I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: COSMO JARVIS-“My Day” (2011).

I learned about Cosmo Jarvis through NPR.  The DJs called it a love it AND hate it song.  But I find that I mostly love it.  The video is a blast to watch, but even without the video, the song is quite catchy and fun.  It’s a half punk song and half folkie/trad song.

So who the hell is Cosmo Jarvis?  Well, he was born in NJ, but is really from England.  He’s a filmmaker and musician and he’s had a hit with the song “Gay Pirates” that Stephen Fry raved about on his Twitter feed!  “Gay Pirates” is a fun shanty, but “My Day” is a full-on punk blast.

The song laments the state of things today and talks about how things were back in “my day” (which is of course funny since he’s 21).  The verses are a kind of folkie/storytelling style (but with electric guitars) and the end of each verse has a guitar riff that sounds traditional to me.  But when the chorus jumps in, it’s heavy, rocking, screaming punk.

Okay so the song is nearly 8 minutes long, which is probably overkill.  There’s a fairly lengthy instrumental bridge about 5 minutes in which features guitar and tin whistle solos.  And then the final 2 minutes are just fast metal screams of “My Day” with some wild soloing.  Yes, it’s too much (I’ll bet the single mix is awesome), but it’s still an enjoyable song.  Even without the video.

But you should watch the video, if only because it’s what the guys from Jackass would do if they were in a band and lived in the English countryside.

[READ: July 15, 2011] The Corrections

My company recently asked us if we had read any books over the summer.  I was able to pony up this review for our company newsletter.  I’ll be fleshing it out, but it’s pretty apt.

I’d put off reading this for a number of years, and I wish I had read it sooner.  It’s a very detailed look at one family: Elderly parents, thirty-something kids, and a few grandkids.  The depth of character development is amazing (and includes even depth of characters that the main characters interact with).  It’s a long book but it is very rewarding—comic scenes, moving scenes and one or two shocking moments.  It’s also the first time I’ve read a book where I thought, “even though I like this character, I think it would be better for everyone if he died.”  It’s an unnerving thing to think, but Franzen really makes you think about how family members impact one another.

It took me forever to start reading this book, obviously.  I wasn’t really interested in Franzen when all of the Oprah commotion came out, so I blew off this book entirely.  I’ve recently grown more interested in him.  But rather than reading his novels, I had decided to read all of Franzen’s New Yorker pieces.  (And even though I wanted to read Freedom when it came out, I felt that I should read this one first).  I wasn’t hesitant about reading it, I think I just wanted time to devote to it.  Much like I needed time to devote to writing up this post.  It’s been well over two months since I finished the book.

The Corrections is a wonderful, engaging story about three generations of the Lambert family (and many of the people they interact with).  The matriarch and patriarch of the family, Enid and Alfred, live in the midwestern town of St. Jude.  They have three children: Gary, a banker in Philadelphia who is (more or less unhappily) married with three children; Chip, a former school teacher and current playwright who sponges off of his younger sister while he tries to live the high life in New York City; Denise, a very successful chef who also lives in Philadelphia.  She has no children.  Gary’s children play a small but significant part in the story, keeping the three generations aspect working very well.

I found the first chapter a little slow and somewhat off-putting.  I read an excerpt from the novel in the New Yorker, which was a piece about Chip.  So I was surprised that the book opened with an older couple.  The chapter deals with Alfred and Enid.  Alfred’s dementia is hitting their household quite hard but Enid just feels that Alfred isn’t trying very hard.  Because Enid has very little in her life, she wants nothing more than to have her whole family together “one last time” for Christmas.  Enid and Alfred are long-married and this chapter picks up in the middle of a typical day.  So it takes a few pages to get up to speed.  Of course, once I did, I felt that the whole family was completely real and believable.

The story jumps back and forth both in location and time.  And by doing so it gives an intense amount of depth and detail to these characters.  Although the book is primarily set in the present (the late 90s), we also see Gary and Chip as children before their sister was born.  Alfred was a strict father who (typical for the time and location) showed little emotion but was quick to punish anything out of line (like a scene that I am assuming was the inspiration for the cover image).  Alfred worked for the railroad for many many years and he was meticulous and excellent.  But he was summarily let go in a merger (that eventually closed down the train line he worked on).  In his spare time, Alfred worked in his lab in his basement–he actually patented an idea that becomes a central part of the story.  He is completely stubborn and this intransigence has caused nothing but friction in his family, especially between him and Gary.

Gary is a closet alcoholic; he and his wife feel a lot more friction than fun in their marriage, and most of that friction is about Gary’s parents (their last trip to St. Jude was a disaster).  Although Gary is an unreliable narrator, given his proclivities, it appears that his wife is using his children against him (the story is all third person, but it is very close to each main character in his or her sections, so we see his or her point of view).  The main plot that focuses Gary’s character is his father’s patent.  It turns out that a company is looking to buy the patent and Gary believes that his father’s stubbornness will cost them and the family a lot of money.  He is also greatly upset at both of his parents for staying in their massive home in the Midwest when all of their kids have moved East and they could very easily move to Philadelphia and get a small apartment.  Enid will have none of that of course, as St. Jude is her life.

Gary’s story also concerns the perils of married life.  He is trying to hide his drinking from his family, which means that he gets angry fairly easily.  So when his wife hurts herself playing with the kids (and Gary sees them playing outside), he insists that she is lying about the origins of her injury.  It’s a petty argument  that grows out of control.  Like when the family insists that he cook dinner–he used to love doing it, now he resents working full time and then coming home to have to cook.  There’s also funny splapstick-worthy scene which involves Gary, a ladder and eventually a lot of blood.

The Chip story line is one that was excerpted in the New Yorker in the 20 Under 40 issue that Franzen was featured in.  Alfred and Enid are on their way to a cruise and they stop in to visit their middle son in hopes of seeing his offices at the Wall Street Journal.  Of course, he doesn’t work for the Wall Street Journal, he works for the Warren Street Journal, which is a postmodern rag, little more than a softcore porn outlet.  But several years ago he said Warren Street Journal and Enid heard Wall Street Journal, and he never bothered to correct her.

Their visit is marred buy just about everything. Chip’s girlfriend (who is technically married, although her husband–a Lithuanian diplomat/criminal–has been deported and she chose to stay in Manhattan in the apartment he pays for) has decided to leave him, right then.  Chip is writing a godawful screenplay (the first fifteen minute or so are a tirade that literally no one would sit through) and his girlfriend is the editor.  She leaves him because there are tits and breasts all over the screenplay, and she can’t understand why there are so many–why is he so obsessed?  He chases after her, leaving his parents and his sister to fend for themselves in his apartment.

So when he finally gets to his publicist’s office hoping to find his girlfriend, he runs into his girlfriend’s boss and her husband, the Lithuanian.  He is trying to get her to find someone to work his new scheme.  When she sees Chip (and she knows what has happened), she tries to get rid of both men by setting them up with each other on the Lithuanian’s project.  The project stands to get Chip a ton of cash and get the Lithuanian a political party.  His scheme is perhaps 10% legal and it is also very funny–he wants to sell the inflated virtues of Lithuanian to international investors–for a small fee, you can have just about anything named for yourself in Lithuania.  Chip’s job is to create copy and run the website for these outlandish claims.  And he becomes quite good at it; until the entire country collapses.

As this story seems to be mostly about Chip (I wonder if other readers think that as well, or did I just focus on the young, hip dude), we get a wonderfully detailed look at his spectacular failure as a teacher (before his life in NYC).  He was essentially fired for having an affair with a student.  And we see their relationship develop.  She flirts with him, he ignores her (no fraternizing with students). She is smart and funny, but he ignores her.  She turns on him and starts publicly making out with another guy in class.  He is relieved but hurt.  The whole thing spirals into chaos (as you might imagine) until they go on a drug-fueled, sex-filled weekend bacchanalia from which he will never entirely recover.  And his sister has bailed him out with tens of thousands of dollars.

Denise’s life seems the most successful on the surface (and we get extensive details about her as well).  There’s a very long  sequences about her as a young girl working in her father’s railroad office.  She is a strong, fast working young girl in an office full of men.  And they don’t know what to do about her.  Especially the one older guy who really steps over the line (there’s an amazing sequence in which the payoff for the indiscretion with the coworker is heartbreaking).   But now in the 90s, Denis is a successful chef, groomed by her mentor (who eventually became her lover).  She puts all of her time into her work until one day she decided to set out on her own.  She was more or less headhunted by a man who seemed to really really like her.  She almost had a fling with him but she didn’t want to get involved with a married man.  Especially once she met the man’s wife.  The wife clearly hates her, believing that Denise has already slept with him.  But through a series of surprising (to me) events, Denise and her bosses’ wife become very close, which actually makes her boss uncomfortable.  The whole thing spirals out of control.

The aforementioned cruise that Alfred and Enid take is a sort of set piece that the rest of the story winds up hanging on for a number of reasons.  My favorite, and one of my favorite things in the book is that Enid gets hooked on Aslan®.  And I absolutely loved the introduction of Aslan® into the book.  Well technically, Aslan is introduced earlier because one of Gary’s children is reading The Chronicles of Narnia.  But the Aslan with the ® is introduced this way:

Thanks to Aslan®–and to Dr. Hibbard, a outstanding high-caliber young man–Enid was having her first solid night’s sleep in many months.

It’s through the pharmaceutical industry that Franzen is able to question and mock our culture.  Alsan® becomes a designer drug.  It’s not available in the States, only on ships sailing in international waters.  And it is never sold, it’s only given out free as SampLaks to those who have paid a consultant’s fee.   They have high hopes for Aslan® as a full spectrum mood stabilizer for all modern needs: Aslan ‘Ski,’ Aslan ‘Hacker,’ Aslan ‘Performance Ultra,’ Aslan ‘Golden Years’ etc.

The cruise is also central in giving definition to Alfred’s breakdown.  He has signs of Parkinson’s, and his mind is deteriorating–he talks to his feces and experiencing terrible incontinence . He even has a shotgun in his lab–although he is likely too shaky to do the deed himself–and Gary for one will not have his mother deal with the consequences of that action.  But as I mentioned in the first paragraph, it seems the nicest thing for him to die.  Finally, in an act that is once preposterous and yet highly believable, Alfred has an accident on the boat, which changes things for everyone on board.

Speaking of onboard, we meet a great number of their fellow passengers (and a few scenes that reminded me in spirit of DFW’s “Supposedly Fun Thing” cruising article–yes, I knew that I’d be mentioning DFW in this review somewhere).   I particularly enjoyed that Enid and Alfred are seated between a family from Sweden and a family from Norway who spend all of their meals sniping at each other.  The dialogue is fast and furious and quite hilarious and the sparring is fantastic.  It provide some excellent comic relief in what is an otherwise dark cruise.

I enjoy pointing out the most humorous aspects of the book because there are many many funny parts.  But it is also a serious look at life in turn of the century America.  Before I read the book I was always confused by the title.  What could it mean?  It turns out that The Corrections apply to each person in the family in some way or another.  There’s the obvious and literal one of Chip making corrections to his script.  There’s also the financial corrections that greet all investors, including Gary, as the 90s stock bubble burst.  There’s the correction of attitude the Enid feels thanks to Aslan®.  And there’s even the correction of the rumors and stories that are spread about Denise by family and lovers.

I mentioned earlier about Enid and her desire for everyone to come home for Christmas.  That story line plays out in unexpcted ways and it really works as the climax of the book.  It’s wonderful to see the family all interact together.

I grew to really care about this family.  They were uncomfortably real (even if some of their problems were kind of farcical), and by the end I really cared about them.  But I also enjoyed Franzen’s commentary on American society.  There were subtle (and a few not so subtle) digs at the way American society has changed over the years.  And there’s some serious questioning about the way money is made and the way it exchanges hands.  And of course, there a lot of questions about family.  It’s a completely engaging book.  I’m only bummed that I waited so long to read it.  Now I just have to decide if I should read Freedom next or delve back into his older books first.