I like to read “period” novels whenever I teach a U.S.
history survey course. I unshelf Howells and Twain when I teach the Gilded Age, dust off
Steinbeck for the 1930s, and dive into Angelou and Walker to get an
African-American perspective. With the semester winding down, I’ve been reading
about the 1990s.
Recent novels are tricky. Books only evolve from
“noteworthy” to “classic” in retrospect; lots of heralded works come off as shopworn
or silly a decade later. Even good books take on meanings that eluded the first
batch of readers. The latter has certainly happened to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and The Corrections (2001). Both were
received in their initial runs as if they were sociology as well as literature.
So they were, but now each also seems an indictment of Baby Boomers and Generation
X excesses. Such generational labels are, of course, media inventions. As a
historian, I don’t hold much stock in generational interpretations of the past,
so I’ll just call these zeitgeist
novels.
A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius was and is a genre-defying work that obliterates the
line between fiction and autobiography. Its narrator, Dave Eggers, is both
author and principal character. It tells of the travails of the Eggers clan. Paterfamilias
John, a nasty drunk, died in 1991, followed the next year by the cancer death
of the family rock: Heidi. Her death threw the Eggers children upon their own
devices. Eldest son William was already living an independent life in Los
Angeles, and soon the remaining children–Beth, Dave, and Christopher–depart
Illinois for San Francisco. Challenges arose immediately, as youngest child,
“Toph,” was just nine and his primary caretakers were Beth (24) and Dave (22).
Both cared deeply for Toph, but neither was prepared to be a parent. (Beth
played a larger role than assigned in the book, but she had demons of her own
and committed suicide in 2001.)
Anyone who has been to San Francisco knows that it’s a tough
town in which to be poor. Dave and Toph eek out a living from their
inheritance, Social Security, and whatever work Dave can drum up, but he’s more
of a slacker/hipster-wannabe than breadwinner. The book purports to recount his
on-the-job-training lessons in responsibility and parenthood, but in retrospect
it reads like Eggers’ thinly veiled anger at being robbed of his adolescence. He
and Toph trash one cheap rental after another, as neither is very good at adult basics such as
wiping up messes, taking out the garbage, or housekeeping. Dave lands a job,
but with a magazine that never made a dime; his real talents include prowess at
tossing Frisbees and imagining himself in the sack with sexologist Sari Locker.
A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius remains a very good read, though a title meant to be
ironic now feels solipsistic. Like works such as Running with Scissors, it has a “look at me” quality whose true irony lies in how badly
Gen X mangled attempts to emulate what it lampooned. That is to say, for all the
Gen X contempt for Baby Boomers, many of them tried to become hippies and
simply weren’t very good at it. Blame the “Dream,” or blame Gen X-fueled MTV,
hipster mags, and reality TV. Or, as I prefer to do, read Eggers to gain
insight into what confused twenty-somethings were thinking in the 1990s.
Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award-winning The Corrections is the superior novel.
Today it seems the ultimate pre-apocalyptic novel as it ends with the Stock
Market “correction” of 1999, and was published just months before 9/11/01. The
novel tracks the highly dysfunctional Lambert family. Parents Alfred and Enid
still live in the prototypical Midwestern town of St. Jude, but their adult
children have bolted to the East. Alfred is a retired railroad
engineer/inventor who, in his prime, was a tyrant. Parkinson’s and advancing
dementia have transformed him from being difficult to being impossible. Enid,
his wife of 50 years, realizes time is short, tries to rally Alfred for a few
last hurrahs, and harbors the dream of a final family Christmas in St. Jude.
Good luck with that! The kids are to busy making of hash of their
lives. Eldest son Gary is a Philadelphia banker obsessed with the Stock Market,
all things material, and few things emotional. He has a postcard family, but
Gary is either bullied by his equally selfish wife, or is clinically
depressed–depending on whose point of view you believe. Middle child Chip, the
family intellectual, is a college professor hurtling toward self-destruction by
violating the school’s sexual conduct code that he helped write. That avenue
leads him to New York, where he fails as a playwright, and to post-Cold War
Lithuania, where he falls in with oligarchs. Diane escapes a bad marriage and
reinvents herself as a celebrity chef, only to jeopardize it all by having
simultaneous affairs with her boss and his wife. Different problems, but each is
too mired in imagine a warm-and-fuzzy Christmas in St. Jude.
Franzen’s novel crosses generations—Depression era parents,
a Baby Boomer-turned Yuppie eldest son, an idealist-gone-egoist “tweener” middle
child, and a Gen X youngest daughter. Each is a metaphor for the hope and greed
of the Clinton years. The first brick fell when the dot.com bubble popped in 1999,
Nasdaq lost 78% of its value, and its 457 IPOs shrank to just 76 in 18 months.
Looming on the horizon: the falling masonry of September 11. Looking back now, The Corrections feels like the warning
siren in advance of the tornado. Rob Weir
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