The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Remember earlier in the year when I read A Spot of Bother? Right, well, The Corrections succeeded where that failed. I would like to send a copy of The Corrections to Mark Haddon with a 'spot the difference' style questionnaire.

The Corrections includes a whole load of things that I enjoy in books: tales of middle America, mental illness, ponderances on the nature of humanity, wrong and broken sex scenes of more than one kind, hysterical characters, analysis of success and failure, etc. All this, I tell you, as well as words sewn together in ways that make me want to sing, like:

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

and

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.

In The Corrections, Franzen catalogues the offences of life against the mind and body without ever once belittling his characters; using humour among a vast chache of techniques, but not resorting to humour while employing few other tools. (Mark, are you reading this? That's the answer to Question 1.)

Given how I've just raved about it, this will seem strange: I spent every second page of this book thinking, 'I've read this,' and then, 'but I have no idea what happens next...' Which, in essence, is half the reason I wanted to start this blog: I'm really good at writing down the titles of books I read, but I write them down in whatever notebook I happen to be using at the time, 95% of which are somewhere in my mother's garage and, therefore, useless since I am not in my mother's garage. Introducing... the portable book log! - blog! It's what Internet intended.

Thanks to my darling Badger for sending this along.