The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, with Rob Harvilla

Zero to Well-Read

In celebration of The Corrections' 25th anniversary, hosts Jeff O'Neill and Rebecca Shinsky welcome Rob Harvilla to discuss Jonathan Franzen

Key takeaways

• The Corrections is a defining literary work of the late '90s, capturing the anxieties of a generation on the cusp of the 21st century.

Main topics

• The Corrections as a cultural artifact of the late '90s
• Jonathan Franzen's literary reputation and the Oprah controversy

Notable quotes

"This is a book about corrections—of the body, the mind, the family, the nation. And yet it's also about how we can never truly correct anything."

Conclusion

The Corrections remains a vital, underappreciated masterpiece of Ameri

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This episode of Zero to Well-Read is sponsored by Speaker 2 (0:02) Thriftbooks.com. Today's book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. 25-year anniversary. We get to give ourselves permission to go back and take a look at what The Corrections was, what it is, and this relates to what edition I would recommend getting here. There were so many copies printed that first editions aren't worth a whole lot. Unfortunately for me, I thought maybe mine was worth something, but there's so many. And you can get... a first edition in the aftermarket for not very much money, but I think the one you want, and you're going to know why if you don't, but you will after listening to this episode, you want the hardcover that has the Oprah's Book Club sticker on it, the January 2001 FSG. Right now, I'm seeing it for $6.69 in very good condition from thriftbooks.com. That is a little piece of 21st century literary lore. Okay, on to the show. Speaker 1 (0:57) We've been waiting for the moment to announce our next Zero to Well-Read guided read-along, and friends, the time has come. I'm so excited to share with you that we're going to be reading John Steinbeck's magisterial novel, East of Eden, in anticipation of the Netflix miniseries that's coming out on October 1st. Guided read-alongs are available exclusively to members of our Office Hours Patreon, and they include a pre-reading guide, an exclusive bonus episode to help you get into the reading, and a private chat space for talking with participants and us. as you move through the novel. Head over to patreon.com slash zero to well read to join and you'll get two months free with an annual membership. That's patreon.com slash zero to well read. You can also find the link in the show notes. We are so excited to read this one with you. Thanks as always for listening and rocking with Zero to Well Read. Speaker 2 (1:50) Welcome to Zero to Well-Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I am Jeff O'Neill. Speaker 1 (1:56) And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And this week, we are putting the fun in dysfunctional as we revisit Jonathan Franzen's breakout novel, The Corrections, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. And we are delighted to have a special guest joining us. Rob Harvilla is the host of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, one of my favorite podcasts, and an author of... a book by the same name. Rob, thanks so much for being here. Speaker 3 (2:22) Thank you for having me. I don't want to freak out on you guys and all relaxed about this, but I'm having, it's like I'm listening to my favorite podcast, but the people are talking to me now. Like I appear to also be part of it and I don't know if it's real. Speaker 2 (2:38) I'm having a very surreal Speaker 3 (2:39) parasocial experience that I'm going to work through myself. This is the last I'm going to say about it, but I just want you to know this whole thing is very weird for me. Also, I'm honored to be here. Does Speaker 1 (2:49) it make it better or worse for you that the feeling is mutual? Like, can we just put the social into parasocial? Speaker 3 (2:55) Let's do that. Let's be awkward together. As we often are in the Midwest. Yes. Okay. That's wonderful. I do feel better. I do feel better knowing I weird you out as much as you weird me out. That's great. That's great for all of Speaker 2 (3:07) us. I'm not Speaker 3 (3:07) sure Speaker 1 (3:07) I would put it that way, but let's go with it. It seems appropriate. Speaker 2 (3:10) Okay. Okay. And one of the great subjects of this book is how to put your Midwestern-ness aside, if at all possible. And I think in that little 90-second microtransaction, we are acting out the promise and impossibility of such an endeavor. That's right. It can never be done. And so we were kicking around an episode to do with you and the corrections came up. We are going to lean or I'm going to lean a little bit on your music expertise, especially as it appears in this book and in the 90s, because this is an exceptional 90s book. I think we get into how it's a 90s book on the cusp of written in the 90s, really, but on the cusp of 9-11 comes out. In that year of 2000, it comes out in June, and then it's around that. It also is written up until the stock market crash in like 1990 into 2000. It's very much about that. It's about corrections of all kinds. But I think as I was reading it and looking over my notes today, I was like, oh my God, I don't know, Rob, we could have picked. a better book. Is there a more 90s book than this? We'll get to our own experience of it. Thank you so much for joining us. Check out his pod and his book. We'll shout it out again, link in the show notes there. Those show notes can be found at patreon.com slash jewel to all red or in your podcast. catcher of choice. You can join our membership options, guided read-alongs. We have one up for the Odyssey. We're Speaker 1 (4:31) going to be doing East of Eden, I think in October. As we are recording this, we're waiting for Netflix to announce when they're going to drop the series with Florence Pugh, but we're going to time the read-along to go with that. So hopefully by the time y'all are hearing this in early September, we have that date and we're all working towards it. But really excited to do some Steinbeck together. Speaker 2 (4:49) Steinbeck, very important to Jonathan Franz. And one of my miscellaneous notes here is about Steinbeck. You can always shoot us an email, zero to well read at bookriot.com. I don't care what episode you're listening to. You could be listening to the original Gatsby one. You could be listening to this one. One just came out. We respond to those. Some of them cover in a mailbag. But really, we want to hear what you think about the shows we do. The pods are always there. The books are there. And the pods are always there for you. So we think of this as not a progression, right? This is a holistic experience that's happening all the time. This book for us, Rebecca, is a kind of totem of a moment in literary history. Early internet. Oprah's book club and the figure of the great white male novelist as something that the culture maybe wants to go out and hate Ahab, right? Go out and skewer and watch it bleed in the ocean. The unfortunate thing for that endeavor is this book rips, Rebecca. So here we are. Speaker 1 (5:49) I realized on this reread that I think I've been chasing this high for 25 years. This is just an incredible work of literary fiction. Let me tell you what it's about before I have a full-blown existential crisis that this book, I've been like staving it off all week, thanks to Jonathan Franzen. So we've got, it's Speaker 2 (6:08) a Speaker 1 (6:08) family story. It's a big, messy, get the gang back together family story, which one of our favorite tropes. But Enid Lambert, she is done. She's done her time. She's been with her husband, Alfred, for 50 years. He has just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. And all that Enid wants is one last Christmas with all of her kids, three grown kids and some of the grandkids, back in the family home in St. Jude, somewhere in the Midwest. It's meaningful that the state is never given to us. That's not too much to ask, right? But it is way easier said than done because everybody's a disaster. The oldest, Gary, is as bad at marriage as he is good at making money. Chip is the classic middle child. He is a professor of media studies, sociology, something like that, who has been fired from his job for sleeping with a student. And now he might or might not be helping a Lithuanian diplomat defraud American investors. And Denise is a superstar chef. She's the youngest in the family at 32. And she is flailing also after failed affairs with both her boss and her boss's wife. So this is the setting that these people come into. Enid wants Alfred to work on his attitude. The kids just want their mom to accept reality about the situation. And all Alfred wants is to be left alone. This is such a sharp. painfully funny satire about a family falling apart. Franzen takes us from cozy Midwestern suburbs to New York to Philly to Eastern Europe and to one incredibly disastrous cruise on the high seas while he's skewering everything from finance to foodie culture to the so-called greatest generation. How'd I do? Speaker 2 (7:51) You did great, because it's that and also not that at all at the same time as we'll get into. I want to mix this up a little bit, because I want to get Rob into the mix a little bit earlier than our normal sort of agenda would be. Because, Rob, you're a book reader. You don't work in books. You work in media. You were a longtime music critic, Deadspin, Village Voice, a bunch of places, thinking about culture. I'd be curious, up until sort of we approach you about writing. talking to us about the corrections. What was your sense of the corrections as a cultural document, your own reading experience of it? Be the nerd on the street for us and report about what the people have been thinking about the corrections for the last 25 years. Speaker 3 (8:30) Right, because I defer totally to your knowledge as like hardcore book people, hardcore readers, right? I came up, I just wanted to work for Rolling Stone and I never did, but it's fine. But I'm just a rock critic, right? And I try to, I'm just a humble rock critic, you know, just a noble Midwestern profession. It's just really not. And so I was trying to think of how I heard about the corrections because I had the sense that it crossed some sort of threshold where even normie, non-reader, hardcore reader people knew about it. My best guess is Spin Magazine. Like I can just picture like a little 200 word blurb in Spin Magazine saying, this is the novel to read, you know, in 2001, if you want to appear to be well-read, you know, as a 20 something like pavement fan or whatever. And I don't know, I don't, I think that was pre-Oprah. Like, I don't know how Oprah works in the timeline of the exposure that this book gets, but I would be really curious to know how I heard about it because I don't feel like I was hearing about many like new. great literary works, right? Like, I went to college in Ohio. I did this sort of stereotypical thing. Like, I read White Noise by Don DeLillo, and I get really into him, right? And so I'm aware, you know, of, you know, the heavy hitters in the early 2000s, like David Foster Wallace or John, you know, all the Jonathans, you know, but something, the many Jonathans, but something about this book. It announced itself as the book. And I do feel like it was pre-Oprah. The fact that I heard about it indicates to me that it was penetrating beyond the hardcore literary people. Speaker 2 (10:13) I think that's right, Rebecca, because our sense of it now, and I think it was true then, is Oprah's not really discovering gems necessarily, right? She might be going back if something's older. But the publicity team and the, you know... The stringers I sent for Book Club are paying attention to what publicists and the publishing industry is putting out. So I'm guessing the same signals that the Richter scale editors it's been were picking up on then got fed to Oprah and then happened a little bit later. Because this was even I have my first edition here. Can I show it off to you guys here? It's not a first printing because it has the National Book Award winner sticker on it. So it must have happened later. But the back, it has this huge list of pre-release quotes. From all the people. So, Rob, what I'm saying is like it was in the water, right? People knew this was going to be a big book. And the Oprah was really like lighter fluid on the bonfire. I think this would have been a big book if Oprah never had heard of it. But that was a bonfire for its sales, his reputation. And it as, you know, a site of contestation of something, which I still can't quite parse what that is. We're going to get this to in a second. Rebecca, let's do our first exposure to then we'll get into the important stuff. Why don't you go next? Speaker 1 (11:27) This episode is sponsored by Vinted. I am very much a seasonal closet cleaner. If it's not sparking joy, I am getting rid of it. And this time of year, I always discover clothes that I genuinely like and I was excited about when I bought them, but that I never actually wear. There's a certain point where I've got to accept reality and admit that having them take up space in my closet isn't doing anybody any good. And that's where Vinted comes in. 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Speaker 2 (12:47) Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyum, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 1 (13:19) I found this on a Barnes & Noble paperback favorites table probably 2002, 2003. When it came out, I was a freshman in college, so I would have been like 19 or 20 when I read this. And I remember it rocking my world. It's now from my mid-40s. It's kind of shocking to be like, wow, how did my 19-year-old self connect Speaker 2 (13:40) with this? Do Speaker 1 (13:40) you remember liking it? Yeah. Do Speaker 2 (13:41) you remember Speaker 1 (13:41) liking it? Speaker 2 (13:42) I Speaker 1 (13:42) do. And I remember having that like frisson of, oh, this is great writing, like that you just know you're in the presence of great art. But from the mid 40s, I'm like, I don't know what my 19 year old self connected to in this book other than that, because it feels like the zone that the three of us are in now in life is exactly who Jonathan Franzen was pitching to. And he was about this age. He was in his mid 40s when the book came out. So, yeah, I was 19. And that experience remains a mystery to me. That's a good Speaker 2 (14:13) observation, Rebecca, that as a younger person, and Rob, I'll throw it to you after this, like the set piece sort of stuff that's like dizzying, like about what the hamsters were doing overnight or the talking turds or, you know, being a web con man and Vilnius, right, are pleasurable in itself. But the thing that hit me this time is like the emotional dynamic, the psychosexual weirdness that's going on. What was your first exposure as a reader, Rob? Do you remember liking the book, saying, I guess this is what the cool kids are reading? What was your own memory of your first experience, and when was it? Speaker 3 (14:45) It was a cool kids thing. I think it was in 2001 or 2002. I think it was pretty close to publication. I read it on a cruise ship, in part, which I'm very excited by. I went on a cruise with my then-girlfriend. I remember so clearly sitting on the sundeck. reading about the racist turd, you know, menacing Alfred before he falls off the cruise ship. And I also remember walking onto the cruise ship with my then girlfriend and being like, you know, there's this guy, David Foster Wallace. And he wrote, Speaker 2 (15:16) wow, Speaker 3 (15:17) called a supposedly Speaker 2 (15:18) fun thing. Speaker 3 (15:18) You were that guy, Rob? I was that guy. And she just looked at me and was like, I don't care about that at all. You know, and then we did not get married. And I think that was better for us. Speaker 1 (15:28) Is it because of that? Speaker 3 (15:30) It probably was. I think that was, I also checked my Yahoo fantasy baseball lineup on the cruise and I probably should not have done that. That was a tactic. Oh, Mike. I was in my early 20s, all right? You Speaker 1 (15:41) were in your early 20s. It happens. We should take... Speaker 3 (15:46) Go ahead. Speaker 1 (15:47) We should take a page from Bill Simmons' book over at The Ringer and do a moment for, is this apex mountain for cruises in literature? Like, you have Jonathan Franzen, you have that David Foster Wallace piece, and then the only other entry I can think of is Gary Steingart's essay from a couple years ago about going on the world's biggest cruise ship. If you have not experienced this piece of writing, Rob, it's, like, elite. And he spends the whole time wearing a t-shirt that says, Daddy's Little Meatball. Speaker 3 (16:15) I think this is Apex Mountain. As an ambassador of the ringer, I anoint this as Apex Mountain. Speaker 2 (16:23) You can by proxy, you know, authorize the usage of that particular way. And we're circling around it, Rob. Do you remember your own reading experience of it other than name checking David Foster Wallace to your paramour there? Do you remember liking the book, getting it? Did you see your own Midwestern self in it? Speaker 3 (16:40) You know who really disturbed me? I remember liking it. I remember thinking it was cool and thinking it was important. The blurb on my front cover. that I have now, it says serious fiction. I think this is a reminder of why we read serious fiction. And I think that phrase stuck with me. Like, this is important stuff. Again, the same as Don DeLillo, right? Like, I don't know what the airport books of 2001 were, but I knew that this was not that. I knew I was sitting on the sun deck on the cruise thinking, I am reading an important book. Speaker 1 (17:15) Yes. Speaker 3 (17:15) will resonate. I'm in the presence Speaker 1 (17:16) of art. Speaker 3 (17:17) Exactly. And the other people on this cruise are in the presence of me being in the presence of art. Yes. Speaker 2 (17:24) That's right. And how lucky for them. Speaker 3 (17:26) They were very fortunate to be anywhere near me. I can assure you of that. You know who freaked me out when I was in my 20s? Gary. Gary's whole thing freaked me out because just the way... The mixed grill thing is somehow what really stuck with me, that he keeps making mixed grill and his family doesn't give a shit. And they're like, oh boy, mixed grill, dad. Like the way, the subplot there, the most brutal part of the book then and now, I guess for different reasons, is him trying to get his kids or at least Jonah home for Christmas and his wife, you know, boiling. Like that really broke my heart. But I remember being so disturbed. But Gary's whole thing and being like, is that what parenthood is like? Like your wife turns your children and you're just stuck in the garage, like doing your little activities. Like I remember that really disturbed me. I love, this is the tiniest possible thing. I love that Denise says, yeah, instead of yes. Y-U-H, yuh. She takes a walk and she comes back and she's like, that was a long walk. She says, yuh. I have been saying yuh in email correspondence for 25 years because of Denise. I don't think it means anything, but the word yuh. really stuck with me. It left a mark. It left a mark. It's really Speaker 2 (18:46) specific. It's very specific. And it's trying to capture something that's hard to articulate, which is why we do fiction things, right? Like, this is why we do this stuff. Speaker 1 (18:54) Yeah, Speaker 2 (18:54) there's, like, Speaker 1 (18:54) one other word choice in here that I had farther down in the notes is the mom. Instead of saying mature, she says mature, which, like, I know Midwestern women who say this, but Franzen spells it M-A-T-O-O-R. And it's the only, like, weird spelling, weird choice he makes in the whole book. But every time she says it, I'm like, it. like hits me right in the gut of, oh God, I know like the judgment coming off of this woman. I hoped you'd be a little bit more mature by now. To take it back to the serious fiction thing. I know before we were Speaker 2 (19:25) so anxious to talk about our own particular things, which we want to do. But Rebecca, let's do a, okay. Rob, Rob knew it was important. Maybe that's all we need to really say, honestly, for this. But talk us through where it came out, what's happened since, what's been the long life of the corrections by Jonathan. When it came Speaker 1 (19:42) out in 2001, one of the blurbs is this is the first great book of the 21st century. So it lands with that. Back cover covered in blurbs, and that's a big one. It won the National Book Award. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Penn Faulkner that year. Richard Russo won the Pulitzer for Empire Falls instead. And I'm not sure how I feel about that decision 25 years later. That's Speaker 2 (20:07) a great nugget, Rebecca. I didn't think to go who won the Pulitzer. I think there's a way of reading the corrections as being. a correction to the way Richard Russo is writing about these old industrial towns in the Northeast, right? Like it's sort of, you know, that that's the end of something. And Franzen sees that as part of a continuum of something. Yes, these people working in these paper mills are getting fired and retiring and dying, but they have children and they're the great continuity of life, right? is that life continues even beyond this thing. And Franzen thinking of a way, this is not the end. We're not going to sort of bury our heads in the sand and be sad forever. Other things will happen. And Russo's a very funny writer, but Franzen's response to this sort of end of something is to find the ridiculous and find the satire and then suggest there is a futurity to these. empire fallings. Like the ruins remain. What are we going to do in the ruins? And I've said this about Pynchon, which is going to be a specter that haunts the whole thing, is that the postmodern and maybe post-postmodern is the jester dancing through the ruins and finding something to talk about and finding something to make art out of. I think it's a fascinating twin. And I'm so glad you found that nugget there. It's Speaker 1 (21:21) such an interesting moment in great American fiction by older white guys. And it has endured. This is number five on the New York Times list of the best books of the century so far. We were talking about the Oprah of it all. But just for folks who don't know, Oprah selected this for her book club in 2001. And then there was a huge... deal because Jonathan Franzen declined to appear on her show. And then in book events he was doing at bookstores right after he declined, people asked him questions about it that he made the mistake of answering in good faith. And those quotes got taken out of context and circulated around the early internet. Like, admittedly, they don't sound great. Like, he didn't really think that going on Oprah was in line with the, quote, high art literary tradition. He was concerned that the Oprah sticker on the book was going to turn off male readers. He talked about some of her past picks as being schmaltzy and one dimensional, which like by 2001, Oprah had picked some Toni Morrison's and some Faulkner's, but she had also picked some schmaltzy one dimensional books. So like, he's kind of. The real sin was that he said the quiet thing out loud. They did ultimately resolve things. She selected his 2010 novel, Freedom, for her book club. He went on the show. They sort of, you know, like, kissed and made up a little bit. But that's a... clip worth revisiting if you're interested. And it sold really well for this kind of literary fiction. More than 400,000 copies in the first year split between the regular version and the Oprah version. Huge numbers. Estimated at more than 1.6 million copies by 2018. So we're probably close to 2 million in circulation now. And it really, this is the book that established him as a serious player, which... The Oprah controversy becomes a symbol again in 2010 when Freedom came out and the New York Times did two reviews of it, which is very rare. You only get two reviews in the New York Times if you are... top-level elite. And there were women writers, led namely by Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, who were really upset basically about the institutional sexism that exists in book coverage. But Jonathan Franzen became a pretty convenient scapegoat for it. And they started what became known as Franzenfreude, where it was like, fuck this guy, because these institutions are giving all of the attention to literary men. Women's books should be reviewed, too. And of course they should. Whether Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult are writing the kinds of books that merit two reviews in The New York Times is a different question. And Franzen at this point was already like completely out of the Internet game. I think he learned his lesson the first time around. But he has like Vox has an explainer about the many scandals of Jonathan Franzen. Like he just is a lightning rod and he's not trying to be. Speaker 2 (24:12) I think that is so fast. I remember this happening at the time. And I think, Rob, you and I may be exactly the same age. I was like 23, my first year or two in grad school when this is coming out, living in New York. And being a little, but being both sympathetic and not to this critique because the work itself. Speaker 2 (24:33) doesn't really fall into what they're talking about. You know, the Weiner-Picot of the world. Like he's doing something that's in a tradition of, you know, the DeLillos, the David Foster Wallaces, and certainly the, you know, the people that would come a little bit after and later. This is one where I think everyone is sort of right. I guess this is where I've come down to in 20 years of thinking about this. I think Oprah was wise to pick him. I think it was brave of her to pick him. I think he probably should have been allowed to be like, that's not for me. Maybe the reasons he thought it wasn't for me were wrongheaded. I think in hindsight, they really were. But I'm also glad that they came together for freedom later, because even as he was continuing to do publicity for this book, I watched an interview he did on Charlie Rose, where he's very sort of sheepish and feels bad about how he deployed whatever he was going to say about his concern about Oprah, not sure if that's the right fit. I think he didn't know what he was talking about. And Oprah was very graceful in not really disinviting him, just sort of saying, let's not do this. And they both come back together. And I think they came from a very similar place. But a fascinating tempest, not really in a teapot. I don't want to minimize it because it was about something. But it was a weird lightning rod for this lightning to strike. I think the lightning needed to strike somewhere to talk about bias and talk about inclusion. But Franzen was an unfortunate, I think, lightning rod at this particular moment. Because part of the story here, Rebecca, is he was not Jonathan Franzen when this book came out. Like he had two books. That's where we're Speaker 1 (25:57) going Speaker 2 (25:57) to get into who wrote it. Rob is a real ghoul we're going to talk about who needs to read all of the books in order. So maybe Rob, I'm Speaker 1 (26:03) going Speaker 2 (26:03) to throw it to you here in a second. Because he had written these two books before. Rob, what were those books like? What was your experience? I have not read those. I have not read Purity. I have read Crossroads and I read Freedom. So just to get my own bona fides or lack thereof on the table. But you're a real one, Rob. What is your sense of the first two books that came before Corrections? Because this book is a correction of his own artistic sensibility, which is like a meta thing to say. But is that your own experience of reading these books, Rob, up to Speaker 3 (26:32) and including Speaker 2 (26:33) the Speaker 3 (26:33) Corrections? I need you to talk me out of this thing that I'm doing where I decide to read an author. Because that's what I do with music, right? Like, it makes sense because you can do that. Even like the Rolling Stones catalog, you can listen to chronologically while you do the dishes or whatever. Like, that's an attainable goal. But for me to be like, I need to read all the Jonathan, I need to read all the Percival Everett's, you know, like just starting from the beginning, you're reading several, you know, or several dozen books, you know, that are not so much part of the public narrative before you get to the book that's part of it. It's an insane thing to do. I don't know if a real one is the way I would describe this impulse I have. You started author's work from the beginning. I wish I didn't do this, but I am glad that I did it in this case. I've indeed read the first two Jonathan Franzen books. I don't think it's even worth saying, like, The Corrections is a huge upgrade. Nobody is going to try and talk you in to his earlier stuff. He's not the Velvet Underground, right? Like, they're both, both these books. Speaker 3 (27:38) The rock-credit jokes, that's all I got. The 27th City and Strong Motion, these are both 500-plus page, very Don DeLillo feeling, like dysfunctional families beset by some larger conspiracy. There's a lot of tension in it as well, right? The 27th City, the plots of the 27th City... is that it's St. Louis. It's actually St. Louis, Missouri. There's no St. Jude like fake Midwest. It's St. Louis, Missouri. And the new police chief is an Indian woman. She's from Bombay. And she starts a grand conspiracy where Indian people take over St. Louis. like the institutions of Salem. It's wild. It's like a take, like all the bad guys are Indian and all the Indians are bad guys. And it's like, take it or leave it. You don't want to be a woman in this book either while we're on this subject. Like this is a very, Speaker 2 (28:30) this Speaker 3 (28:31) is, but it's fascinating. But the problem with it is, is the conspiracy overwhelms the family. And like the characters, you don't really get a sense of the characters and there's like a cruelty. There's like a chess piece. moving sort of cruelty, especially to the edge, right? Like I approached the corrections. I understood it was a novel about a family unraveling, but like, I don't like stories about families unraveling. Like I don't, the blue. and the tragedy of it, I'm not so into. But, you know, in the 27th city, like the end of that book is really like terrible things start happening to everyone because the book is over. And that's what happens in a book like this. There's an intensity and a bleakness to that one. Strong motion is set in Boston. There's an evil petrochemical company causing earthquakes. They're digging a huge hole into the earth and putting toxic waste into it. Forgive me, but an evil corporation is fucking the earth. Speaker 2 (29:28) That's the plot of Strong Motion. Speaker 3 (29:30) And again, Speaker 2 (29:31) there's dysfunctional family Speaker 3 (29:32) dynamics, but they're squashed by an anti-abortion subplot. There's all this stuff. There's all this societal stuff. And so I think what happens with the corrections, part of what makes it such a huge upgrade, is that the family takes the foreground. When you get in the corrections to the correct all thing, to the drug, when I was reading, even on rereading, I had forgotten almost everything. I was like, oh, here we go. Here's the conspiracy that's now going to take over and the rest of this book is going to be about this wonder drug that doesn't work. But he does that scene, basically, and then pushes that aside because he's more interested in the family, like the family dynamics. and the sympathy that he has for these characters and how lovingly they're drawn, even when there are elements of cruelty, like Gary. Gary just really upsets me. It's very upsetting. Gary is really Speaker 1 (30:27) upsetting. Speaker 3 (30:28) He is very, very upsetting. And so he just got them mixed right with the corrections. between like the political and the personal and he sort of realized that he was far better at or more interested in or whatever the personal you know and there's lots of outside forces on this family but you never lose sight of the family and you never treat the family like they're just chess pieces you know are just cardboard cutouts to be blown away by a strong wind you Speaker 2 (30:58) know what i mean yeah Speaker 3 (31:00) I think, Rebecca, Speaker 2 (31:01) that's as Midwesterners ourselves, we can attest to, there is a dynamic at the core of a certain kind of Midwestern family that we're not going to totalize. But generally, the disaster is in the house. The disaster is the family dynamic. We do not need the corporation. And nobody's talking Speaker 1 (31:17) about it. So it's more disastrous than it has to Speaker 2 (31:19) be. Speaker 1 (31:19) And Speaker 2 (31:19) the silence of it is worthy of epic literary treatment. I think that's the insight that he had is this. There is something to be said here. And I'm going to, we're going to do read-alikes later, but the interior life of a person, you know, Gertrude Stein and Henry James a hundred years ago, like that, or Virginia Woolf and Jacob's Reuben before that a little bit is like, that is the stuff of serious work. And the written word, the novel is particularly, maybe uniquely able to get inside these people's heads and to trace the connections between them and the awkwardness and the silences between them. And I do not need this grand overarching sort of the I don't need a toxic airborne event to do that in the form of white noise. I do not need, in the form of Steinbeck, I do not need the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl. It's the Dust Bowl of the heart that he's trying to figure out for us in a lot of different ways. Rebecca, he is a Midwesterner. Can you take this? Because you are a fellow St. Louisian. What do you say? I'm Speaker 3 (32:25) not. Speaker 2 (32:26) I'm kidding. We're from the Midwest. Let's get our Midwest bona fides on the table before we connect, because I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, which is not a suburb of Kansas City. It's like a 30 minute drive from Kansas City. So it's a satellite. It's a college town. And that's where I grew up. Rebecca, where did you what is your hometown situation? I grew up in the Speaker 1 (32:45) suburbs outside Kansas City. And because Kansas City is weird in the way it is, I was in a suburb on the Kansas side, but it's a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. Speaker 2 (32:54) So, Speaker 1 (32:55) deeply Midwestern. My husband grew up in St. Louis. There are some jokes and references to specific neighborhoods of St. Louis. It's like, it was a fancy house in Ledoux. And I was like, I know exactly what that means. Speaker 2 (33:09) Rob, how about you? Yeah. I Speaker 3 (33:11) was born in Cleveland. I spent most of my first 10 years in St. Louis, in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Shout out, Eureka, Missouri. I kept waiting for the first book. 27th City to mention Eureka. And finally it did. It was like, Speaker 2 (33:24) yes, that's where they like stored the bomb parts or something. I was so excited. I Speaker 3 (33:29) grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and Eureka, Missouri. It was like a John Cougar Mellencamp song. It was pretty awesome. Then I moved to Cleveland. I am an Ohioan at heart. Born in Cleveland, raised in the Cleveland suburbs mostly. I'm living in Columbus now. Are we allowing Ohio into the Midwest? Is that just to clarify? Yeah, of course. That's Speaker 2 (33:50) a Speaker 3 (33:50) relief to me. I've been explaining away my bizarre behavior as Midwestern my entire life. So I would have to construct an entirely new excuse now if I got kicked out of the Midwest. Speaker 1 (34:01) It's a great moment of validation for me because I've been telling Jeff for years that Ohio counts spiritually as the Midwest. And so I'm just really glad that you're here to... say that I'm right on the record. Jonathan Franzen, also from a suburb of St. Louis, born there. He was born in Illinois in 1965. So really interestingly, on the cusp right between Gen X and the Baby Boomers, depending on what day you Google it, he can fall into either one. Then his family moves to a pretty tony suburb of St. Louis, spends the rest of his young adult life living there. graduated from Swarthmore in 1981 with a degree in German, speaks fluent German, and somehow that just seems really right to me that Jonathan Franzen speaks fluent German. Got married pretty young, 1982, fresh out of college, moved to Boston with his wife. And he worked at Harvard in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where he co-authored a couple dozen papers. Which is something a Speaker 2 (34:59) character in a Jonathan Franzen novel would do, which is so weird to study German and Swarthmore and write these. It's so weird, Rebecca. Speaker 1 (35:07) Yeah. And probably informs some of the earth-fucking of Strong Motion that Rob's talking about. Yes, that makes a lot of Speaker 3 (35:15) sense. Speaker 1 (35:16) Yeah, 27th City comes out in 1987. The second novel, Strong Motion, was 1992. And then it's Speaker 2 (35:23) a Speaker 1 (35:23) nine-year gap before The Correction. So he had a lot of time to mature as a writer before 2001. But started contributing to The New Yorker in 94, was making a name for himself sort of on that literary scene and in the tradition of Don DeLillo, as we've talked about. So strong Midwestern roots, but also this interest in what's happening overseas and in being sort of a worldly kind of guy, which was interesting and not available to a lot of people in their early 20s and the early 80s. Speaker 2 (35:57) One point of order. I think he was born in 1959 in Illinois. Oh, Speaker 1 (36:01) really? Speaker 2 (36:01) Correction. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. I had the late 50s. The reason it stuck in