Just say NOPRAH!

A partial list of celebrities who won’t be invited on The Oprah Winfrey Show anytime soon: Osama bin Laden, David Letterman, bad-boy white rapper Eminem, bad-boy novelist Chuck Palahniuk... and of course, Jonathan Franzen, author of the best-selling Oprah Book Club pick, The Corrections.

Why won’t Franzen be on the show, despite Oprah’s having bestowed upon him the magical Oprah Seal of Approval? Seems Franzen didn’t feel his book could be properly appreciated by the types of readers (usually older and female) who feast on Oprah’s Literary Picks. Says he didn’t like the Oprah corporate logo either, which was plastered (against his will) on all new copies of The Corrections.

The Oprah-Franzen controversy ended up with the talk show host dis-inviting the testy young author from joining her on the famous TV couch. Whether this causes Franzen sleepless nights or large doses of literary anxiety is unknown. The book in question is a doorstop-sized tome about the disintegration of the American family in 1990s. It ends with a "correction" in the New York stock market, and explores a series of other corrections – metaphoric, literal, economic – within its 568 pages.

And it’s an Oprah Book Club Pick, did I mention that? Despite the disdain with which young writer Franzen treated this fact, it has probably generated more interest and book sales (and hate mail) than had been previously focused on the novel.

Much like the film American Beauty, we are invited to examine an American family: the Lamberts, a Midwestern clan led by Alfred – former mechanical engineer and current Parkinson’s disease sufferer – along with his long-suffering, long-fretting wife Enid, who wants, above all things, to bring her children home for "one last Christmas."

We meet the first son, Chip, a recently-fired college professor, as he embarks on a desperate quest to fetch back a screenplay from his publisher before she can read it (his ex-girlfriend has informed him that it is unsellable, obsessively fixated on literary theory and breasts). Chip’s life is spinning out of control in several, if not all, directions. He strives to make "the necessary corrections" in the screenplay before itís too late.

Denise, the sister, is an up-and-coming chef who was recently featured in the New York Times and on the Food Channel. Her life, too, is spinning madly out of control, though she seems to have a better perspective on people, particularly the frailties of her family members.

Gary, finally, is the successful, materialistic investment banker whose wife steadfastly refuses to visit the Lambert home in the Midwest for Christmas, and relentlessly wheedles Gary into admitting that he’s depressed about this situation. All one big, happy dysfunctional family, as they say.

Other white male American writers have tried to capture the zeitgeist of the times with lengthy, maximalist novels about the Pursuit of Happiness in Modern Life and What It All Means (Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace quickly come to mind); but no other author of this demographic description has been invited on Oprah, up until now.

To be fair to Franzen, his beef with the "Oprah Book Club" designation seems to be more about his aversion to corporate logos and devices for selling things in general. He probably feels the book can stand on its own merits (as it indeed did, becoming a best-seller before Oprah waved her magic wand). But as a 30-something author, Franzen has shown a distinct lack of literary etiquette, alienating potential readers who watch Oprah and would now prefer to cling to their copies of Toni Morrison and Tuesdays With Morrie. Also, he has a habit of sticking his foot in his literary mouth, such as his recent carping about having to do a Q&A session after giving a reading at a New York City outlet. "That’s so discount-bookstore," Franzen reportedly sneered.

At any rate, the book itself. The Corrections is an often funny, sometimes moving, frequently meandering tale of filial ties, of lines leading to home and to the concept of family. It’s also an economic treatise on the growing pressure to become a consumer in the modern world, and how this aids or detracts from our pursuit of happiness. I wish I could say this treatise was delivered with more finesse than I’ve just outlined, but at times The Corrections veers into obviousness, making it clear that a certain heavy literary message is being purveyed.

Take, for instance, the title. Various "corrections" are explicitly mentioned throughout the novel, in case we fail to tie up all the loose thematic threads on our own (maybe it was written for Oprah viewers after all). There are the manuscript corrections, the stock market corrections, various corrections in Alfred’s and Gary’s brain chemistry, corrections at the dinner table and in bed, an experimental drug called Correcktall, and a final series of corrections delivered by Enid to her increasingly Parkinson’s-addled husband in the closing pages.

So it’s about corrections, you’ve probably noticed. It’s also about everything that plagues modern living, from the need for money and status to the difficult search for love and fulfillment. It’s about being cool versus being real. It’s about the old generation (that of Alfred and Enid) versus the new generation (that of Chip, Denise and Gary). It’s a satire, in case you hadn’t noticed.

There are richly comic moments, long pieces that build up over the course of hundreds of pages, like the chapter on Gary ("The More He Thought About It, The Angrier He Got") and his fragile grip on his own sanity. Gary loves his wife, Caroline, but since she suffered a back injury visiting the Lamberts eight years ago at Christmas, she refuses to fly there ever again. Enlisting the sympathy of her sons, Aaron, Caleb and Jonah, Caroline uses emotional blackmail to force Gary to admit he’s depressed, and indulges her sons’ strange, expensive hobbies, including home surveillance. ("Surveillance isn’t a hobby, son," observes Gary.) You know this is not a strictly functional family when Aaron is allowed by Caroline to install a video cam and microphone system in the family kitchen, an act which eventually catches Gary behaving in a very unfatherly manner.

Other errors of judgment and behavior are detailed mercilessly, such as Chip’s affair with an undergrad student who debunks him during a class, and Denise’s unfortunate gravitation toward married men. Each slice of the Lambert family is given space to tell their story, though it’s hard, at the end of The Corrections, to decide who’s worth rooting for.

Certainly Enid, though she is annoying in a stereotypical-mother way throughout the book, deserves our sympathy. Chip, too, emerges less as a victim of his passions and more of a full-fledged character. Gary and Denise stay true to character. But Alfred, the domineering father figure, is given a dose of cruel medicine by book’s end, undermining the tone of sympathy and elegiac sadness that Franzen has worked hard to maintain throughout the novel.

Another theme that gets a lot of attention in The Corrections is male weeping – or rather, the inability of men to weep. All the male characters, at some point, find themselves on the verge of breaking down, but they rarely do. It’s too much work, apparently, to pick up the pieces. There are numerous references ("He refused to weep..." "Curiously, though he didn’t outright cry..." "He had to clench his jaw and refer to his philosophy to prevent its turning into tears..."), suggesting that a good dose of waterworks is really what these male characters need. If this is the case, then a visit to the Oprah couch could be just the ticket.