Some mixed feelings, but I devoured it in three sittings. Still can't wait for Chaon's next story collection.Some mixed feelings, but I devoured it in three sittings. Still can't wait for Chaon's next story collection....more
Credit goes to Delillo for his spot-on, feverish rendering of thanatophobia (“In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awCredit goes to Delillo for his spot-on, feverish rendering of thanatophobia (“In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe�), and for his depiction of the “Airborne Toxic Event� � which, with its bleak grandeur punctuated by vivid and minute details, reminded me of the evacuation of Dunkirk in MacEwan’s Atonement. Delillo’s characters are at their most believable and compelling when they are alone, or alternatively when they fade into the background of a panorama. But put them together and get them talking, or place them in a quotidian situation where there’s no dynamic backdrop against which they can fade away, and it’s quickly apparent that they are no more convincing as human beings than the animatronic robots in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.
These characters are not people, they are merely convenient delivery methods for the ingestion of Delillo’s hyperactive rhetoric � they are as human and as worthy of our care and concern, in other words, as a syringe or a spansule. Ultimately, their flatness, their plain silliness, undermines the novel itself. How can we credit Delillo’s depiction of a society hypnotized by consumerism � the relentless encouragement to consume goods, to consume information � when the novel seems to suggest that such a society people are reduced to behaving like the characters he depicts? The characters he depicts are so patently ridiculous, so obviously lifeless and fake, that it’s unclear why any reader should believe that the society depicted in the novel, the society that has produced these fakes, is anything but a fake itself, a Potemkin village of Delillo’s own design. The novel offers no reason to believe that its society has any more relation to our own than its ridiculous characters have to the real people we encounter in our lives.
Death exists. Modern commercial culture offers vapid distractions from that fact. But hamstrung as it is by a vapidity of its own, White Noise can offer little more insight into the situation than that....more
Franzen writes with wit and energy to spare, but for about four hundred and fifty pages, The Corrections is content to spend (for example) nine pages Franzen writes with wit and energy to spare, but for about four hundred and fifty pages, The Corrections is content to spend (for example) nine pages describing, in exhaustive and occasionally lurid detail, a senile man's hallucinated encounter with, yes, a sentient turd, and then less than a single paragraph recounting, in broad summary, his wife’s surprisingly tender reaction to this episode of dementia. For those first four hundred and fifty pages, the novel is long on brio and intelligence but short on heart.
In its closing sections, the novel’s own fading emotional reticence and growing sensitivity try to pass themselves off as actual character growth, but this is a cheap trick. It’s not the characters who grow or change so much as the novel’s willingness to faithfully track their emotional valances in scene and not summary, and in plain language rather than in flights of metaphorical fantasy. In the above example, Enid feels that remarkable tenderness after her husband’s episode, but the novel’s prose barely gives it credit, dispensing with it in less than a paragraph. Much later, when the novel finally chooses to linger upon and explore that kind of emotional territory, the reader ought to remember that the characters have been feeling these sorts of things all along � it’s the book itself that’s finally opened up, not the Lambert family.
This is terribly frustrating, because some of the writing in the book’s final hundred pages is excellent. A shame that it’s robbed of much of its power by the plain and simple cowardice of the several hundred pages that have come before. The Corrections is often entertaining, but flimsy....more
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