Only correct

Jonathan Franzen talks about the medicalization of love and loss, the charms of Narnia and living in an America where no one grows up.

By Laura Miller

Sept. 7, 2001 | At the core of "The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen's meaty new novel, stands a painfully recognizable and deeply bewildered American family, each member trying to make up for some botched aspect of their shared past. The corrective measures they opt for range from playing the stock market to perfecting a recipe for sauerkraut with juniper berries to signing on with an Internet scam operated by the government of Lithuania. They try body piercings, antidepressants, cruises and prodigious amounts of vodka, none of it particularly effective, and some of it disastrous. Franzen dropped by the Salon offices recently to talk about "The Corrections."

Let's talk about the people this book is about. It's a family, a husband and wife and their three adult children. The patriarch of the family, Alfred, is failing from Parkinson's disease, but he's also still an incredibly powerful figure. You also recently published an essay about your father's experience with Alzheimer's disease, and it seems that Alfred has a certain amount of your father in him. He almost stands for the mythos of the "Greatest Generation," this admirable moral rectitude, and yet there's a difficult side of that, a sense of too much will and too much control being pressed upon the emotional life.

Things have relaxed a lot in this country in 50 years, and people want to be able to "break the rules," as all the TV commercials urge you to do. They want to be children, and Alfred's not a child. He's very, very much an adult. Too much so. He has a fairly unhappy marriage and some fairly alienated children to show for it. And yet if you get inside a person like that, I think you can see a lot that's admirable and I think in the course of the book he does a few things for his children, invisibly, that he does purely because he has a feeling that this is right. He's not doing it to win anything from them, he's just doing it because it's right.

I think one of the motives I had in writing the book was to do justice to the world of my parents, which seems like a vanishing world. My father grew up in a town in northern Minnesota that didn't get electricity until he was a teenager. All of his parents and uncles were born in the 19th century, and fairly far back in it. So I grew up knowing all these people who had been born in the 19th century. There was something lovely about how hard people out in the middle part of the country were trying to be adults and to be responsible and to provide for their children and to do the right thing. There was a terrible personal cost to that in many, many ways. And you can understand why Alfred's children would not want to have marriages like his or work for the kind of company he works for. On the one hand, it's obviously an improvement, the kind of changes they've made in their lives, but there's a cost to that as well in the form of moral anarchy or a diminished grasp of what their lives might really be about or for. So I feel a mixture of condemnation and love for those attitudes that Alfred embodies.

Next page: The feckless would-be bohemian son