Having read Jonathan Franzen’s melodramatic 2001 novel, The

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Having read Jonathan Franzen’s melodramatic 2001 novel, The Corrections, after having recently read Postmodern tripe by William Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, and so-called Postmodern-cum-classic prose by Don DeLillo, I wondered how in the hell anyone could think that this book was good, much less great. Yes, Franzen can hold a narrative, unlike Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, or that ilk, but it is wholly shorn of depth, gets worse as it goes- being a merely competently written melodrama, larded with stereotypes of WASPs and their WASPy pseudo-problems that morphs into a cliché-ridden sub-soap opera that is almost as bad, in its subgenre, as anything put forth by the writers named above. Franzen is wholly in the T.C Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates camp of being able to craft a narrative structure, but not one of any depth, novelty, nor interest. The book’s main characters are a Midwestern, suburban, WASP clan whose father suffers from Parkinson’s disease and dementia; a mother who hates her marriage and wishes her husband dead; an oldest son ‘bravely’ admitting his manic depression; a middle son whose career is ruined by screwing a student, then cuckolding a Lithuanian politician; and a youngest daughter coming to terms with newfound lesbian feelings; and ending with the middle son refusing daddy's request to be killed and put out of his misery.
And this is NOT an Oprah book: how?
More irony abounds in that last sentence than in any sentence in the book. Go ahead, read those character arcs. In doing so you will see that Jonathan Franzen, indeed, is writing Chick Lit with a slightly shriveled penis occasionally dangling forth so he can recoup his manhood. In a sense, this book is the micron’s length slightly better cousin to that other male Chick Lit writer of renown: Richard Russo, whose own bad soap opera, Empire Falls, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the same year as Franzen’s book copped the National Book Award, thus meaning, to the general public, that these two testosteronic-leached soap operas ware the two best published works of American fiction in 2001.
Yet, let’s look at its opening paragraphs, with my unindented comments interpolated:
The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.