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This book snuck into my life in pieces, without hype.

I had bought the New Yorker's anthology of New York stories Wonderful Town sometime in 2003 or 2004. Bored/curious one night, I read "The Failure" by Jonathan Franzen, a pre-publication version (dated 1999) of Alfred and Enid's visit to New York from Chip's perspective. It seemed strikingly not the typical New Yorker story style: it was rough, edgy, but not the phlegmatic street-wise colloquialism of Junot Diaz. I thought there was some cognitive dissonance involved in "failure" as a theme and being published in The New Yorker, but I liked the story.

And... a year passed.

My mom (!) left me her copy of The Corrections (paperback, massive printer's ink stains down the edge of a middle section) after a visit. I honestly do not think I'd heard about the Oprah controversy at this point yet still, or much else about the book.

I think I only picked it up because I'd already read some of it and had a head start, and I'm not the kind of reader who isn't always happy to take a short cut when she can. I may have even skimmed that first Alfred/Enid intro the first time around, and just continued with the Chip story.

And then, sometime around the time Melissa Paquette was screaming, "It is so much better like this! This is so much better!", I just flipped for it, the whole dancing-poo-, half-baked-prison-system-commentary-, Schopenhauer-citation-filled extravaganza, as if someone had slipped Aslan into my drink.

I think I read every single professional review of it when I finished, because I had Lexis-Nexis access at the time and could. I thought, predictably, that the positive reviews were brilliant and that the negative reviews were rubbish. Now, skimming Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, I have almost the opposite reaction: the negative reviews I can kind of understand, and the positive ones seem suspect. This cretin is actually doing a blow-by-blow of the plot as if that's so important! This Dr. Obvious thinks the book is about family!

What happened in the eight years since I first finished reading this book? One thing didn't happen, and something else did. Franzen didn't write another great book. And he became obsessed with birds. As a result of these two things, Franzen, and his books, have become profoundly uncool, which is the worst thing to be in America as your following act to being an ungracious success. To love this book in 2013 is to throw in with the Cows Clueless who simply do not know how uncool this book is, how pandering, undeservedly controversial, and jejune.

But here's something: this book has been compared to every big book and book about families under the sun, but none of those books are its DNA. Its DNA is Little Red Riding Hood. The big bad wolf is Clinton- and dotcom-era ("Let's buy both!") exuberance and excess, winnable wars and getting off on technicalities and charm. Red is all of the Lamberts. All of them. They are innocents.

Think about it.