![]() ![]() Three grown-up children, Gary, Chip and Denise, labour to live adult lives under the long shadow cast by their unhappy parents. At its centre is the Lambert family, dominated by Alfred, the difficult patriarch, and Enid, the yearning and frustrated matriarch. So The Corrections is itself a correction, and as such it succeeds marvellously. He proposed, in effect, a softened DeLilloism. But in Underworld there are no connections at the human level at all, because there are no human beings in the novel, no one who really matters and whose consciousness matters to himself.įranzen realised something like this when he read Underworld, and pledged to put the matter right by producing, in his novel The Corrections, a book of DeLillo-like breadth and intellectual critique which was centred on human beings. DeLillo insisted on connections (the atom bomb is somehow connected to JFK's assassination and to paranoia) as Dickens's plots insist on connections (wills, lost relatives, distant benefactors). His novel was a Dickensian novel without any humans in it. ![]() But there was a problem with DeLillo's example. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |