The Corrections

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, tells the story of the Lambert family from each member's perspective. Enid, the mother, wants everyone to get together for one last Christmas in St. Jude, and she wants everyone to be optimistic. This is troublesome, because Alfred, the father, has lost more and more of his lucidity to Parkinson's and dementia. Their firstborn, Gary, suffers from depression and a wife who can't stand his parents, while Chip, the second son, flies off to Eastern Europe to work for a would-be warlord, and youngest-child Denise can't decide who she is and what she really wants, and ends up losing her job because of it.

Life according to The Corrections is that in order to survive, you need something desperately -- but nobody will give it to you, because for them to survive, they desperately need to do the opposite of what you need. It's possible for you to fix the problem yourself, but that would require you to do the one thing you will never do, the one thing that goes against all your principles, the one thing that you can't do because you'd rather die. So really, it's impossible. So really, we are all in desperate need of something that we will never get. Life in the Lambert family also revolves around fixing mistakes. Not mistakes that need fixing at that moment -- but past mistakes. The novel explores how people live their lives as a correction of other people's lives, or as corrections of decisions made in their previous lives.

In The Corrections, Franzen portrays communication as ulitmately impossible and human relationships as ultimately nonexistent. What people talk to each other about, what people express to each other, is not what they really need. Because of this, nobody actually communicates themselves to anybody else, nobody really knows anybody else, nobody truly understands each other. Relationships are just people masking their desires and interacting with other masks. Families are people holding ten-foot poles, sliding and banging them against other people's ten-foot poles in an attempt to learn about the person on the other end of it. But even if people could bring themselves to express themselves, to ask for what they need most, it would still not help the state of things, because nobody can help anybody else. We are all ultimately alone.

Also depressing is the characters' complete lack of ethics. Alfred thinks he's ethical -- but in reality, he's just guilt-ridden and Puritan. Once, Denise thinks to herself that she's probably doing something wrong, but then she keeps doing it. Without thinking about it or contemplating the ethics of the situation, the other family members continually do and say selfish things that often hurt each other. Franzen himself seems to agree that a lack of ethics is depressing as well as, well, unethical -- most of the time when a character does something wrong, he is actually screwing himself over.

Despite it's darknesses, The Corrections is also really funny at times. The situations that some people get themselves into and the offhand comments that a few of them make are ridiculous, hilarious. But sometimes the comic relief becomes too much -- for example, when there are pages of it in the middle of an especially dramatic, intriguing section. Reading it for a second time, though, would probably fix this problem since the reader could take the time to enjoy the comedy. Other parts that tempt the reader to skip pages include long-winded, confusing accounts of business or financial dealings. However, these passages also show Franzen's breadth.

Franzen shows off impressive knowledge of biotechnology, culinary arts, businesses, finances, high-end clothes, physics, and rail lines. Just the research that all this must have taken is incredible.

The Corrections is 576 pages of voluptious, casual, rambling prose -- at times intriguing, frustrating, touching, and humorous. I recommend it.

"Day and Night"

The charm in Pixar's very original short, "Day and Night," comes from its animation, cleverness and truth. The two characters (Day and Night) are 2-D outlines whose bodies display part of a landscape. When they move around, different parts of the landscape are revealed, as if the audience was scanning a view with a person-shaped telescope. These two characters fight and wrestle when they first meet, jealous of the landscape that the other has within, until they begin to appreciate the good things they see in the other.

It's at this point that they come across a radio broadcast of an Einstein quote about fear of the unknown. In th end, Day experiences a sunset while Night experiences a sunrise -- revealing that what each of them originally feared and disliked in the other is actually part of them, too. "Day and Night" is a fun, silly short that is also quite successful at presenting a moral and showing a truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZcKPxDhQcs

"The Family Stone"

"The Family Stone" is a disappointing movie. Where it aims for humor, it ends up painful and awkward. When it tries to twist, it turns predictable. While it wants to portray depth and layers, it dishes up shallow, cliche characters.

The plot centers around a Stone Christmas celebration, to which one of the Stone sons brings his girlfriend, Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker). She and the Stones immediately clash, and things only get worse when Everett (Dermont Mulroney) tells his parents that he plans to propose to Meredith on Christmas morning. The audience is supposed to believe that the cause is the conflict is because Meredith is conservative and uptight, and that Everett's family is just relaxed, quirky and liberal. Not so.

Meredith gets drunk at a bar, smokes pot, and later sleeps with Everett's brother -- what's uptight or conservative about any of these things? Her interactions with the Stones are awkward not because she is uptight, but because she is usually polite, uncomfortable, nervous, and doesn't get the family's humor. The Stones, though they are liberal (and might be quirky -- none of them are ever developed well-enough to show this), are also ridiculously rude, unkind, ungrateful, and unwelcoming. So much so that it's hard to believe these adults behave this way -- and it's hard to feel for them.

It's hard to feel for most of the characters. None of them have any depth: they rely on stereotypes, misconceptions, and cliches. All the audience knows about Everett is that he's successful and he likes Meredith; all the audience knows about Ben (Luke Wilson: another Stone, another love interest), is that he loves his mom, he thinks Meredith is hot, and he likes to relax and smoke pot.

Even Meredith: all the audience knows about her is that she works hard, is fashionable, successful, polite, nervous, and rude to gays. This last characteristic makes her less endearing to the audience at a time when she seems the most hackneyed -- and needs our empathy the most. "I'm not a racist bigot," she says. "I know that's what you see, but I'm not a racist bigot." However, there's no evidence beyond her own word that proves she is not. Thus, the audience's only conclusion is that she is, in fact, a racist bigot. This -- after the plot gives away all the secrets and Meredith relaxes and lets her hair down by drinking at a bar and actually letting her hair down. Very winning, very original. And this is before all the usual flip-flopping-partner-swapping starts.