Excess

Nobody does it quite as well as the Americans, and Jonathan Franzen is in the front rank of those doing it superbly. Now over the halfway mark in The Corrections and finding myself regularly carried away by the addictive verve of the central characters. Wonderfully vertiginous downward spirals keep opening up and dragging me down. I keep recalling how alternatively thrilling and awful it used to be to be drunk. How happy I am those days are long gone.