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Two years later, Franzen's unhappiness about the state of fiction led him to publish a 15,000-word essay in Harper's magazine in which he pondered whether the serious novel could survive in a culture consumed by television, movies and the Web. "Where to find the energy," he asked, "to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?" It seemed hopeless to think of the novel as a medium that would change the world. The world wasn't paying that kind of attention. But Franzen refused to give up entirely. Better, as he says now, "to think of fiction as a way of entertaining people who really like to read."
At the time, Franzen was working on a long novel not so different from his earlier ones, full of polemical subplots involving anarchists in Philadelphia, the prison system and Wall Street. He threw away nearly all of it. "The big socially significant characters were not coming alive," he says. Working in a small writing studio in Harlem, he says, "I literally extracted a more personal book from that one." The book he finally wrote focuses on the inner lives and dismal family dynamic of the Lamberts, a couple of whom were minor characters in the book he abandoned. Alfred, a retired railway-bridge engineer and basement-lab inventor, is a man sliding into the mental and physical chaos of Parkinson's disease. His wife Enid devotes much of her energy to denying the seriousness of his condition, but understands it well enough to want all three of their grown children home for a last family Christmas in St. Jude, a Midwestern city with resemblances to St. Louis, where Franzen, now 42, grew up.
Son Chip, having lost his college teaching job for sleeping with one of his students, has found his way to free-market Lithuania, where he is helping a world-weary ex-politician fleece investors over the Internet. His prosperous brother Gary is drinking hard to reconcile himself to a manipulative wife and three sons who are drifting from his affections. Their sister Denise, a celebrity chef, makes reckless thrusts into other people's marriages. As anyone can tell you, "Christmas with the family" is a goal that has trouble written all over it. Trouble ensues.
Franzen's literary heroes are the masters of the paranoid, postmodern novel--William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo--writers who spin huge plots full of manic undertakings and dense riffs on civilization and its discontents. The book he put aside to write The Corrections was cut from that cloth. "It had prisons, race relations, stock-market corrections," Franzen says. "The 'corrections' in the finished book are more personal." The social disorders of the 21st century are expressed mostly through the personal distempers of the three siblings and their flight to the false consolations of sex, careerism and consumerism. "They all lose something in leaving behind their parents' values," says Franzen. "You wouldn't want a marriage like Enid and Alfred's, but when you correct things you get new problems."