Assessing The Promise Of Jonathan Franzen S First Three Novels A Rejection Of Quot Refuge Quot

J
onathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001)
demands that readers consider whether
its author charted a new direction for the
American social novel.1 The National Book
Award-winning text announces itself as a cul-
mination and a point of departure—a tri-
umphant leap forward for Franzen’s own fic-
tion and for American fiction more generally,
insofar as the novel embodies Franzen’s
imperatives for the future of the genre.2 As
early as 1996, Franzen began a public and
ambitious deliberation on whether such a
future even exists. With “Perchance to
Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to
Write Novels,” which Harper’s published in
its April issue that year, Franzen articulated
his difficulties in drafting The Corrections.3
The essay traces these difficulties to his sense
of the novel form’s receding cultural capi-
tal—meaning here, the novel’s decentraliza-
tion from media of mass social instruction—
Assessing the Promise of Jonathan
Franzen’s First Three Novels:
A Rejection of “Refuge”
Ty Hawkins
Ty Hawkins, Ph.D. from Saint
Louis University, has published
in War, Literature & the Arts,
Papers on Language and
Literature, and The Arthur
Miller Journal, while The Dos
Passos Review has published
his fiction.

and likens the state of literature in America to the state of the nation’s inner
cities. Franzen writes,
The institution of writing and reading serious novels is like a grand old
Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the
depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass
entertainments. . . .The last fifty years have seen a lot of white male flight
to the suburbs and to the coastal power centers of television, journalism,
and film. What remain, mostly, are ethnic and cultural enclaves. (Franzen
1996, 39)
According to Franzen,American fiction seems to have retained but one of its
formerly numerous mass social roles, that of affording the marginalized a
means of defining themselves in opposition to the dominant culture.Although
he once wanted to write novels of scathing social satire that might change that
which they critiqued—social change being a traditional aim of the American
social novel—Franzen now believes that economic machinations have negat-
ed the possibility of such texts by rendering them arcane. He states,
The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out
quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each
improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this,
news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it’s an antithetical
product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and,
worst of all, unimprovable. (Franzen 1996, 39, author’s emphasis)
For Franzen, the social novel and consumer economics prove inimical to one
another, and besides, he implies, the social sphere, in an era of chimerical
global capitalism, moves too fast for the novelist to capture and reshape it
anyway—moves too fast even as it works to kill off the“specificity”on which
“fiction feeds” (Franzen 1996, 43). Franzen argues that ours is an age charac-
terized by “the drama of regional specificity succumbing to a commercial
generality,” leaving the American novelist “to risk writing fiction that makes
the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal
machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine . . .” (43).4
Hence, the American social-fiction writer would appear to face a binary and
unenviable choice: either retreat from the public sphere and embrace one’s
membership in an “enclave,” or allow one’s work to devolve into a static
aping of social reportage,an assimilatory medium that at its best is irreducibly
and dynamically linked to the malleable and evolving.
In “Perchance to Dream,” as well as The Corrections, Franzen voices what
he believes to be a viable way out of this opposition—a way of exploding
this dichotomy. In the essay, he claims to have arrived at the following real-
ization: “Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed soci-
ety—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly
62 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

American delusion” (Franzen 1996, 49). He then poses the following ques-
tions in an effort to displace this “delusion” by shifting the goal of the social
novel away from the progressive and toward the diagnostic: “To write sen-
tences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this
enough? Isn’t it a lot?” (49).5 With this essay, I hope to support an unequiv-
ocal “no” in response to the first of these questions.6 I will give a reading of
The Corrections that situates it within the context of Franzen’s earlier novels,
TheTwenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992). I will contend that
Franzen’s entrenchment in “refuge”—an entrenchment his fiction often
enacts—is one that undercuts the force of his social vision, creating the con-
ditions that lead James Annesley to observe that in Franzen’s work readers
encounter globalization, the contemporary evolution of consumer capital-
ism, as “an irreducible reality that the novel is powerless to either interrogate
or resist” (2006, 124).7 Franzen appears reticent even to entertain the idea
that, as Jeffrey D. Sachs writes,“the world is not a zero-sum struggle, . . but is
rather a positive-sum opportunity in which improving technology and skills
can raise living standards around the world” (2006, 16)—one such standard
being that of contemporary American social fiction, which can engage this
world and represent the experiential realities attendant to myriad shifts in
culture,economics,politics,et cetera,by way of myriad points of entry,there-
by expanding readers sense of human potentiality, variety, and prospects for
connection.As Franzen states in “Perchance to Dream,” the novelist’s highest
calling is “preserving a community of readers and writers” for whom “noth-
ing in the world seems simple” (1996, 52). In short, it is in his evident unease
with the novelist’s commitment to the effectuation of social change by way of
the empathetic identification fiction engenders—an unease that leads him to
substitute awareness for goodness as the endgame of the social novel, while
drastically underestimating the social capital novels like the ones he has writ-
ten still have—that Franzen risks undermining the power of exactly this com-
munity.8 He struggles to see what D.H. Lawrence argued nearly a century
ago, that one’s existence “is never freedom till you find something you really
positively want to be.And people in America have always been shouting about
the things they are not” (1977, 9-10, author’s emphasis). Lawrence continues:
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are stray-
ing and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep,
inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when
they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling
some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. (Lawrence 1977, 12, author’s
emphasis)
Franzen recognizes that globalization is a force that threatens to enable cycles
of self-interested production and consumption to assimilate or obscure all
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Ty Hawkins

other forces in contemporary America—indeed,it is difficult not to view this
potential as his main subject matter and repeated plot catalyst. At the same
time, he resists penning a narrative that enacts a qualitative understanding of
being human, an understanding that foregrounds agape over and above utili-
ty, which might challenge consumer capitalism’s quantitative logic on a
superstructural level, even as it seizes upon the energies globalization
unleashes by way of the constant change it demands.9 Thus, upon finishing a
Franzen novel readers are left with greater knowledge of how the social and
personal intersect in contemporary America, given the skill with which
Franzen represents the subjective experiences of American living in, as well
as the objective shape of, a globalizing age. On the other hand, these readers
confront characters whose lives may look a lot like theirs and who tend
toward political paralysis, which, of course, only reinforces a reader’s own
sense of paralysis and therein furthers the aims of the “infernal machine”
Franzen despises.
I
The Twenty-Seventh City is a novel whose aspirations Franzen himself
seems to view as overly diagnostic. In “A Word About This Book,” a piece
that serves as the preface to a collection of essays entitled, How to Be Alone
(2002b),10 Franzen refers to his younger self as “a very angry and theory-
minded person” who “used to think that our American political economy
was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions,
exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder
the planet in the process” (2002b, 4-5). The Franzen Franzen describes
here—the Franzen who presumably wrote TheTwenty-Seventh City—sounds
quite similar to the portrait of William Gaddis we find in “Mr. Difficult,”
another essay collected in How to Be Alone.There, Franzen sharply criticizes
what he terms the postmodern “Systems novel”—Gaddis being the author
of several—that“becomes as chilly,mechanistic,and exhausting as the System
it describes”(2002a,248,262).By the conclusion of“Mr.Difficult,”Franzen’s
criticism of Gaddis and the Systems novel morphs into a blanket indictment
of postmodernism as a whole:
Indeed, the essence of postmodernism is an adolescent celebration of con-
sciousness, an adolescent fear of getting taken in, an adolescent conviction
that all systems are phony.The theory is compelling, but as a way of life it’s
a recipe for rage.The child grows enormous but never grows up. (Franzen
2002a, 268)
This indictment centers on the fact that postmodern art and theory so often
represent the construction of identity as a negative process. Identity in much
of postmodernism is forever under siege, under threat, imperiled; it can be

maintained only by way of a retreat into an embassy of isolation the guns of
whose guards are loaded with a constant supply of continually updated the-
oretical bullets. In pointing this out—and in seconding the ambivalent reac-
tions of critics as diverse asYvor Winters and Terry Eagleton to the excesses
that surround modern and postmodern anti-foundationalisms—Franzen
seems poised on the precipice of a definition of moral artistry akin to that of
John Gardner. Franzen seems ready, that is, to affirm a view like to that
announced in Gardner’s following statement:
True art, by specific technical means now commonly forgotten, clarifies
life, establishes models of human action, casts nets toward the future, care-
fully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns. It does
not rant. It does not sneer or giggle in the face of death, it invents prayers
and weapons. It designs visions worth trying to make fact. It does not
whimper or cower or throw up its hands and bat its lashes. . . . It strikes like
lightning, or is lightning; whichever. (Gardner 2000, 100)11
In rejecting William Gaddis, as well as his own younger self, Franzen implic-
itly rejects The Twenty-Seventh City, a novel which eschews exactly the kind
of commitment to life and a qualitative understanding of humanity that ani-
mates Gardner. The Twenty-Seventh City is a Systems novel, a text that
attempts to expose the workings of the System that is consumer capitalism,
even as it reinforces the System’s power by replicating many of its structures
without submitting an alternative vision of human relations. In this way, the
System looks all-consuming and inescapable, except for those, such as the
author himself, who have armed themselves with the theoretical tools capa-
ble of naming it and thereby withdrawing from it. Ironically, we will see that
even in rejecting The Twenty-Seventh City,Franzen has yet to embrace the full
implications of his challenge to systems fiction.12
Franzen’s first novel is set in a mid-1980s version of St. Louis and opens
with a “foreign invasion” in which an Indian woman named Susan Jammu
assumes control of the city’s police force, while her Indian friend and accom-
plice, Asha, marries Sidney Hammaker, president of the Hammaker Brewing
Company, a fictionalization of Budweiser. Franzen begins, then, with the
invasion usurping the city’s two major means of exerting control, the police
and the economy—or, in more crude terms, usurping the city’s guns and
many of its dollars.These movements pave the way for a larger invasion, as
“sightings began” of groups of Indians until these “scenes . . . had become a
fixture of daily life in the city” (1988, 5, 6).What Franzen has done, is imme-
diately set in motion a conspiracy that enables him to render literal the xeno-
phobia that is the byproduct of the exceptionalist nature of American nation-
alism.13 He juxtaposes this conspiracy against the decline of the American
metropolis in the wake of suburban sprawl and the struggles of American
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Ty Hawkins

industry, prefiguring his comments in “Perchance to Dream.” This decline
ostensibly is the most salient factor that will enable a foreign “takeover” in
the American “heartland.”As Franzen states of St. Louis,
no part of the city was deader than downtown. Here in the heart of St.
Louis, in the lee of the whining all-night traffic on four expressways, was a
wealth of parking spaces. Here sparrows bickered and pigeons ate. Here
City Hall . . . rose in two-dimensional splendor from a flat, vacant block.
The air on Market Street, the central thoroughfare, was wholesome. On
either side of it you could hear the birds both singly and in chorus—it was
like a meadow. It was like a back yard. (Franzen 1996, 7-8)
With no Americans paying close attention, it would seem, Jammu is able to
install herself as “keeper of this peace” (8)—usurper of the shell of a once-
vibrant American city. Control of America has not only been wrested from
the mythologized American People, it has gone global.What appears at stake
in The Twenty-Seventh City, therefore, is the very prospect of the death of
America—the end of the promise of a “City on a Hill”—in the face of the
pressures of consumer capitalism-driven globalization.
Franzen describes Jammu as a slight woman with a figure “like a school
girl,” yet, we learn,“Her head was older” (1988, 8). In fact, Jammu, as a threat,
is virtually all “head.” She pursues an intensely rationalized method of gain-
ing power for its own sake, building an apparatus of surveillance and nor-
malization that calls to mind a Foucaultian panopticon. Jammu does not
spend time concerning herself with “what she would do once she became
the Madam of the Mound City,” but rather,“Right now she was concerned
only with the means” (29). She developed her skills under the tutelage of “a
marxist of the aesthetic variety” named Balwan Singh (18); her mother,
“Maman,” an arch-capitalist known as “the laughing jackal of real estate” in
the Indian press (16); and by following the example of Indira Ghandi, to
whom Jammu distantly is related. Just 35 years old and formerly the com-
missioner of the Bombay Police,Jammu sets about creating what she calls the
“State” in the major figures of St. Louis public life.The State is such that “a
subject’s everyday consciousness became severely limited” (30); it creates a
kind of tunnel vision in the person who finds him- or herself in it. As
Franzen writes,“Probably the best metaphor for the State was sexual obses-
sion. An absorbing parallel world, a clandestine organizing principle. Men
moved mountains for the sake of a few muscle contractions in the dark” (77-
78).To induce the State, Jammu must have “leverage,” yet this leverage “often
...consisted of little more than the subject’s susceptibility to her charm”(30).
Martin Probst functions as Jammu’s central antagonist in the novel and
thereby becomes the text’s protagonist. Probst is a self-made man, a high-
school-educated Midwesterner of stark integrity, unfailing work ethic, and

brisk intelligence. He is a central figure in Franzen’s St. Louis, for Probst is
the contractor who built the Gateway Arch—a symbol that conflates hope
for the future, westward expansion, and economic development for local res-
idents—as well as a steadfast family man. He heads a community-revitaliza-
tion firm named Municipal Growth, which Franzen describes as “a benevo-
lent organization . . . [that] was a model of efficacy and an object of almost
universal reverence” (Franzen 1996, 20). Jammu sees that if she “wanted to
alter the power structure of metropolitan St. Louis, she had to contend with
Municipal Growth” (20). Jammu further sees that what she is to contend
with is, as she states,“‘paternalism at its best’” (21). Probst is to embody the
ideal of the All-American Boy all grown up, and it is through the conflict
between him and Jammu that Franzen offers readers a parody-homage to the
femme fatale sagas of popular thriller fiction, encouraging readers to invest
their faith in Probst—their belief that this embodiment of a vigorous, white,
American masculinity will defeat the sinister designs of a passive-aggressive,
feminized, foreign Other. In Jammu’s own terms, it is her task to assume the
power of this “‘saint of the American Way, rags to riches,’” a man,“‘Christ-
like in his incorruptibility’” (21, 22). She must induce the State in Probst, but
she realizes that, apparently,“Probst had no weaknesses” (30). It is only after
some five hundred pages of plots,subplots,and counterplots that readers fully
discover that this conflict, as well as Franzen’s novel, is a confidence trick.
That something is amiss with the Jammu v. Probst scenario—that the
deck is stacked insofar as readers are asked for assent to a novel that will con-
clude by deconstructing itself, an act of novelistic bad faith—is a truth the
seeds of which Franzen plants early on.These seeds have less to do with the
principal players I have described than the site of contestation—namely, St.
Louis, a metonym for the American city more generally. Franzen asks read-
ers to consider the implications of St. Louis being hopeless, a place in a State
of sorts itself.As he writes,“cities are ideas,” and the idea that is St. Louis is
a dying or dead one:
By now, of course, most American cities were in trouble. But compared
with St. Louis, even Detroit looked like a teeming metropolis, even
Cleveland like a safe place to raise a family. Other cities had options, good
neighbors, a fighting chance. Philadelphia had land to work with.
Pittsburgh could count on help from Alleghany County. Insular and con-
stricted, St. Louis had by 1980 dwindled to America’sTwenty-Seventh City.
Its population was 450,000, hardly half the 1930 figure. (Franzen 1996, 26)
Maybe, readers come to ask, the contest between Jammu and Probst is noth-
ing more than a screen? This question, as I have suggested, surfaces early in
the novel.Yet it is offset by this dynamism of this screen.
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In concert with a number of coconspirators, Jammu sets about reversing
the flow of money from St. Louis City to St. Louis County—two entities
kept separate under Missouri’s Constitution. Ultimately, she wishes to do
nothing less than reverse suburban sprawl through a plan to merge the city
and county.To do this, she puts major St. Louis figures in the State by means
ranging from tax incentives to the trafficking of prostitutes to homicide—
creating conditions that will make local leaders see the merger as the proper
way forward and encourage voters to pass a referendum to that effect.As the
election nears, and as his former allies topple, Jammu isolates Probst. She and
her chief associate, Singh, have decided “to accelerate the process of bereave-
ment” in Probst,“compress[ing] into three or four months the losses of twen-
ty years” (33). Over the course of the novel, Probst’s high-school-aged daugh-
ter, Luisa, leaves the home to live with a boyfriend; his wife, Barbara, commits
adultery with Singh, is kidnapped by him—although Probst is led to believe
she has simply left the marriage—and is killed; and Probst’s hold on fellow St.
Louis executives slips radically. Once Probst is marooned, Jammu will seduce
him, making herself an object of obsession so as to land Probst in the State.
Even this proves a challenge,though,for it is the nature of paternalism,Franzen
suggests—it is the nature of patriarchy—to court distance and derive comfort
from it.As Franzen shows,“The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the
sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years
he’d sought attention . . . then that was because attention proved him different
and solitude begins in difference” (Franzen 1996, 93). What Jammu does to
attract Probst, is not attempt to force a change in him. Instead, she plays upon
his weakness, vanity—the self-inflation that accompanies Probst’s individualis-
tic and hierarchical view of his relationship to his fellow citizens.
Jammu presents in herself the qualities that Probst finds attractive in his
own person. All of these qualities are offshoots of the desire and ability to
exercise control, as well as the trust that such a desire is a right-minded one.
The first time Probst sees Jammu—she is directing a large-scale police
action—readers are told,“Probst would remember his first glimpse of her . .
. [for] she seemed to control every action of the men around her and of all
the other men farther off in the darkness” (Franzen 1996, 202). Probst,
Franzen continues,“knew a professional when he saw one” and is transfixed
(203). Becoming attracted to Jammu engenders a divorce in Probst’s psyche.
This attraction forces him to “look” at himself as he looks at her, producing
a split.This split—a classic mind/body split of the Cartesian variety—reduces
Probst’s power, diminishing his ability to act, for action requires an uncon-
scious conjunction of mind and body in a moment that buttresses the will.
Raised to consciousness, as it were, Probst becomes decentered and seeks to
merge with Jammu to regain wholeness. He has been made to see “a world

that was not a spherical enclosing screen on which pictures were projected”
(219). Replacing Probst’s old “world”—a world that supported his faith in
individual autonomy—is one consisting of “a collection of objects to which
the given person was dared to belong” (219). In fact, this second world pre-
cludes the very existence of vision;replacing vision is blind will feeding upon
itself, acquisition not a means but an end. Having arrived here, Probst is
indeed in the State—the same state as Jammu, his identity spilling into hers
and vice-versa, as Franzen clarifies via the following image:
She flushes the toilet, and she is washing her hands, she is staring straight
ahead into the mirror, when suddenly all the diffuse evil in the world has
puckered into a single mouth and is blowing out of the mirror at her.The
face looking back is a white one, a white face made up as an Indian. An
American face is showing through the mask, and it crashes into the wall as
she throws open the cabinet. Her fingers close on the thermometer. She’s
burning up. (Franzen 1996, 267)
Once this merger has been completed, it is just a matter of time before
Jammu gets Probst to back her city-county merger.
To be fair,Probst does hold out for a while,even making himself the face
of local opposition to the referendum. Come around he does, though, to
much media fanfare. It would seem that Franzen’s novel, in leading readers
to this point, is to affirm a kind of draconian gaze upon the will, implicitly
arguing for the inescapable and undergirding reality that is the will unvar-
nished—that is theWill, a la Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy factors
heavily in The Corrections. In the end, however, it is this affirmation that The
Twenty-Seventh City undermines, divorcing signifier (the merger of Jammu
and Probst) from signified (the merger of city and county,which would assert
the Will as a form of essential truth). In an act of classic postmodern nega-
tion, Franzen subverts even this most base of metanarratives.The referendum
fails, with voter turnout proving abysmal. Election day brings neither a reac-
tionary movement against Jammu’s scheme nor a libertine movement toward
the new megatropolis.It brings indifference.Jammu has concluded that“with
so much talent, so much investment, so much technique and theory . . . it’s
reasonable to demand resounding victories” (Franzen 1996, 267). Instead of
such a victory, she finds herself confronted with entropy.As Franzen states,
The referendum had needed to carry both city and county by simple
majorities.In the city,where less than 17 percent of registered voters had cast
ballots, it was failing narrowly. In the county, with voter turnout barely 14
percent, it was missing by a four-to-one margin. Overall, the merger was
receiving just over 20 percent of the vote. . . .When little better than one
eligible adult in seven had bothered to go to the polls, the only thing any-
body could say had carried by a landslide was apathy. (Franzen 1996, 502)
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This apathy proves the undoing of Jammu. It also proves the undoing of
Franzen’s text, signaling the collapse of its System in true Systems-novel fash-
ion and creating what Colin Hutchinson terms a “sense of an ‘end of history’”
that leaves“an impersonal form of capitalism”triumphant (2009,194).Readers
are left with a glimpse of a defunct America Franzen characterizes thusly:
With a maturity gained by bitter experience, the new America knew that
certain struggles would not have the happy endings once dreamed of, but
were doomed to perpetuate themselves, metaphorically foiling all attempts
to resolve them. No matter how a region was structured, well-to-do white
people were never going to permit their children to attend schools with
dangerous black children. . . . Taxes were bound to hit the unprivileged
harder than the privileged. . . .The world would either end in a nuclear
holocaust, or else not end in a nuclear holocaust. . . .All political platforms
were identical in their inadequacy, their inability to alter the cosmic order.
(Franzen 1988, 503-04)
Rather than offer the prospect of change—rather than even call for it—The
Twenty-Seventh City extends an olive branch of irony to the reader, who is
encouraged to join Franzen in shaking his or her head in mutual under-
standing of the nation’s intractable awfulness.
II
When compared to The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen’s second novel,
Strong Motion, can be interpreted as marking an aesthetic shift in the author’s
career, one that moves Franzen away from the “isolation” he cites in How to
Be Alone.As in the earlier novel, the overriding thrust of Strong Motion does
seem to be the diagnosis of a society controlled by the hegemony of global
consumer capitalism and its incredibly assimilatory metanarrative of self-
interested production and consumption, which atrophies people’s hope for
community. Likewise, Franzen sets as a frame for this diagnosis a single
American city, this time quarantining Boston.Yet Strong Motion indicates a
change in Franzen’s understanding of individuals’ connections to this meta-
narrative. Franzen still reads these connections through a deterministic lens,
but he is not so quick to reduce individual identity and action to mere func-
tions of the economic and historical forces that transcend the individual. He
is prepared to represent some of the ways in which individuals’desires,as well
as the personal and political visions these desires engender, often conflict
sharply and sometimes effectively with power structures’ attempts to gain
monopolistic holds on society. In Strong Motion, therefore, and for the first
time in Franzen’s extended fiction, readers find characters who are neither
vectors for one dubious mode of control or another—that is, characters such
as Jammu and Probst—nor foils or dupes, agents or victims of apathetic

assent. Instead, we find several characters who work against the grain of
extant power dynamics, often at great risk to their own wellbeing, in efforts
to articulate and make manifest alternative models of human community.
That these efforts do not come to pass by the conclusion of Strong Motion—
do not come to pass on a social scale, at any rate—once again underscores
Franzen’s attraction to postmodern negation, to what Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak once termed the“fall into the abyss of deconstruction,”a fall in which
one becomes “intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom” (1997,
lxxvii). However, the end of Strong Motion does allow the seed of change—
which is to say, human-to-human commitment founded on agape—to
remain planted in a manner TheTwenty-Seventh City rejects.This change fore-
shadows the growing comfort with the prospect of community I will argue
that The Corrections evidences.
To come to grips with how characters work against the grain in Strong
Motion, one first must identify that toward which they react in the novel.As
I suggested earlier, this force or series of forces is the deregulated, corpora-
tized capitalism that is the engine driving the increasingly global hegemony
of Western-style finance. In Franzen’s world—one that affords no space to
even the prospect of corporation-as-good-steward, a world replete with
Enrons and devoid of Newman’s Owns—this brand of capitalism answers to
no particular person, company, or even nation-state. Its sole reason for being
is to increase the production and sale of whatever goods so as to turn a prof-
it. This system or series of systems exists as its own metanarrative, then, and
it embeds within said metanarrative the assimilation or destruction of all
other metanarratives.The only real checks on this metanarrative’s success are
consumer whims—this even as the expansion of its power depends precise-
ly on the creation (through advertising) and subsequent placation (through
sales) of these whims. If left unchecked, consumer capitalism will achieve
total monopoly, Franzen suggests, in the end eliminating even that which we
identify as “human.” See, for example, his description of Boston’s
Commercial Street at the end of the 1980s:
On Commercial Street there were a thousand windows, bleak and square
unornamented windows reaching up as high as the eye cared to wander.
Pale green, opaque, unblinking and excluding.There was no trash on the
ground for the wind to disturb,nothing for the eye to rest on but new brick
walls, new concrete pavement, and new windows. It seemed as if the only
glue that kept these walls and streets from collapsing, the only force pre-
serving these clean and impenetrable and uninspired surfaces,was deeds and
rents. (Franzen 1992, 19)
In Strong Motion, Franzen focuses on a fictional company named Sweeting-
Aldren, as well as the executives who work for it, so as to examine the
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destructive and dehumanizing side of consumer capitalism—the only side of
consumer capitalism and the globalization it fuels available in his work.
Headquartered in the Boston metro area, Sweeting-Aldren is the sec-
ond-largest chemical concern in all of New England,large enough to engage
in a pitched battle for market share against the likes of Dow and Monsanto.
Sweeting-Aldren traces its roots to the late 1930s, when founder Alfred
Sweeting merged his process of explosives production with J.R.Aldren’s pig-
ment business. From then on, the company maintained and grew its business
by way of a highly profitable mixture of military and civilian contracts. By
the 1960s and early 1970s, the company was expanding rapidly through the
sale of pesticides on the homefront and defoliants to a U.S. military at war in
Vietnam.The company managed to insert itself as a major player in the mil-
itary-industrial complex, its pesticides “suppressing all infestations of indoor
vermin and outdoor weeds however faintly reminiscent of Communists”
(Franzen 1992, 392), even as Sweeting-Aldren deployed its “chlorinated
hydrocarbons” to the military, the latter “having discovered hundreds of
thousands of square miles of Southeast Asian jungle in urgent need of defo-
liation” (393).The company emerges out of theVietnamWar era more lucra-
tive than ever, dipping into everything from the production of spandex for
swimwear to Warning Orange pigment for traffic cones. As the 1970s wear
on, though, it faces a major problem—the growing consciousness among
Americans of the need for environmental protections. This consciousness,
which results in new air-pollution and water-pollution standards, poses a
roadblock for Sweeting-Aldren in terms of waste disposal. The company’s
solution is splendidly Machiavellian: it drills an illegal injection well near
Boston and pumps highly noxious waste beneath the water table. By the
1980s, these waste products have built up to such a degree as to trigger suf-
ficient force to induce seismic events. Boston is wracked with a string of
increasingly dangerous earthquakes, which represent in part the “strong
motion” that affords Franzen’s novel its title. Sweeting-Aldren denies culpa-
bility until a particularly stalwart quake brings about its exposure and ruin.
However, even this ruin does not affect the executives whose decisions led
to the problems.They flee the country to avoid prosecution and jump to the
Caribbean, with proverbial golden parachutes cushioning their falls.
In Strong Motion,Sweeting-Aldren is the chief agent of an intensely ratio-
nalistic approach to the world that is an heir to both Enlightenment reason
and the death of various metanarratives that gave purpose to the use of rea-
son—most notably, the mutually reinforcing politicization of Protestant
Christianity and sacralization of liberal democracy that form the intertwined
movements that sustained America for its first two centuries and before, dur-
ing its colonial period.14 In the wake of the Vietnam War, which saw the

American experiment founder in the jungles of Southeast Asia, reason
emerges as its own self-sustaining entity, finding its expression in the free-
market ideology that affords a company such as Sweeting-Aldren the unfet-
tered ability to assert its will and a means of measuring its success (the dol-
lar). Unchecked by a competing or controlling metanarrative as Judeo-
Christian calls for universal love and Jeffersonian calls for civic duty recede
as driving forces in American life, the free-market ideology of Sweeting-
Aldren faces consumer choice and the competition it spawns as its only real
impediments to growth, for both are engines that at once drive markets and
render said markets unstable. Yet Franzen suggests that companies like
Sweeting-Aldren are well on their way to managing choice.As he writes,
The system believes that the last twenty years have eliminated any signifi-
cant distinction between human and artificial intelligence in America.The
system believes that all vital functions of the average American intelligence
can now be simulated by a program ...which can perform exactly the same
mental tasks as a randomly selected American: can realistically simulate his
spending patterns, his crisis-response mechanisms, his political behavior.
(Franzen 1992, 301-02)
To work against the System, Franzen states, one must demand that it account
for factors it considers “a dangerous irrelevance” (1992, 304). One must assert
and reassert the relevance of questions “your science disqualifies itself from
answering ...those questions that concern the mind’s ability to feel that which
is, in an absolute and verifiable sense, not there” (305).To assert these questions
is to begin work toward an alternative metanarrative. Strong Motion offers three
approaches to this, and Franzen channels these approaches through the novel’s
three main characters, each of whom attack this from a different angle.
The first of these characters is Louis Holland, a young man who recent-
ly took a degree in French from Rice University and who arguably serves as
Strong Motion’s protagonist. He is the son of Bob Holland, a tenured Marxist
who teaches history at Northwestern University, and Melanie Holland, a
woman with upwardly mobile ambitions who has recently inherited a vast
sum of money thanks to family ties to none other than Sweeting-Aldren.
Louis is literally the inheritor of two sharply opposed worldviews—the rad-
ical politics of the 1960s, a politics largely founded on the extension of
Christian love, and contemporary free-market fundamentalism.15 Louis
would like to reject the latter in favor of the former, but time separates him
from the hope that buoyed the American Left during Bob’s formative years
as an academic.When Louis looks to his father,he sees not a courageous man
willing to take intellectual risks and willing to act on his principles; instead,
Louis sees a man who has degenerated into dope smoking, token anti-estab-
lishment gestures confined to campus, and the decision to allow his backyard
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to return to a prairie state roughly akin to its virgin condition.16 Disgusted
by his father, Louis looks to others for inspiration. He begins work in radio
in Boston—Louis is a lifelong lover of radio—and takes a menial job under
a station owner named Alec Bressler. Alec is a decent man who cares for
Louis. Alec also is a man who orchestrated a daring seaborne escape from
Stalinist Russia during his youth. Rather than use his own experience and
informational forum to combat the kinds of ills he surely witnessed in
Russia, however, Alec voices a very different “American Dream” (Franzen
1992, 17).As he explains it to Louis,
For eight years I try to remove politics from WSNE. It’s my “American
Dream”—a station where people talk all day long (no music—it’s cheat-
ting!) and not a WORD about politics.This is my American Dream. Radio
with talk all day and no ideology. (Franzen 1992, 17, author’s emphases)
Met with his father’s drift into the inane, Alec’s self-insulating fantasy, the
hegemony of consumer capitalism at play all around him, and his own lim-
ited imagination, Louis stalls when it comes to formulating a vision of his
future that might conjoin the personal and the political.That said, the polit-
ical is an extension of the personal, and it is on this ground that Strong Motion
invests a good deal of its energy in uncovering whether Louis can find good-
ness in his immediate sphere. That Louis does so—committing himself to
Renée Seitchek, a Harvard University seismologist, by the end of the novel
and manifesting what Hutchinson calls “the germ of a communitarian
impulse” (2009, 196)—indicates Franzen’s willingness to open the door to a
loving, humane alternative to systems thought.
For this alternative to find its feet, it must avoid the severe miscalcula-
tions of 1960s radicalism, which is to say it must make use of the tradition of
American pragmatism, building just institutions rather than merely subvert-
ing unjust ones. It is through his portrayal of Seitchek and her actions that
Franzen clarifies this. Renée is a thirty-year-old woman with a Harvard
Ph.D.; she holds a postdoctoral fellowship there. She is lonely and isolated, at
times sounding a lot like J.D. Salinger’s Franny Glass in deploring the sort of
elitists Franny would term “section men” (Salinger 1991, 15).17 However,
unlike Louis—and, for that matter, unlike Franny—Renée not only senses
the evil of ungoverned systems thought, she can speak to this evil in the pre-
cise terms necessary to lay the groundwork for action. She looks at Boston
and sees “‘overt racism and a rotten climate and elevated cancer rates and bad
drivers and a harbor full of sewage’” (Franzen 1992, 120).When the earth-
quakes afford her a chance to make a difference in the city, she seizes it. She
compiles evidence of Sweeting-Aldren’s misdeeds at great threat to her per-
son, threat that is realized near the end of the novel when she is shot and
nearly killed by a Sweeting-Aldren operative. Early on, Louis sneers at

Renée’s efforts, caught up as he is in the paralysis that has characterized the
American Left since its defeat by market fundamentalism in the 1980s. He
states,“‘You actually believe in this stuff? Service to mankind and all that?’”
(163). Undaunted, Renée continues on her course, besting hurdles—to
include many of her moral failings—and telling Louis,“‘I wouldn’t have said
it if I didn’t believe it’” (163, author’s emphasis). By the conclusion of Strong
Motion, Renée exposes Sweeting-Aldren, by and large, and provides Louis,
fellow women in the novel, and readers an expanded sense of the possible.
All that being said, Franzen is quick to highlight the limits of Renée’s
pragmatism, a process he pursues in part via the difficulties she and Louis
encounter. In a particularly striking passage of free indirect discourse, one
that follows a scene wherein Louis and Renée have sex, Franzen writes,
He [Louis] wondered why he had to feel so alone when they made love, so
alone with her pleasure as he propelled the long wave train that led to her
satisfaction. . . . It wasn’t that they didn’t fit together or come enough; it just
seemed as if at no point, not even in this most typical of acts between sexes,
did she ever present herself or give herself or even let him see her as a
woman. . . .Always it seemed to suit some obscure purpose of hers to have
the two of them be the same sex, excitable through matching nerves and
satiable through matching stimulation. (Franzen 1992, 209-10)
The roadblocks to intimacy at which Franzen points can to some degree be
attributed to the joint struggles of Louis and Renée to formulate palatable
gender identities—struggles that constitute a core subplot in the novel and
deserve scholarly treatment in their own right. However, I believe Renée’s
reluctance toward intimacy has as much to do with the pragmatism about
which I have written as it does with her gender.That is, a pragmatic, action-
oriented worldview is a worldview founded on reason; such a worldview,
unless it is encompassed by a humanistic metanarrative that transcends the
personal and posits a qualitative understanding of human value, threatens to
commit many of the same evils as the free-market ideology of Sweeting-
Aldren. Renée’s pragmatism, as we see here, obviates difference. In so doing,
this pragmatism can prove a barrier to real commitment, for commitment is
founded on love, which often equates to an act of unreason and always con-
stitutes respect for difference, even when we consider self-love. Hence, dur-
ing the nadir of the relationship between Louis and Renée, Franzen offers
the following: “‘We love you’ made as little sense to her now as a whale say-
ing, ‘You strain plankton with your baleen, just like me,’ or a turtle saying,
‘You and I have shared this experience of laying eggs in a sandy pit.’ It was
revolting (1992, 345).” Renée aborts the child the two of them conceive, and
it is only after she opens herself to Louis, and vice versa, at the end of the
novel,that they begin work toward a relationship that could rightly be termed
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“loving”—a relationship founded on mutual concern and the sense of a future,
one starkly different from the escape into one another that is the beginning of
their time together.This final work, then, hints at the prospect of reconciling
the personal and political in a manner that accounts for difference.
The task of pointing out the limits of pragmatism—the fact that reason
is a tool and not a worthwhile epistemology in its own right—frequently
falls on the shoulders of Phillip Stites, the third of the novel’s three main
characters. Stites is the head of a religious group organized as the Church of
Action in Christ.This group has migrated from Fayetteville, North Carolina,
to Boston, where it sets up quarters in a derelict building on the outskirts of
the city. Fundamentalist in its theological orientation, the group has travelled
to Boston to protest abortion, picketing outside of and blocking entrance to
abortion clinics. Franzen’s treatment of Stites’s followers is satirical at best,
flatly smug at worst, and a reader does well to notice that this group is the
only body of organized religiosity to factor centrally in any of Franzen’s nov-
els—a hole in the work of a writer who wishes to represent America on a
broad canvass.While his treatment of the church’s followers is flawed, though,
Franzen does afford Stites the slightly puzzling role of being the only charac-
ter in the text who voices a thoroughgoing metanarrative that contradicts the
demands of global capitalism. Stites calls for acting with what he terms “neg-
ative certainty” against, as he says,“‘The idea that you can turn people’s lives
into hellish pursuits of pleasure and claim you’re doing them a favor’”(Franzen
1992, 327). Stites continues: “‘It’s hard to figure a world that sees religious
belief as a form of psychosis but thinks the desire to own a better microwave
is the most natural feeling there can be’”(327-28).He wants Americans,when
they narrate themselves into the history of their nation, to “count [the] thir-
ty million poor people and the systematic waste of all the riches God gave us
and the fact that to most of the downtrodden people of the world the word
America is synonymous with greed, weapons, and immorality” (328).
Predictably,when Franzen shows readers Stites’s attempts to combine his diag-
nosis of America’s ills with a plan of action, Stites is exposed as a man who
wants women to accept a rigid separation of public and private spheres, and
who wants all people to accept suffering as a necessary condition in moving
toward an ill-defined postmortem peace. Unable or unwilling to bind Louis’s
personal devotion to love, Renée’s pragmatism, and Stites’s understanding of
the necessity for an alternative metanarrative, therefore, Franzen in Strong
Motion defers a new metanarrative to The Corrections. Unfortunately for read-
ers and for the writer’s corpus, that novel also ends with a deferral.

III
Franzen, I would guess, might disagree sharply with such a contention. In
“AWord AboutThis Book,”he makes clear that both How to Be Alone and The
Corrections are to be read jointly “as a record of a movement away from an
angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance—even a celebration—of
being a reader and a writer” (2002b, 5-6). Regrettably, both texts, indeed all of
Franzen’s texts, frame this “acceptance” as to some degree a withdrawal from
the prospect of social engagement.Take, for example, Franzen’s reading of the
ends of How to Be Alone.As he states,“the underlying investigation in all these
essays ...[is] the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy
and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone” (2002b, 6).
Franzen conflates “preserving”and“individuality”and“alone”here,neglecting
the prospect of, say,“community.” As such, the shaping of individual identity
becomes an act of negation—dependent for its terms on what it is not, which
is to say, dependent on the System for its own definition. The effect of this
process in The Corrections is to once more leave readers viewing the System of
consumer capitalism largely as a monolithic entity.
In The Corrections, Franzen again offers a sweeping portrayal of American
society, this time taking on the millennial zeitgeist. The novel displays his
wide-ranging talent as a mimetic and satiric chronicler of the intersection
between globalization and middle-class America—a talent he manifests by
way of his depiction of the Lamberts, who live in St. Jude, a fictionalized ver-
sion of St. Louis, and constitute a traditional, nuclear WASP family coming
apart at every seam.As Annesley states,
Offering precise descriptions of a world shaped by international politics,
new technologies, consumer economics, and the free market, [Franzen] sets
out . . . to link his portrait of the Lambert family with a vision of global-
ization’s complex combination of forces.The familial and the domestic are
thus known in relation to broader panoramas of global change. (Annesley
2006, 111)
Instead of challenging globalization on a macro- or metalevel, however, The
Corrections retreats into the world of the Lamberts so as to safeguard some-
thing of their integrity,something of their deeply threatened individuation.18
The novel does this, furthermore, so as to represent a fundamentally twenti-
eth-century conflict, rather than offering readers a glance forward. That is,
the central conflict at play in The Corrections is that which we popularly refer
to as the generation gap between the Baby Boomers and their parents. In
broad terms, this struggle unfolds in a seriocomic manner, with strong ele-
ments of an abrasive dark humor that affords Franzen the narrative distance
necessary for him to resist sentimentalism; it pits the utilitarian individualism
of the Lambert parents,Alfred and Enid, against the expressive individualism
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of the Lambert children, Gary, Chip, and Denise.As Hutchinson writes,“All
three [children] oppose Alfred and Enid’s strict conformity with a libertari-
an-individualist ethic that bears traces of the 1960s counterculture” (2009,
200). In more specific terms, however, the real conflict of the novel is that
between Alfred, who turns and returns to Schopenhauer’s philosophy with
all the regularity of a religious devotee, and Chip, his middle child, a dis-
graced professor steeped in postmodern literary and cultural theory. The
Corrections pursues the conflict between Alfred and Chip, and resolves it with
rather tender strokes at the book’s conclusion, so as to attempt to close a
chapter in American history.19 In doing so, the novel does figure as a culmi-
nation of sorts, even as it opens a space for a social novel that might truly
challenge the quantitative logic of globalization—opens a space, in other
words, for the kind of social novel Franzen has thus far rebuffed.
To argue, as I am, that Alfred and Chip, along with their personal meta-
physics, are engaged in a twentieth-century conflict that just happens to take
place at the dawn of the twenty-first century implies, of course, that neither
Schopenhauer nor postmodern theory offers sufficient grounds for an inter-
rogation of globalization. The Corrections supports precisely this conclusion
insofar as neither the utilitarian individualism of Alfred, which he channels
through Schopenhauer’s existential determinism, nor the expressive individ-
ualism of Chip, a retreat into the self he couches in the liberatory rhetoric of
anti-foundationalism, points toward the commitment to community neces-
sary for the elaboration of a challenge to globalization’s systematic fragmen-
tation of individual identities into component parts of an overarching com-
mercial mechanism. Both men, and both philosophies of sorts, are entrapped
in rhetorics of radical individualism that support,rather than contest,the nat-
uralization of self-interest key to the unfettered expansion of consumer cap-
italism. That this is true for Alfred becomes clear immediately as the reader
takes up Franzen’s novel.Alfred is a man whose identity is founded on a series
of static dichotomies that would fail to hold up under questioning by Chip’s
theories, let alone in the age of globalization’s ever-present emphasis on
kinesis.Alfred crafts crystal-clear binary oppositions between public and pri-
vate, male and female, moral and immoral, white and non-white, and so
forth. All of these oppositions are founded on the essential Enlightenment-
spawned distinction between subject and object, or between the inviolate,
reasoning self, and the environment in which that self operates.With this dis-
tinction in place, Alfred comes to regard himself as engaged in a struggle
against his environment; furthermore, through a rather off-kilter reading of
Schopenhauer, Alfred concludes that his only real defense against the
world—his only tool of resistance—is his will, which functions in opposition
to the larger Will of Nature. As such, Alfred’s outlook is more than a little

grim. Franzen frames this outlook thusly:“to suffer like this for no reason.To
know there was no moral order in the flu, no justice in the juices of pain his
brain produced. The world nothing but a materialization of blind, eternal
Will” (2001, 259).
Armed with just his will, then, Alfred, for much of his life, finds the
industrial America that precedes the Digital Age compatible with his belief
that in a world as nasty as this one the least and the most we can do for one
another is preserve a veneer of civility. Pursuing this utilitarian outlook and
refusing to relinquish his moral high ground—in Franzen’s terms, his right
of “refusal” (2001, 263)—Alfred rises to middle management working as an
engineer for the fictional railroad, Midland Pacific, which makes its head-
quarters in St. Jude.Through his work,Alfred demonstrates a degree of com-
petency in the public sphere that allows him to justify his role as patriarch of
the Lambert family in the private sphere.As Franzen writes,describing Alfred
on a trip to inspect the Erie Belt Railroad, an East Coast line Midland pur-
chases in the 1970s,
Maybe some of the women drivers crossing [by] . . . saw him perched there,
flat of belly and broad of shoulder, the wind winding his cuffs around his
ankles, and maybe they felt, as Enid had felt the first time she’d laid eyes on
him, that here was a man.Although he was oblivious to their glances,Alfred
experienced from within what they saw from without. By day he felt like
a man, and he showed this, you might even say flaunted it, by standing no-
handedly on high narrow ledges, and working ten and twelve hours with-
out a break, and cataloguing an eastern railroad’s effeminacies. (Franzen
2001, 243-44, Franzen’s emphasis)
Having shown himself a “man” in the public sphere,Alfred takes as his nat-
ural reward the right and duty to rule over his household with unquestioned
authority. Discipline becomes the prevailing order of the Lambert home,
given Alfred’s internalization of nuggets from Schopenhauer such as this:“you
cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of
penal colony” (254, author’s emphasis). Or this:“Woman pays the debt of life not
by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of childbearing and care for the
child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheer-
ing companion” (264, my emphasis).
For all of his Schopenhauer-colored faith in the power of the will, how-
ever, Alfred has sunk into a state of deterioration by the time the present
action of The Corrections catches up with him. He has retired from Midland
Pacific, which has been swallowed by an amorphous megafirm; his children
have moved out of the house to make their own ways in the world, reject-
ing the model of adulthood he and Enid provided them; and his body has
begun to betray him, for he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and
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is slipping into dementia. It is through the portrayal of this last element of
Alfred’s condition, which comprises scathingly ironic, often wildly funny, and
extensive sections of the novel, that Franzen literalizes his rhetorical con-
tention that the world in which Alfred’s dichotomies held sway has long since
passed. In the new world order—an ethereal, digital order Alfred’s will could
not lay hands on even if he were a vigorous young man—Alfred hears what
Franzen terms, “the alarm bell of anxiety . . . a kind of metasound whose rise
and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slow-
er waxing and waning of [the elder Lamberts’s] consciousness of the sound”
(2001, 3-4; my emphasis). This anxiety is rooted in Alfred’s realization not
that the world is a dehumanizing place or that he must die at some point—
Alfred has known these things his entire adult life, has, in fact, bolstered his
sense of his own virility by accepting these truths. Instead, Alfred’s anxiety
stems from his inability to narrate the nature of an America that no longer
grounds itself in a material reality he can recognize;Alfred is unable to fit his
experience of a changing America and globe into the model he has derived
from his skewed reading of Schopenhauer, the model of my-will-versus-
Nature’s-Will, the essence of which is a tangible, material battle whose dig-
nity derives from the tragic fact that Alfred is bound to lose eventually. He is
confronting not defeat, therefore, but rather is confronting the disintegration
of his very identity,the dissolution of his ability to point to a self,rational and
inviolate, that makes Alfred Lambert unique and separates him from all the
other entities in the universe. Franzen characterizes Alfred’s panic as follows:
“The suspicion that everything was relative. That the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’
might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with.That his feeling of
righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling” (272). It
is this suspicion, Franzen continues, that “had lain in ambush” for Alfred for
years (272). Suffering from Parkinson’s and rendered obsolete by a changed
economy, Alfred no longer can hold this suspicion at bay, which is another
way of saying that the world that surrounds and penetrates Alfred’s being is
deconstructing him. He becomes visited by night terrors punctuated by hal-
lucinations of what Franzen, with characteristic edginess, calls,“a sociopath-
ic turd,a loose stool,a motormouth,”that,when told by Alfred,“‘Civilization
depends upon restraint,’” responds, “‘Civilization? Overrated’” (282, 283).
The dignity of Alfred’s stoicism is irredeemably undercut by the glibness of
this turd, which tells Alfred that it, just as much as anything else, has a right
to,“‘Life, liberty, [and] the pussuit of hotpussyness’” (283).
Unmoored from his identity as well as from Enid, who he has bullied
into submission for forty-some years,Alfred ironically discovers that the only
direction in which he may turn is to the children who implicitly have reject-
ed him. It is only to his children that Alfred can look for any promise that

the selfhood he has constructed will in some way remain a viable force in the
world after he has passed on—the reason being, as Franzen writes, “in the
end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for
but your children” (Franzen 2001, 336). In a further bit of irony, it is to Chip
specifically that Alfred looks,hoping that Chip,a Ph.D.in the humanities able
to perform what Franzen calls “that minimal burden of decoding spoken
English” (262), can help him. Alfred hopes that Chip, “his intellectual son”
(464), can answer the big why, which Franzen figures as such:
The human species was given domain over the earth and took the oppor-
tunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and gener-
ally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that
the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable
of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself. (Franzen 2001,
464)
I say this is ironic because it is Chip, much more so than his two other chil-
dren, who is most closely tied to the undermining of traditional foundations
that so unsettles Alfred.
Given Chip’s adherence to postmodern theory—we learn, for example,
that Chip’s dissertation, entitled “Doubtful It Stood,” treats castration anxi-
eties present in Tudor drama—the reader is less than shocked to hear Chip
had “been arguing with Alfred and deploring Alfred and feeling the sting of
Alfred’s disapproval for most of his life, and his personal failures and his polit-
ical views were, if anything, more extreme than ever now” (Franzen 2001,
544). Chip is a Baby Boomer par excellence—a cliché, that is—still engaged
at the turn of the century in a revolt against his parents that has its roots in
the 1960sYouth and Sexual revolutions, as well as that same era’s Continental
challenge to Western philosophy as articulated by such theorists as Jacques
Derrida and Michel Foucault. Chip, who begins the novel as a professor of
“Textual Artifacts” at a prestigious liberal-arts college, remains busy trying to
extricate the individual from various Western metanarratives in an age when
globalization has worked to do away with or assimilate the power of these
metanarratives into itself.What Chip is doing, Franzen suggests—suggests by
way of a character through whom he reduces a variety of anti-foundation-
alisms to nothing more than knee-jerk relativism—is not forwarding the
Revolution by training another generation of theory-addled young people.
Chip is carrying on an irrelevant argument against a palsied old man.
Chip begins the novel believing, as he says,“‘Your parents are not sup-
posed to be your best friends.There’s supposed to be some element of rebel-
lion. That’s how you define yourself as a person’” (Franzen 2001, 59).The
plot of The Corrections sets into motion a picaresque journey that “corrects”
this thinking. This plot sees Chip fired from his job for sleeping with an
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undergraduate, engaged in an adulterous affair while working for the radical
Warren Street Report in New York, transported to Eastern Europe where he
assists a Lithuanian business man (the man he has cuckolded) in the com-
mission of international wire fraud, and finally returned to St. Jude, where he
helps Enid care for Alfred during the latter’s final days. Over the course of
this journey, Chip begins to consider means by which to figure himself as
“free to,” as opposed to “free from,” and finds that, as Franzen states,
“Unfortunately, the theories” in which he is steeped “sounded somewhat
lame when he wasn’t lecturing to impressionable adolescents” (83). At one
point, Chip actually sells his theoretical texts, for which he’s paid nearly
$4,000, to a used-book store for $65; it is only once Chip has released him-
self from the excessive influence of, as Franzen writes,“his feminists, his for-
malists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers”
(92), that he can forgive Alfred and love him—refusing Alfred’s injunction,
which Alfred voices near the end of his life,to“‘put an end to it!’”(556).This
act, even if it depends upon a representation of postmodern thought so
reductive as to make the knowledgeable reader cringe, does figure as a step
toward the affirmation of interdependence necessary to assert human con-
nection in an age of greed.The fact that Chip can take this step—commit-
ting himself to Alfred and thereby affirming love over liberation, and engage-
ment over retreat—means he has come a long way. Chip has done nothing
short of“correct”the thinking of his Marxist ex-girlfriend,Ruthie,who after
listening to a racist harangue by Alfred over dinner once rightly accused Chip
of being “more like his father than he seemed to realize” (23). By loving his
father, Chip proves that he need not be mired in his father’s utilitarianism or
in the expressive individualism to which Chip has adhered for much of his
life.He can prove himself unlike his father by acknowledging their difference
in sameness, their individual identities as extant within a shared history, pres-
ent, and future to which they are mutually responsible, regardless of whether
his father will or can acknowledge as much. This is the “germ,” to use
Hutchinson’s designation, of what Robert N. Bellah and his associates call a
“community of memory,” a community that “carr[ies] a context of meaning
that can allow us to connect our aspirations for ourselves and those closest to
us with the aspirations of a larger whole and see our own efforts as being, in
part, contributions to a common good” (1996, 153). If this is a long journey
for Chip, it is likewise a long journey for Franzen, one that carries him
through the end of the twentieth century and deposits him squarely on the
brink of a metavision of community that could anchor the twenty-first-cen-
tury social novel which effectively challenges the hegemony of self-interest.
Let us hope, even against the apparent decline in his fiction-writing produc-

tivity of recent years, that Franzen takes advantage of this opportunity, con-
joining the personal and public in a novel that truly proves progressive.
Notes
1 In using a phrase such as “American social novel,” I voyage onto grounds that
are at best shakily defined. For this essay’s purposes, I deploy this phrase as an attempt
to categorize those works of extended fiction that attempt an overt representation of
the intersection between individual identity and the social structures that permeate
life in the United States. I have in mind American novels that position themselves at
the crossroads of the particular and the political, and in so doing either explicitly or
implicitly investigate the interdependence of both. I do wish to stress, though, that I
am not using “American social novel” as a synonym for “American social realism,”
for some of the finest U.S. social novels of the post-World War II period appear
deeply ambivalent about the mimetic power of language and language’s use as a
mimetic tool. Relevant examples include Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
2 This statement throws into relief a fundamental disagreement I have with
Stephen J. Burn, who recently published a very fine, and the very first, book-length
study of Franzen. Burn’s work relies on an opposition between Franzen’s literary
essays and Franzen’s novels, one whereby the essays provide misleading resolutions of
a tension between “postmodernism and more traditional fiction” that is “at the heart
of his [Franzen’s] works,” while this tension remains “stubbornly unresolved in each
novel” (2008, 49). I will claim that this tension remains unresolved in all of Franzen’s
writing because of Franzen’s retreat into “refuge.” My explanation follows.
3 This essay has proved quite controversial over the past decade and has touched
off two widely read responses. See Ben Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction
Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as we Know it: A
Correction,” Harper’s, October 2005, 39-52; and Cynthia Ozick, “Literary Entrails:
The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin,”
Harper’s,April 2007, 67-75.Those who wish to trace the evolution of this exchange
might also considerTomWolfe’s seminal essay about the state of American social fic-
tion. See Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the
New Social Novel,” Harper’s, November 1989, 45-56.
4 Christoph Ribbat is correct to point out that Franzen’s argument as to the
evils of “technological consumerism” relies on a sharply drawn opposition between
print and electronic media. As Ribbat states in reference to The Corrections,“things
go wrong only when paper ceases to matter.The more old-fashioned systems of rep-
resentation lead toward integrity, whereas the electronic and visual media seem to
favor disintegration . . . all that is virtual, visual, electronic seems to lead toward an
erasure of the individual” (2002, 565-66).
5 When I write of that which is “progressive,” I am not intending to use this
word in its popular U.S. political sense, that is, as a reframing of “liberal” activists
attach to the Democratic Party in order to increase said party’s market share. Instead,
I am referring to a worldview founded on the faith that a commitment to the exten-
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Ty Hawkins

sion of the fruits of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution to all people—bet-
ter medical care, improved agricultural techniques, developments in art that afford a
window onto the shifting landscape of humanness, et cetera—is a noble goal that
affirms our common humanity and fate.
6 In voicing this “no,” I am simultaneously voicing agreement with a crucial line
of argumentation embedded in Catherine Toal’s study of Franzen. Reading The
Corrections alongside the work of Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace,Toal high-
lights the manners in which Franzen at once attacks and sanctions popular discourse
on “depression” as a way to soften and obscure his turn away from progressive social
change.AsToal states,Franzen borrows from this discourse“its power to confer iden-
tity and to sanction a release from the burdens of criticism and opposition” (2003,
314), even as he goes about parodying the self-indulgence of those who rely upon
it.Toal is persuasive in linking Franzen’s ambivalence about change not only to this
discourse, but also to the writer’s anxieties relevant to white American masculinity.
In reference to The Corrections, Toal points out that “the novel, while resisting the
threats posed to masculinity by‘therapeutic’assumptions,simultaneously makes a hero
of the hapless, depleted maleness that they generate, and stigmatizes forces hostile to
it, namely the patriarchal rigour traduced by the ideologies of popular psychology”
(2003, 314). In arguing this, Toal anticipates the work of Colin Hutchinson, who
demonstrates convincingly how Franzen “embodies the figure of the compromised
and conflicted white male liberal writer” insofar as Franzen “is ultimately torn
between multiple discourses,” which leads to Franzen’s attraction to “a complete sur-
render to the power of the prevailing ideology” (2009, 191, 192, 193).
7 For readers familiar with their critiques of The Corrections, it should be clear
by this point that the works of Annesley and Hutchinson influence my own. I am
particularly sympathetic to Annesley’s contention that Franzen has not shown “a
recognition that globalization is not a brute reality . . . but a network of competing
patterns, discourses, and debates that are subject to the influence of dialogue and dis-
cussion” (2006, 126). Likewise, Hutchinson’s claim that perhaps the very defeatism
one finds in Franzen might pave the way for “transgressive collective action” is an
intriguing one (2009, 205), although in the end I am suspicious of it.The reason for
my suspicion lies in the fact that I diverge from Annesley and Hutchinson on two
crucial matters. First, I will argue that fruitful action can proceed only through an
assertion of basic humanistic precepts, in particular the Judeo-Christian call to love
universally, a claim neither man quite makes.To narrate community, in other words,
Franzen must render a metanarrative in which a community (as opposed to an
enclave) makes sense, and the only metanarrative in which community makes sense
is that of universal love (which insists on the progressive, whether it be transgressive
or not). In the absence of this metanarrative, community cannot be sustained, given
the fractious nature of human self-interest. In the absence of universal love, commu-
nity dissolves amid competing interests, which can be most readily reconciled via a
management structure that promotes fairness so as to bolster utility—exactly the
structure, more or less, that globalized consumer capitalism purports to embody.
Universal love is the ground on which Franzen might transcend what Hutchinson
calls “a baffled despair that stems from the perception of a blocked future (the aban-

donment of Utopia), a lost past (the impossibility of return), and a present that is
compromised by dependence on capitalist prosperity” (2009, 203).And as a novelist
of extraordinary talent, it is Franzen’s job to cease his handwringing and show read-
ers what universal love might look like as operative in the world.
Second, I will offer a more thoroughgoing explication of Franzen’s three nov-
els than one finds in Annesley and Hutchinson—and even, in many ways, in Burn’s
book-length effort—for I find that uncovering the potential embedded in Franzen
requires an intense study of the internal structures of the writer’s texts.
8 It is this risk that I underestimated in a previous study of the novel. See Ty
Hawkins,“‘A smile and a shoeshine’from F.Scott Fitzgerald to Jonathan Franzen,By
Way of Arthur Miller:The American Dream in The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman,
and The Corrections,” The Arthur Miller Journal 2.1 (2007): 49-64. To my thinking,
Ralph J. Poole makes the same mistake in his reading of the text, which is to say,
Poole, in celebrating Franzen’s “regionalist-based tragic realism” (2008, 281), wrong-
ly indulges Franzen’s conflation of cynicism and artistic courage.
9 This refusal remains evident in Franzen’s most recent book, a collection of
essays that focus mainly on the insular topic of the author’s adolescence.See Jonathan
Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2006).
10 This text includes a revision of “Perchance to Dream” entitled, “Why
Bother?” Franzen claims that in preparing this revision, he has “exercised my autho-
rial license and cut the essay by a quarter” so as to move away from “a tone of high
theoretical dudgeon that made me cringe a little now”(2002b,5).Although the revi-
sion is a bit “more straightforward in its movement” (2002b, 5), as Franzen charac-
terizes it, I can point to no discernible difference in the content of his argument that
affects my own.Therefore, I will not proffer a comparative analysis of the two ver-
sions. Readers interested in such a comparison should consult Toal (2003, 312-14).
11 Franzen’s comments resemble those of Valentine Cunningham, too, who
refers to the “hermeneutical suspicion” of postmodern theory as “the Grandest
Narrative of all . . . the greatest intellectual colonizer of all time” (2002, 54, 19).
12 See Burn for a compelling analysis of how The Corrections carries on an
extended dialogue with Gaddis that entails a revision of Gaddis’s artistic prerogatives,
a revision Burn reads through Harold Bloom’s theories of artistic influence (2008,
98-100).
13 Burn’s reading of this parallels my own, as he states, “That the Indians in
Franzen’s novel are invading America from the subcontinent, as opposed to the
Native Americans being plagued by invading Europeans, is presumably a historical
joke on Franzen’s part” (2008, 61-62). Franzen is showcasing the cultural chauvin-
ism at work in the mythic City on a Hill; put bluntly, this City necessarily excludes
or overrides all alternatives, as well as the complexities of its own history, by posit-
ing itself as the end of history.The apocalyptic imagination has little tolerance for
the piecework and ambiguities that characterize historical analysis.
14 My comments reflect the work of the Americanists Perry Miller and Sacvan
Bercovitch. See especially, Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge:
85
Ty Hawkins

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956); and Sacvan Bercovitch, The
American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
15 For an analysis of how market capitalism took on religious status, attracting
members of both major U.S. political parties until it became a hegemonic force dur-
ing the twentieth century’s waning decades, see Thomas Frank, One Market Under
God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New
York: Doubleday, 2000).
16 It is worth noting that Franzen’s representation of Bob Holland, as well as
Franzen’s portrayal of Sweeting-Aldren, tend strongly toward the parodic. As such,
Franzen is accentuating the opposition between radical theories of social redistribu-
tion and market fundamentalism. This serves a key narrative purpose—increasing
suspense through a reduction of complexity—but would be ridiculous, of course, if
read as argument.
17 I am thinking of Franny’s rant over lunch with her boyfriend Lane, which
occurs in “Franny” (1955). She states,“‘He’s usually a graduate student or something.
Anyway, if it’s a course in Russian Literature, say, he comes in, in his little button-
down-collar shirt and striped tie, and starts knockingTurgenev for about a half hour.
Then, when he’s finished, when he’s completely ruined Turgenev for you, he starts
talking about Stendhal or somebody he wrote his thesis for his M.A. on’” (1991, 14-
15; author’s emphasis). Compare this to Renée’s rant to Louis, during which she
derides “‘people [who] are so insecure that they never hesitate to let you know that
what they like is more original and better than what you like, or that they liked what
you like years before you liked it’” (1992, 171).
18 Susanne Rohr also notes this strategy in her work on The Corrections.As she
argues,“this withdrawal into the confines of family life and family matters could cer-
tainly be interpreted as a reaction to the threat of globalization. The novel . . .
explores the manifold confusing and menacing effects of globalization, counterbal-
ancing this disturbing panorama by narrowing the focus of observation to familial
and interpersonal relations. This retreat into small worlds, however, appears almost
impossible as the effects of globalization find their way into the closest social rela-
tions” (2004, 102).
19 As I have argued elsewhere, on an ideological level the novel’s other three
main characters function as poles against which Alfred and Chip define themselves,
a factor of The Corrections to which only Burn, among Franzen’s critics, appears
attuned (2008, 90). Gary is but a materialist who conjoins popular rhetorics of ther-
apy to Alfred’s utilitarian outlook—making for a kind of expressive utilitarianism that
softens Alfred’s outlook solely on a rhetorical level—while Denise assimilates popu-
lar deconstructions of gender and sexual norms into a worldview that struggles to
transcend a mechanistic understanding of living. (In this, Denise appears to be a
reprisal of Strong Motion’s Renée Seitchek).Franzen uses these characters to highlight
the limits of anti-foundationalisms that fail to tether themselves to social engagement
founded on the hope for a community committed to humane, loving relations
between all of its members. As for Enid, she is a somewhat sympathetic character
who more often than not resigns herself to Alfred’s abuse, thereby highlighting the

violence at work beneath his outwardly civil manner, as well as the limits of civility
itself. See Hawkins,“‘A Smile and a Shoeshine.’”
Works Cited
Annesley, James. 2006. “Market Corrections: Jonathan Franzen and the ‘Novel of
Globalization.’” Journal of Modern Literature 29.2: 111-28.
Bellah, Robert N. 1996. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American
Life. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London:
Continuum.
Cunningham,Valentine. 2002. Reading After Theory. Malden, MA: Oxford University
Press.
Franzen, Jonathan. 1988. The Twenty-Seventh City. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
———. 1992. Strong Motion. NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. 1996. “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write
Novels.” Harper’s,April.
———. 2001. The Corrections. NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. 2002a.“Mr. Difficult.” In How to Be Alone: Essays. NewYork: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
———. 2002b.“A Word About This Book.” In How to Be Alone: Essays. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gardner, John. 2000. On Moral Fiction. NewYork: Basic Books.
Hutchinson, Colin. 2009. “Jonathan Franzen and the Politics of Disengagement.”
Critique 50.2: 191-205.
Lawrence, D.H. 1977. Studies in Classic American Literature. NewYork: Penguin.
Poole, Ralph J. 2008. “Serving the Fruitcake, or Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern
Poetics.” Midwest Quarterly 49.3: 263-83.
Ribbat, Christoph. 2002.“Handling the Media, Surviving The Corrections: Jonathan
Franzen and the Fate of the Author.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 47.4: 555-
66.
Rohr, Susanne. 2004. “‘The Tyranny of the Probable’—Crackpot Realism and
Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49.1: 91-
105.
Salinger, J.D. 1991. “Franny.” In Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2006. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for ourTime. NewYork:
Penguin.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1997. “Translator’s Preface.” In Of Grammatology, by
Jacques Derrida. Corrected ed. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Toal, Catherine. 2003.“Corrections: Contemporary American melancholy.” Journal of
European Studies 33.3/4: 305-22.
87
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