“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
This well-written novel is “a comic, tragic, masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.” Thank you so much Kerri for giving this book to me! There is no way to describe the array of emotions that surfaced while reading this book. Franzen truly is a master of dictating interpersonal relationships. The drawn-out and in-depth interactions between the characters and the relationships those scenes structure between them is what makes the book. These are impossible to quote, but here are some of my favorite quotes anyway:
[Pages 3 through 12 are completely stunning on their own.]
“It was raining so hard in Manhattan that water was streaming down facades and frothing at the mouths of sewers.”
“Her open eye was like nearly black balsamic vinegar beading on white china.”
“The jismic grunting butt-oink. The jiggling frantic nut-swing.”
“[…] the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later.”
“The leaves of the sunflowers had black spots and were rimmed with pale senescences; the heads were meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies, thick as palms. In the center of a sunflower’s Kansan face was a subtly pale button within a subtly darker areola. Nature, Chip thought, could hardly have devised a more inviting bed for a small winged insect to tumble into. He touched the brown velvet, and ecstasy washed over him.”
“Finch’s tongue was probing beneath her upper lip like a cat beneath blankets.”
“A low fountain was murmuring nearby, generating medium-strength privacy. A small unaffiliated cloud had wandered into the quadrant of private-sphere sky defined by the encompassing rooflines. The light was coastal and diffuse.”
“The beds of mums and begonias and liriope all around him were like bikinied extras in a music video, planted in full blush of perfection and fated to be yanked again before they had a chance to lose petals, acquire brown spots, drop leaves.”
“[…] each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner…”
“He believed that if he heard himself weeping, at two in the morning in a smoke-smelling motel room, the world might end.”
“Brown grease-soaked flakes of flour were impastoed on the ferrous lobes of liver like corrosion.”
“And like self-pity, or the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled – the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor – refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.”
“They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid.”
“[…] her chill-stippled arms and thighs and belly, the plump twin cloudberries into which a suddenly gray winter sky had drawn her nipples, the quaking ginger fur between her legs.”
“Robin spoke in a voice like an ice cube compressed between molars.”
“His mind was aware of its own racing. He didn’t fall into sleep but skipped off it, again and again, like a stone on water.”
“The rock was four-sided, a broken corner of granite cobblestone. It was coated with fresh hostility and seemed faintly embarrassed.”
“He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.”
“And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.”
