Enid is naturally adept at not listening to what her children are determined to tell her. "Dave Schumpert has had ten times more health problems than Dad, he's had a colostomy for fifteen years, he's got one lung and a pacemaker, and look at all the things that he and Mary Beth are doing. Lamenting her Parkinsonian husband's apparent passivity to their daughter Denise, she expresses her frustration with any number of examples of old men who have succumbed less easily. The greatest talker is Enid Lambert, whose loquacity will remind many a novel-reader of Jane Austen's Miss Bates. With every section of The Corrections narrated from the point of view of one of the characters, it is in dialogue that the reader can step back from all the characters and hear the consequences of their self-delusions. Franzen's narrative method puts an onus on dialogue. Dialogue is where they pursue their own preoccupations. In The Corrections it applies to members of the same family, practised at not attending to each other. The description is often used of political antagonists, unwilling to take each other's points. "A dialogue of the deaf", as it has been translated into an English idiom, is a conversation between two people who cannot listen to each other. T he French have long had a phrase for it: un dialogue de sourds.
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