies in print. While that's not quite John Grisham territory, Franzen has so far made more than a million dollars. This could be another reason why he's feeling optimistic about the literary novel these days. He may be right that serious fiction has not gone the elitist route of chamber music. But what happens to The Corrections in the marketplace is going to tell us just how big a sound it can still make.