Reading The Corrections

Reading sticks better when you're traveling, I find. The articles you read, the novels you devour, are somehow more vivid, details imprint themselves and, if you are lying in the heat of a Colombo guest house, with a fan turning lazily, shifting the hot air from one side of the room to the other, you find you laugh out loud at Michael Ondaatje's observation that, 'Most of the events in the erotic literature of Asia. . . must take place in the mountains, for sex is almost impossible in Colombo except in the early morning hours.' Not surprisingly it is Ondaatje that I want to re-read first, since I am traveling in the country where he was born. I go to a bookshop looking for his books - surely he must be a hero in his home land? Perhaps, though the bookshops I go to try to offer me the English language writers they do stock. 'Danielle Steele,' one helpful proprietor suggests. I shake my head so he gives it another shot: 'John Grisham?' I finally find Ondaatje's memoir, Running in the Family at Barefoot, a gallery, cafe, textile and book store which is a haven for tourists and well-to-do Sri Lankans. I also ask for Anil's Ghost, his most recent novel about Sri Lanka's recent political turmoil, but they have sold out.

It's not just the stretches of time uninterrupted by the phone, or email or TV that makes reading more intense away from home because there are always distractions to be found. Where I am - a retreat for International Scholars called Pemberely House (after Jane Austen: 'She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.') and set in the 'up country' as locals describe the hills - the monkeys swing on electrical wires and onto the roof, as noisy as a dozen possums. One day I looked up from my desk to see a monkey on my window sill trying to summon up the courage to come in: perhaps he could smell my almonds. Other creatures come into the room as well: iridescent green beetles, wasps, and glow-flies sparkle on the ceiling at night like the fluorescent stars I put up on my bedroom wall when I was a child. One morning there was a frog on the wall beside my pillow - beige, with bulging black eyes - and when I tried to cup it in my hand it sprung across the room and hid behind a curtain. Then, after walking, there are leaches to be pulled off ankles. There are tics to be pulled off hips. There is the wall of static and music that swells through the hills on Poya (full moon) day.

In the living area there at Pemberley House there is a pile of New Yorkers that goes back five years and that is distraction a plenty. I have read a profile on the Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft, a bulimic woman who has transformed her eating disorder into performance art. This is quite useful as the heroine of my novel also has a problem with food. I read a fifteen thousand word essay by Janet Malcolm on Gertrude Stein's war that examines Stein and Alice B. Toklas's friendship with collaborators during World War 2; then an article on Clint Eastwood and what a straight shooter he is. He loves Jazz and chickens.

An intermittent insomniac - and yes, the nights seem very long here as I lay under my mosquito net listening to the whine of those who can smell my blood but can't get to me - I am drawn to an article called 'Eyes Wide Open' by Jerome Groopman, about experiments being conducted by the military to keep people awake using a drug which mimics the hormones we produce during the day, rather than just shooting them with speed. Do we, Groopman wonders, actually need sleep? My answer would be yes, always, I can never get enough, but when I discuss this over a beer at sunset with fellow Australian writer, the naturalist Nick Drayson, he points to the swifts that are swooping over the lawn in front of us and tells me that swifts don't touch the ground for two years after they leave the nest. Satellite photos suggest they sleep high, high up, floating on eddies of air.

But the big news is, I've finally read The Corrections. I've always had a bit of a love/hate thing for that novel. I was a publisher at the time it came out, and wondered what suicidal impulse would motivate a writer to refuse an Oprah Winfrey Book club sticker and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sales that would ensure. Moral high ground is all very well, I thought, but I could only see that Oprah Winfrey had done good things for the American reading public and the recommending of Franzen's novel to it was testimony to this. (After Franzen's rebuff she has taken to recommending classics only. When I was in New York last year and saw that Anna Karenina was No. 1 on the Bestseller list I had only one thought: Oprah).

I started to read The Corrections in 2001. After a hundred pages or so, just as Chips, the novel's anti-hero is about to go to Lithuania, I put it down by my bed and didn't pick I up again. Every now and then I would dust it. I'm not really clear why I stopped reading it. I can only assume I was intimidated by the genius of its prose and wit, not to mention its length (653 pages) when I had so much else to read. Over the years the pressure mounted. My partner had, on occasion expressed her surprise that I had once been a publisher, considered myself a writer, but was now too much of a coward - I'm sure that's the word she used - to finish the novel. I took baby steps. I read Franzen's book of essays, How to be Alone, and was suitably impressed but I still didn't move onto the novel. By now my partner had read the novel a second time. I was asked to comment on the intensifying debate that young Australian Writer's hadn't produced anything as good as The Corrections. This did not endear me to the novel either. It had turned into a big stick to whack writers over the head with. The Corrections was becoming, an issue.

Having read it, I concede the point - but would also say that not many (any? - I'm yet to read In the Line of Beauty) other writers in the entire English language have produced a contemporary novel of this stature in the last few years either. And let's not get into the socioeconomic and statistical arguments that Franzen himself is so alert to and adept at conveying. (Actually, let's get into them: how many Australian writers could afford to write the eight and more hours a day I believe Franzen wrote, for years on end, and not actually starve to death? Five, if they're lucky. How many American writer's and published novels did it take to produce this one novel? Allot. How do those numbers compare to the Australian industry? Not so many writers, not so many books published. How many good Australian novels are being turned down on a weekly basis on the ground that they are uncommercial? More than you'd like to think. If I had access to statistics here, my figures might be more precise but I feel confident they'd make my point.)

Here are some more idiosyncratic statistics. I read the last 300 pages of The Corrections on the Colombo to Badulla train, which took me from the flats to the hill country and then wound along the ridge of mountains for 6 hours or so. I gave up trying to read in the first two hours from Colombo, because I was at the back of the train, and that seemed to create a whip effect. Every few moments the carriage would jerk and shudder dramatically, to the extent I thought we might be derailed. Trying to drink water out of my water bottle, or eat my pre-packaged curry in a banana leaf, was uncannily like a scene early in The Corrections in which Alfred Lambert, the novel's patriarch who has Parkinson's disease, is trying to navigate hors d'oeuvre into his mouth. 'Alfred was sitting on the edge of the chaise in a somehow penal posture, his knees high and his back a little hunched, and was surveying the crash site of his third hors d'ouevre. The gondola of bread had slipped from his fingers on its approach to his mouth and plunged to his knees, scattering wreckage and tumbling to the floor and finally coming to rest beneath the chaise.'

Until this movement calmed down I looked out the knee to ceiling windows in front of me (I was in the 'Observation Lounge') watching people walk along the tracks carrying their bags, their lunch and umbrellas as they wandered down the lines. At one point, when we were going through the longest train tunnel in Sri Lanka (1.5 Kilometers, I was told, by a man who was very excited by train facts and ran up to my end of the carriage to inform me whenever some highlight occurred), you could see people holding torches, pressed to the side of the walls then coming out behind the train after it had passed, their torches bouncing around in the darkness as they tripped over the sleepers. I continued to read The Corrections leaning against the back window of the train whenever it pulled in at a station.

The trip was nine hours in total though by road it's only about 200 kilometers. I shared it with a family of about 20 - sisters, brothers, children, parents - all on their way up to an uncle's place near an army camp. The family chatted and offered me chili and onion toasted sandwiches, because, as they told me, we are all one blood. They seemed far happier than the Lamberts. Each member of that family has moments of self-mutilation. The responsible and bullying older brother, Gary, almost cuts his thumb off with a hedge-cutter. The younger siblings, Denise and Chips, occasionally burn themselves with cigarettes. When a former torture victim and prisoner of an Eastern European regime quizzes Chips about his burn and finds out it's self inflicted he calls him pathetic, leading Chip to sum up American life, indeed the whole novel, in one, concise sentence. 'Different kind of prison.' I find that I love that sentence so much that several times I have gone to include it in my current novel, before remembering it's Franzen's not mine. That's one reason why it is nerve wracking reading other fiction writers when you're writing fiction yourself - you want to steal stuff.

I read using sunglasses for the glare that I pulled off as we entered the more than thirty tunnels along the way. As the train climbed the hills the train journey became more spectacular , and, because it was traveling at the pace a man jogs, more stable. Whenever I lifted my eyes from my book I would see beautiful sculptured tea plantations hugging the side of hills like some enormous green quilt. By the time I got to Nanu Oya (the station for for the English Hill station, Nuwra Eliya), two hours from my final destination, I had reached the point in The Corrections where there are concerns that the stock market is about to correct itself after a decade long dream run and Alfred has plunged off the cruise ship he and his wife are traveling on. These events lead to an extraordinary bringing together of statistics, narrative drive and beautiful prose: 'four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify your husband of forty-seven years . . . and even to observe the expression on your husband's face, to register its almost youthful beauty, its peculiar serenity, for who could have anticipated the grace with which the raging man would fall?' I finished The Corrections around Ohiya, which is, at almost 2000 meters the highest train station in Sri Lanka. From this stop you can walk to World's End, the point where the plateau plunges 880m down onto the plains.

The Corrections is particularly good on the subject of food. When young, the Lambert children were subjected to cooking so bad it bordered on abuse, the result of which is that the youngest, Denise becomes a top chef, and Chip becomes so concerned with eating well that he goes to the trouble of stuffing a Wild Norwegian Salmon (line caught) down his pants to smuggle it out of an expensive Soho supermarket. Food can be wonderful in Sri Lanka: for breakfast you can be served egg hoppers - eggs fried into a basket made of pancake - which you can fill with chili, coconut and red onion sambal, pickled fish, tomato salad and dhal. Lunch can easily be half a dozen dishes: rice flour and coconut milk rolled into logs, or sieved into a kind of pasta called string hoppers, or boiled into little cakes called Iddlie, then served with chicken curry, fish, beans and coconut, potatoes and mustard seed, eggplant, dhal and green chili on everything. After one particularly nice salad I quizzed the cook, a process he appeared to find mortifying. 'Did you use beetroot?' 'Yes,' he looked at his feet. 'Coconut?' 'Yes, he said, indicating that he grated it. In a rush of enthusiasm triggered by my interest he said firmly, 'And onions. And . . .' his nerve failed him, 'tom-at . . .' and his voice trailed off into a whisper.

There was mortification to be had all round, really, because, once Nick Drayson left and I was alone, it was not uncommon for me to eat with three servants standing attentively, watching me, ready to move any dish I might desire just that extra inch closer to my spoon. Most nights I go to bed cursing Sri Lanka's class system (a heady combination of Dutch, Portuguese, British and Sinhalese) and my limited language skills.

It must be said that, both the cook's enthusiasm for invention, and, consequently, mine for eating, began to wane during my stay. On my thirteenth day of curry and rice, 3 meals a day, I was given curried liver and thought of the extraordinary 15 page sequence in which a young Chip refuses to eat the half-cooked liver he's been served for dinner. 'The denuded surface of the liver was a thing you didn't want to see. He unfolded the beet greens somewhat and rearranged them.' Like a recalcitrant child I picked the liver off my plate and ate plain white rice before going to bed, grumpy.

To read The Corrections while spending a month working on a novel you have doubts about is a risky business. As many writers know, one's assessment of one's own work tends to swing wildly from preparing one's Booker Prize acceptance speech, to imagining (or indeed remembering) reviews that inflict horrendous humiliation. (Here's my first English one for my first novel. It was nothing if not concise: 'unforgivably tedious.')

There is a particular thought that most writer's fend off: 'What if no one's interested?' and this concern has come to haunt me here. I have spent three years researching little pockets of history that I find deeply interesting and, it has suddenly occurred to me, no one else might give a toss about. And that is just putting to one side for a moment - please, please let me put it aside for a moment - the 'Can I actually write?' question. Chip, the favored son of the Lambert family, is a writer. He has been working on a screenplay that he hopes will redeem him from having been sacked from his academic position (he had sex with, took drugs with, dictated an essay to and became obsessed by, one of his students). The screenplay is called 'The Academy Purple' and he's convinced it's going to make him millions. It is only when he sees the look on his new girlfriend's face as she reads it, when she in fact dumps him it's so bad, that it occurs to him that others may not be reading it as he intended. 'It seemed to Chip that Julia was leaving him because "The Academy Purple" had too many breasts references and a draggy opening, and that if he could correct these few obvious problems, both on Julia's copy of the script and, more important, on the copy he'd specially laser printer on 24-pound ivory bond paper for Edith Procuro, there might be hope not only for his finances but also for his chances of ever again unfettering and fondling Julia's own guiless, milk-white breasts.' When he goes to his agent, Edith Procuro, he sees that her young daughter is using his script as scrap paper to draw on. A few weeks later, having been robbed in Lithuania during some kind of coup (he was there because he was involved in an internet embezzlement scheme) and being forced to walk the 15 miles to the Polish border Chips has an idea to change the tone of his screenplay: 'Make it ridiculous. Make it ridiculous.' While Chips redeems himself in almost every way, he never does professionally, and by the novel's end is on his eighth revision.

The Corrections has now become a stick I beat myself, it exhorts me to make my own corrections, (Improve your dialogue! Sustain those poetic asides!) but it is also a source of inspiration. Chip's epiphany triggered one of my own, one that sounds obvious now I put it into words: 'what you need, Sophie, is a plot. Yes, a plot!' and I've been at my desk at Pemberley, 9 hours a day, in hot pursuit of one ever since.

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