By John Dolan
This review was first published in The eXile on March 21, 2002.
Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal the fact that this novel is a simple mix of three of the most hackneyed storylines in American fiction:
- The picaresque adventures of a feckless male academic, borrowed from DeLillo;
- The sentimental tale of the decay and death of one’s parents as in Dave Eggers’s “masterpiece”;
- The old, old plot device of the family Christmas reunion to bring the centrifugal parents and kids back together again against all odds, as in every sentimental John Hughes movie ever made and about a thousand more before him.
That, folks, is all there is to this mess: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation meets dying-parents memoir meets Manhattanite satire Lite. God help me, but that’s it! (more…)
August 27th, 2010 | Comments (47)
