Jonathan Franzen: The Collections

By PENELOPE BIEDER

About 18 months ago I read a memorable piece of writing in New Yorker magazine. By Jonathan Franzen, it introduced me to Enid and Alfred Lambert, a retired couple from a small town in the Mid-west.

He is battling Parkinson's disease and she is battling disappointment, or rather she is longing to throw off the burden of a long and dutiful but unsatisfactory marriage and live a little. They have embarked on a cruise with Nordic Pleasurelines to Quebec to enjoy the changing leaves all the way back.

Their story stayed with me, so brilliant and immediate was the writing. I had no idea it was an excerpt from an epic novel until I picked up The Collections and there, on the first page, I found the Lamberts.

Alfred has just had his nap and there is no local news to be had until 5 pm. "Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred." Enid is on her knees in the dining room opening drawers. Both feel near to exploding with anxiety.

You may think this is hardly a promising start to a 568-page novel, but stay with the Lambert family and you will be in for a rare and satisfying treat.

Franzen is a stunning writer. Merciless yet deeply compassionate, his narrative gradually reveals the five members of the family.

They are dysfunctional, disaster-prone, hopeless, not even nice a great deal of the time, yet you will find yourself caring a great deal about what becomes of them.

The middle child, Chip, is finding it hard to believe that he's a fully functioning adult male, so much has gone wrong for him. He's been fired from academia for seeing a beautiful but manipulative student and when you find he's working on a screenplay you groan for him. He's a 21st-century Lucky Jim and a target for Franzen's black humour - "it seemed to him that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart".

Denise, his young sister, is an attractive, talented chef working in a swanky place in Philadelphia and fast heading towards owning her own hip establishment. Compared with Chip, she appears to have life rather well sorted. How wrong we are.

Gary, the oldest son fulfils perfectly Saul Bellow's adage: "Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a man's examined life can make him wish he was dead."

Gary, a wealthy portfolio manager also living in Philadelphia, is convinced his lovely wife Caroline is eavesdropping on all his phone calls. (And they are hardly momentous conversations, mostly with his mother, whose dream is to get the family together for Christmas.)

Gary is also on red-alert at all times for signs of his own clinical depression. When his 11-year-old son Caleb rigs up a spy camera for a surveillance project, and Dad is filmed getting into the booze cabinet - more than once - he knows he must stop feeling sorry for himself.

Don't be put off by the Lamberts. They are a wonderful, hilarious family; they do care about each other, and while they may all at times be in danger of losing it completely, it is the madness of the society they live in that can be the real problem.

Franzen's third novel is a comic, tragic and deeply moving masterpiece.

I concur happily with David Gates who wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "The Collections creates the illusion of giving a complete account of the world - it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read."

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.

* Fourth Estate, $34.95