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The Corrections
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Critically lauded and an Oprah Book Club choice, Jonathan Franzen's third novel The Corrections is already a huge success in the US, and it's none too difficult to see why. Whereas his earlier novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and StrongMotion could be seen as single-issue works (on inner city decay and abortion respectively), the long-awaited The Corrections is far more grandiose in its ambition and its scale.
Framed by matriarch Enid Lambert's attempts to gather her three grown children back home for Christmas, The Corrections examines their lives: Enid's husband Alfred, sinking into dementia, her sons banker Gary and writer Chip (now in Lithuania) and daughter Denise, a chef, busily re-evaluating her sexual identity.
With these characters, Franzen gives himself plenty of room to examine the foibles, fears, hopes, anxieties and neuroses of 21st-century American life and the mad Lithuanian subplot provides some real laughs. But most striking and surprising about The Corrections is its reassuring normality. Despite all its well-signposted dysfunction, this remains at heart a big sprawling family saga, with all the security that implies. The book closes with Enid noting "that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they'd been in her youth" during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now, "disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States". It's a line Franzen couldn't have written after 11 September, 2001--and, perhaps because of its now forgotten confidence, The Corrections is a book that readers will take to their hearts.--Alan Stewart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Amazon.co.uk Review
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
48 of 53 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Spanning the last forty years of the 20th century, this is a huge family drama focusing on the elderly parents and three grown children in a midwestern family. To label these characters as dysfunctional does not do justice to their uniquenesses or to the reader's ability to identify with them. Their difficulties as a family arise because the family dynamics require them to hurt each other if they are to be true to themselves. When Enid decides that the whole family must come home to St. Jude's for "one last family Christmas," the stage is set for an emotional family reunion which results in many "corrections."
Enid, the mother, while not assertive in a traditional sense, cleverly wields the age-old guilt ploy to get her own way. Albert, the father, suffers from Parkinson's-induced dementia and creates enormous strains on the rest of the family's emotional resources. Each of the children, now adult and living away from home, brings to the reunion the baggage of the past and the insights obtained independent of the family.
Seven years in the making, this novel is an intimate, domestic drama, smoothly incorporating themes which question who we are, what we owe our parents, how we become who we are, and where we are going. Franzen's pointed observations about contemporary life--as revealed by upscale restaurants, the "green movement," cruise ship behavior, use of the internet for fund-raising, dispensation of "happy pills," nursing homes, and even the crassness of Christmas--enliven the plot as it spirals around and through time and the lives of the five characters. Albert's decline, told in part from his point of view, is particularly heart-breaking. This book offers a stunning and intimate view of a middle-class American family, its values, and its dreams, all presented with wit, sensitivity, and power. Mary Whipple
44 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I came to the pc this Friday evening, midnight thirty, to look up more Franzen writing, having just finished The Corrections. If you are reading this, I beg you to disregard some of the downbeat reviews submitted by other readers and believe the general acclaim that has greeted this wonderful book. I rate this huge, wonderful, funny, touching, involving novel right up there with other recent great reads, from Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin to Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. It is, as intelligent reviewers have commented, so distinctive that any comparisons risk being misleading, but it's not a million miles off the mark to say that there is a whiff of Catch 22 in the author's virtuoso handling of his material. As I experienced it, this is a book, like all great novels, about the extraordinary canvas of human life. It focuses on an ageing couple - their twilight years sympathetically, sometimes hilariously, portrayed - and on the three startlingly different adults who were once there children (and whom the mother wants to reunite for one last Christmas together in the family home). Over the course of a gloriously big book that is not a page too long, Franzen interleaves the stories of his characters with a sureness of touch that reminded me of Saul Bellow and Humboldt's Gift: the narrative at any given time is so involving that you only realise when a storyline is resumed that you actually left a situation many pages back in order to focus on another situation that has completely absorbed you... Ultimately, no theme is left unresolved in this hugely rewarding modern symphony of a novel. The prose is a joy - never a need to reread a single poorly formed sentence in over 600 pages (only an urge to reread some of the most insightful and wonderfully observed paragraphs in recent fiction); the dialogue and characterisation are terrific; the themes relevant to anyone who calls himself/herself a human being. Tremendous. Do yourself a favour and read it.
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
'The Corrections' is a sophisticated and enjoyable family saga charting the lives, loves, successes and failures of the Lambert family. It is a very ambitious book which attempts to address a whole host of modern issues as well as provide a complex portrait of human relationships and motivations.
The book is very strong on characterisation, each family member is sufficiently complex to make the reader feel differing emotions towards them at different points in the book. Franzen is very good at describing the emotions that drive his characters to behave and act in the (often cruel) way that they do.
The book contains some wonderful prose, is often very funny, and is thoroughly unsentimental in its portrayal of both families and the world in which we live. Franzen also has interesting things to say about materialism and consumerism, and how deeply engrained in society these values have become.
My main criticism would be that the book is rather long and sags somewhat in the middle, sometimes Franzens descriptions become overelaborate and you start to want the story to move a bit faster.
However, the book is well worth sticking with as the last 150 pages or so are the best, and I found the ending moving and satisfying. If you can overlook the hype and judge the book on its own merits, there is a lot to admire here.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
corrections
This book was recommended by several people before I purchased. The book was a good read, and I really got into the characters, however, I found some of the details unnecessarily... Read more
Published 2 months ago by marian
Dysfunctional Family Portrait
The Corrections is a long book. Over 600 pages. Its a big book on a small scale, telling the story of a very dysfunctional American family, that has been highly praised and... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Syriat
So dreadful, I couldn't bear to carry on
This book.......
It first caught my attention when I read that Oprah Winfrey had tried to select it for her Book Club and had been flatly refused by Franzen, saying he... Read more
It first caught my attention when I read that Oprah Winfrey had tried to select it for her Book Club and had been flatly refused by Franzen, saying he... Read more
Published 3 months ago by R. A. Davison
Absolutely superb!
I had been intrigued by the reviews of this book for some time, and had been put off by the negative ones. Read more
Published 4 months ago by E. Craxford
Puffed-up American crapola
The funniest thing about this book is how uncomfortable Franzen was with Oprah selecting it for her book club choice, and the most startling that it was shortlisted for the... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Fruitella
the correction
For my birthday I got Fourth Estate's 25th birthday edition of The Corrections. It's about a family called the Lamberts and their struggles with modern life in very selfish times. Read more
Published 8 months ago by rhysthomashello
From Chekhov to Hiaasen
The Corrections may be a one-family story that emanates from small-town St Jude in the American mid-West, but it gives us universal observations of family behaviour that span the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Roger Risborough
So, don't be put off by its lengths...
It is a very long and at places boring novel. I bought it based on reputation of its author and some very good reviews here and there but was disappointed. Read more
Published 8 months ago by S. MOHAMADI
Just loved it!
Very conscious that many of my reviews of so positive, but then I am reviewing things I have chosen to buy. Read more
Published 9 months ago by L. Quinn
The corrections
I have read this B4 & it is a bit slow moving. But it is quite a good story. I have put it down for a few days. Not like me at all.
Published 9 months ago by p3joclyn2011
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