Recommended reading, vol. 1

As a child, I was a voracious reader. I repeatedly plowed through The Chronicles of Narnia, Battlefield Earth (yeah, the movie sucked, and Hubbard's a crackpot, but man the book kicked ass), Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, Judy Blume (who taught me everything I needed to know then or now about girls), the complete works of Tom Clancy ... pretty much anything that came over the transom and didn't smell of literature.

These days, I'm more of a voracious drinker. But when I happen across a good book -- a surprisingly good book -- I'm gonna plug it here. Most of them will be what's known as literature, or non-fiction, as fun stuff that everybody reads doesn't merit discussion here.

Today's selection is The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. A Christmas present from the woman I'm dating, along with tickets to a live performance of The Graduate during which the star, Morgan Fairchild, apparently gets naked. (Man, do I love those Old Navy ads.) And yes, as a matter of fact I do know how to pick 'em. But I digress.

The Corrections, a definite work of literature, is a National Book Award winner from a couple years ago, so I'm way behind the curve on this one and most of you have already read it. But hey, I didn't read The Grapes of Wrath until a couple years ago either. You'd be sick, the great fiction I've never read.

First of all, some caveats. Franzen is a Yankee Asshole in the worst kind of way. You may remember him as the dude who didn't want Oprah to include his book in her book club because he didn't want it to be lumped together with some of the "popular" crap she's picked, or something. To be fair, he's not the only author I like who turns up his nose on "popular" fiction -- one of them even lives in my fine southern home town. You ask me, anything that gets people reading rather than watching TV -- especially if they're kids -- is a Good Thing.

But for Christ's sake, to turn your nose up on Oprah's book club ... only a Yankee Asshole would have misgivings about selling shitloads of books to housewives all across America. Yeah, he apologized, apparently profusely -- but still.

So Franzen is not my favorite guy, and so I went into this book with some misgivings. And by the time I got through the first page I was pretty sure my misgivings would be borne out. For instance, this sentence:

By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overontes; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness [inexplicable Italics Franzen's] of the sound.

That there is a 172-word sentence. Wanna guess how many 172-word sentences I've written in my journalism career? Exactly ... hmm, carry the one ... zero. Why? Because no good newspaper reader wants to slog through a 172-word sentence.

But this is literature, you say. And I say, okay, I'll allow that there are some instances in fiction when a 172-word sentence is merited. But you better goddamn well sell it to me, and Franzen doesn't do it here. Not to mention that the ringing bell that is the subject of this monstrous sentence is "the alarm bell of anxiety." Really.

It was also disconcerting, at first, that Franzen seemed to hold in contempt every one of his characters, their lives, and in particular the Midwest -- a sure sign of a Yankee Asshole author. Albert was an emotionally abusive father and husband. Enid was a ditzy, nagging, insufferable wife and mother. All of their kids were deeply flawed with no redeeming qualities. The Midwest is full of oblivious, fat suburbanites. I mean, doesn't someone in your story have to be a protagonist?

So by the end of the book, Franzen's dropped a lot more of those 150-word-plus sentences, and his characters are still mostly unlikeable. But it's also hilarious and totally engaging. And at the end, almost everyone, including the Midwest -- except this one particularly despicable Lambert child -- has been redeemed in satisfying fashion.

Recommended.