On Monday night at BookPeople, a large audience listened to Jonathan Franzen read from The Corrections (FSG, $26), the novel you can’t escape even if you tried. As happens too infrequently, a novel that shouldn’t be ignored is getting the kind of treatment that makes it impossible to ignore (if you bought a copy of The Corrections stamped with Oprah’s Book Club on the front jacket, you’re not getting the more inspirational version, as some people have been wondering). The Corrections is an irresistibly funny yet sobering novel about family, a commentary on contemporary American life, and a page-turning suspense story. Because Franzen is one of the few people writing today who is able to blend those elements together, maybe it’s inevitable that people would want to know more about him. After he stopped reading, the retinue of questions began pouring out of people’s mouths and in one way or another, many of the queries were about the degree of autobiography lurking in The Corrections. For example, since Gary, one of Franzen’s characters, suffers from depression, did Franzen have to “research” depression or had he suffered from depression himself? I’m sorry, but why does it matter if Franzen has suffered from depression or had a relative with Parkinson’s, like Alfred Lambert, the father in The Corrections? Certainly Franzen opened up that line of investigation in his 1996 essay in Harper’s in which he tried to figure out, sometimes in an urgently personal way, the purpose of the contemporary American novelist. But there’s an underpinning to questions about novelistic research — and at least one seems to pop up at every reading — that is jarring: the idea that research has supplanted imagination and insight, the novelist’s usual tools. Sure, Franzen’s father suffered from Alzheimer’s, but does experience impart an authenticity to the page that the imagination is somehow incapable of creating? The Corrections is authentic on every page, not just the parts where the author may be writing from lived experience… Kati Marton, who talked about her book Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History (Pantheon, $25) at Barnes & Noble Arboretum while Franzen was at BookPeople, didn’t get the soul-searching routine. Those poor “serious nonfiction” authors; they rarely do. Hidden Power, which is culled from a voluminous list of previously published books about the presidency (as well as original research), is proof that there’s a genius to synthesis. Marton weaves through the relationships of presidential couples from the Wilsons to the present occupants of the White House as if she knew them all personally. The verdict on Laura Bush? “Laura’s primary role will be as emotional ballast for her husband,” Marton writes. “Though Laura does not crave the limelight, she is a practical woman who will not waste her season.” Marton is saying more generally what Texas writers have known for a while, that the First Lady is a reading geek who’d rather be with a book than in front of a camera. Mrs. Bush may not be breaking any political barriers but wouldn’t it be fascinating if she were a First Lady who, instead of shopping for dresses and waging feeble campaigns like that Just Say No silliness, removed herself from the spotlight because she was too busy reading? Enough questions for one week … here’s this week’s events: David Rice is the writer-in-residence at the Llano Grande Center in the Rio Grande Valley and the author of Give the Pig a Chance and Other Stories and Crazy Loco, which “offer[s] an amusing and worthwhile descent into a valley of everyday passion and passage,” as we said when this book of nine stories set in South Texas was published this summer. Rice will be at the Pleasant Hill Branch (211 E. William Cannon) tonight, Thursday, October 11, at 7pm… The Michener Center is bringing poet Yusef Komunyakaa to the UT campus on Wednesday, October 17, at 7:30pm at the Avaya Auditorium (southeast corner of Speedway & 24th). Call 471-1601 for more info… SWT Mitte Endowed Chair in Creative Writing Tim O’Brien will speak on Thursday, October 18, at 7:30pm in the LBJ Student Center Teaching Theater on the SWT campus. Call 512/245-7681 for more info.
This article appears in October 12 • 2001.