It was...okay. As I mentioned earlier, the sections that concentrate on character are far superior to those that seek to offer jazzy, satiric social commentary. In particular, each and every time that Franzen comes back to Alfred, the family patriarch, who is deteriorating physically and mentally because of Parkinson's, he comes up with gold, painfully mined. Franzen's father died of Alzheimer's, and his sympathy and intimate knowledge of the pain of such a degenerative disease is evident.
There's some nice writing throughout, and one extended passage is especially good: it describes an evening in the family's early history in which Enid, the mother, prepares a horrendous meal of liver, rutabegas, and beet greens in revenge for her husband's mistreatment - specifically is behavior before and after an extended business trip. Neglect, in a word, is what she feels.
But the focus of the passage is Chip, the younger son, who hates to eat anyway, and, confronted with this meal, is faced with nothing less than a plate of disaster:
Some days were ghastly from the outset; the breakfast oatmeal was studded with chunks of date like chopped-up cockroach; bluish swirls of inhomogeniety in his milk; a doctor’s appointment after breakfast. Other days, like this one, did not reveal their full ghastliness till they were nearly over.
...and later, after eaten a bite or two of what he could bear, the rest of the meal still awaited:
His eyes went around and around his plate, but he had not been provident and there was nothing on the plate but woe
It's an excellent scene, expressing in concrete terms what collateral damage children bear as their parents battle.
The book is full of lines that convey a reality in just the right words - not too much, not too little. The daughter, as a teen, bears a great humiliation to work with her every day:
By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears…
And finally, there's this passage that describes what's going on in the head of Alfred, the patriarch, as he tumbles into the sea (to find out why, I guess you'll just have to read the book.):
He was remembering the nights he’d sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with the girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from Black Beauty or The Chronicles of Narnia. How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.
There are lots of things I like about this book - the precise descriptive language, Franzen's varied arguments (through the characters' experiences) against the medicalization of human emotion and personality (see my Percy comment below - one of the main differences between the two is that Franzen doesn't seem to have a clear alternative to the human-as-merely-a-fixable-machine paradigm. Percy was combatting the obliteration of the soul. Franzen doesn't have anything so solid to hang onto in his critique), and some of the truths about the strains of family.
But there's just way too much of that gabby, precious cultural critique stuff going on, and it's distracting. It's hard for me to describe these things, but in the end, even with pages and pages devoted to each character, they still, in the end, seem rather flat - authentic, rich humanity doesn't come through here, as it does, say, with Richard Russo. Now that would be an interesting article - comparing two big fat novels that say important stuff that both came out in 2001 - The Corrections and Empire Falls by Russo. Very interesting......
