A Minor Corrections

Adam Langer, Crossing California

There was a moment, reading this "breakout book of 2004," when I put it down next to me and said out loud, to no one, "I really hate these people. They're despicable." And many of the characters in Langer's first novel seem, at first, to be truly terrible people. But by the end, I felt sympathy for, or even empathy with, nearly all of them.

This is a "big" novel, in the vein of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, tying a set of characters to a larger set of circumstances. (It's not as long as Franzen's "big" book, though--at 420 pages, with smooth writing, it coasts by quickly.) Langer's framework is more defined than Franzen's; he fits the action of his novel into the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, ending it on the day Ronald Reagan took office. In those 444 days, the characters all experience major events, including a move from one part of a Jewish neighborhood to another, better one--or out of the neighborhood altogether. The characters are representatives of three tiers of a microcosm for society as a whole, each struggling to advance. Married doctors struggle to send their kids to the right schools and find happiness in a worn-out marriage; a widower struggles to maintain a middle-class lifestyle for his motherless daughters; and a single mother and her son attempt to take care of one another. (In one of the novel's most touching subplots, the son does odd jobs to accumulate enough money to send his mom back to college so she can fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher.)

Like Corrections, though, this novel often inspires antipathy for its characters and rueful thoughts about the realistic situations that transpire. It examines the impact of psychology, divorce, religion, capitalism, and even pornography on a culture, doing so at first through the eyes of the children but eventually giving the adults and their needs and wants a fair share of attention as well.

This is not a perfect novel; in places it feels over-written, and at times Langer would be better served by getting out of the way of his characters rather than narrating their conversations. The ending, while it ties things together neatly, does seem to rely on one coincidence too many to deliver the requisite warm feelings for all the characters. Still, this is a dynamite first novel, broad in scope and laser-focused on the feelings and changes of its characters and, by extension, a nation in transition. I look forward to good things from Adam Langer.