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Depending on how the rest of the book unfolds, we may disagree on how Enid is portrayed. (We may disagree on Alfred too but I’ll shelve him for the time being because he’s a little one-dimensional within the first 100 pages.) I agree with how you arrived at your initial impression of Enid but I don’t know if I agree (yet) about her being a kind of control freak. My initial feeling is that Enid–like many women who got married and had kids in the early or mid ’60′s has never had an identity that wasn’t directly tied to other people and/or external forces (i.e.–our next door neighbors have 3 kids and a new sedan and they go bowling, isn’t that a nice life that I should aspire to as well?). I’m not saying that Enid isn’t flawed because of it, and it makes sense that it aggravates the shit out of her kids, but I think Enid in general is a genuinely caring person whose words either fall on deaf ears or are taken as being passive-aggressively malicious. There’s probably no middle ground with how people view her. She’s simply trying to be the type of person she always thought that she should be, and when her kids moved out of state a small part of her probably died. Again, I could be totally wrong about her as the book unfolds but that’s my gut instinct about Enid.

Further to this, it wouldn’t surprise me if Chip and Denise are just f**k-ups who are mostly guided by being the opposite of their parents (which is fine to want to be the opposite of your parent(s) but if you yourself have no identity other than that, you are still not a level-headed person). All of this leads me to the main point of this post, and what I believe will probably be one of the main themes of the novel itself: identity.

Alfred’s identity was tied to hard work for one company; once he stopped working, he is lost as a person and, consequently, one of his life’s goals is to put serious thought and effort into where a recliner should go. Enid’s identity was probably always through her children and once they left town she became lost. Chip and Denise’s identity (so far) seem to be tied to trying to convince themselves that the paths they’ve chosen are the correct ones. And yet they don’t seem happy about it at all (thus, Chip’s affair with a student and a married woman, as well as the routine of masturbating to foreign erotica; Denise’s affair with a married man). Gary hasn’t been completely introduced but I reckon something fell apart for him and now he’s lost too.

I’ll turn it back over to you for the final word on the first 100 pages. In the meantime, here are two quoted passages from the book that I really enjoyed and that, I think, encompasses Franzen’s terrific ability to write descriptively about things that would otherwise be so banal to think about.

Quote #1 (page 7), about the Ping-Pong table in Alfred’s basement:

“It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired he appropriated the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence. At the western end was the portable color TV on which he’d intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that Enid never quite found time to transport to the Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil war raged openly. At the eastern end Alfred’s calculator was ambushed by floral print pot-holders and souvenir coasters from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries which Enid had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at the western end, for absolutely no reason that Enid could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made of pinecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.”

Quote #2 (page 68), from Alfred’s POV when he eats the bread that Denise gave him at Chip’s apartment:

“Leaning forward and steadying his taking hand with his supporting hand, he grasped the butter-sailed schooner and got it off the plate, bore it aloft without capsizing it, and then, as it floated and bobbed, he opened his mouth and chased it down and got it. Got it. Got it. The crust cut his gums, but he kept the whole thing in his mouth and chewed carefully, giving his sluggish tongue wide berth. The sweet butter melting, the feminine softness of baked leavened wheat. There were chapters in Hedgepath’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system…”

I have to immediately jump in here with you and another “WOW” to these first one hundred pages. I have not been this uncomfortable since I dreamed about playing “Naked Twister” with the Golden Girls.

You did an excellent job on the summary of the first 100 pages, which I think is hard because this book doesn’t break down into easily digested chapters like most books do. I think that’s important because it’s going to be hard to separate our comments so easily, but we shall carry on.

Franzen’s writing is very absorbing and filled with a rich use of idioms that can easily leave your mind feeling as though it had just comprehended the equivalent of double-layered cheesecake. Yet while those same words are a bit wieldy at times you get to see that they are the perfect constructs to build and showcase a family as dysfunctional as the Lamberts.

We appear to have some very different views on the heads of the Lambert family, Alfred and Enid. I think Alfred is a tired old man whose body is not aware that he may already be dead. The early descriptions of seclusion into his small part of the house seems akin to a whale beaching itself. Only this whale got lost on the way to the beach and is laying a lagoon during a low tide. Enid on the other had is a very troubling and disturbing woman.

I believe you might be too kind to her or maybe I am looking far too deeply, but I believe she is much more complex than what Franzen has let on up to this point. Look at his descriptions of her as he describes (from her point of view) how she is trying to regain control of her life by organizing different things, but each time these are things that she is collecting and hoarding, growing larger and more out of control as she strives harder and harder to rein it in. Then there’s her habit of mentioning the successes of others to those around her.

These instances aren’t brought up out of the blue, but they come out at the proper time so that it does paint a parallel to one of her family members and to this point I don’t think I have come across and instance in which this has happened and it was in favor of her family. The reactions of Chip and Denise are such that I was left with the impression that this has happened to them their entire life, despite small protests and nonverbal displays that those around her don’t approve of her comments. The fact that she doesn’t see this, or simply chooses not to acknowledge it, makes me think that she is so totally self absorbed with trying to keep up with the Jones’ she doesn’t realize how destructive her actions are.

Then there’s Chip. His character is single-handedly the most uncomfortable character I have ever had the misfortune of reading about, but that also makes him fascinating. For some reason I think he is Halden Caufield for the new millennium; he has no real idea of how to be happy and no matter what he is doing or achieving he will most like fail at and blame others for it. He is just creepy and he is exactly the type of person I could see coming out of a childhood full of Enid’s comments and observations about other people’s children and the grades they were getting, awards they were winning, and later on what colleges they were getting accepted to. In the little bit here that we’ve read I get the feeling that Chip doesn’t have too much compassion for anyone else, especially women, but how could that not be rooted in the fertile ground that is the verbal abuse of Enid Lambert?

So far I think the story is amazing, if for nothing else than the brutal honesty of the inner monologue he gives us for his characters. There is such raw honesty and emotion; he is actually writing the dark and awful thoughts that people think and never say and showing us what they do when they’re alone and how they behave to a degree that if we ever found someone doing some of these things in person, that person would be horrifically embarrassed for a lifetime.

I’m anxious to get through the to the next bench mark and see where he takes us and if we can get much lower than Chip.

Wow. Where to begin?

The first 100 pages of “The Corrections” has some terrific and almost uncomfortably astute writing (i.e.-the way Franzen describes Alfred’s, the dad’s, Parkinson disease and the way he writes about Chip’s, the youngest child’s, slacker-esque life; to name two things). But before I continue on that I’ll give a brief summary for anyone else reading this (feel free to add or correct anything you see fit to as well).

“The Corrections” starts off at the home of Alfred and Enid Lambert, who still live in their first home in the fictional Midwestern town of St. Jude. Their children are Gary, Denise, and Chip—all three of them live out east. Gary has not been properly introduced yet but he and his family live in upstate New York (I think); Denise lives in Philadelphia; Chip lives in New York City. Alfred and Enid are on their way to a cruise vacation but they stop over in NYC to visit with Chip and Denise. Chip picks them up from the airport but when they get back to his apartment he leaves almost immediately because his girlfriend has packed her things, moved out, and broken up with him. Is this a pretty fair and succinct general summary of the first 100 pages? Don’t hesitate to add anything to this if I’ve forgotten anything.

The specifics of the book so far are as such: Alfred is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, Enid wants nothing more than to regain control of her life and surroundings (she’s overwhelmed by the mail, which ranges from medical bills to inquiries of purchase regarding a patent that Alfred owns) and therefore is prone to desiring that other people’s nice things be applied to her current situation (i.e.–the way she loves to bring up a recent party that she attended and how she raves about how much shrimp and bathrooms were at the house). Enid seems (so far) to be someone who genuinely wants things to be better but doesn’t know how to go about it. You can see how Chip and Denise can view her raves of the party’s house as being a criticism of their current station, but at the same time I kinda got the feeling that Enid’s also looking to just talk with people too. Most of the first 100 pages revolve around Chip and his questionable choices (sleeping with a student) and his overall half-assedness (he’s writing a story and he’s a teacher at a college but I never got the feeling that he really cares about any of it). Chip seems like a reimagined, modern day Tolstoy character: he seemingly has no idea what he’s supposed to want to do and he lets society’s external forces lean on his decisions. And like a Tolstoy character, I’d put money on Chip’s ultimate happiness (whatever it will be) being the crux of the last act of the book.

I’ll turn it back over to you, Chuck. What are your thoughts so far? What do you think of Franzen’s writing? Any passage(s) that struck you as you read it? I was going to include a couple of excerpts but I’ll hold off until your comments to see if we have any similar thoughts on the writing so far in the novel. Personally, I think Franzen, up to this point, has written a great story. I think some of his thoughts could have been edited down a little bit, but so far I have no complaints.