After finishing Lee Child's Worth Dying For, I picked up The Corrections. It's hard to believe that both books can inhabit the same bookstore let alone end up as best sellers. Needless to say, reading the two is a very different experience. When I read a Reacher novel, I'm asking myself: Who is this man? Did Dexter have another brother? (Prompted by my husband) Doesn't he ever change his underwear? In spite of the impossibility of Reacher and the mind-numbing amount of violence, I typically can't put the books down. I have to find out how Reacher is going to extricate himself from yet another hellish situation.
When I visit Franzen's fictional worlds, I also feel as if I'm visiting some kind of hell but for a very a very different reason. Whereas Reacher is someone who I've never known and will never know, I feel uncomfortably close to Franzen's characters. They all seem to intersect my own world in odd ways. In fact, I hate to say it but I often see myself in all their self-loathing glory whether it's the nice, liberal couple in St. Paul or the professor who hopes to teach his students how to read all the texts produced by corporate America.
The Corrections will certainly take me longer to finish than Worth Dying For and it's not because of it complexity. It's because I can only take the character's self loathing (and by extension my own self loathing) in limited doses.
During my current break, I'm just imagining how Jack Reacher would handle Christmas in St. Jude with the Lamberts. A conversation between Chip and Jack would be priceless.
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