Stretching from the Midwest at mid-century to contemporary Wall Street, this story of a family's breakdown brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into collision with the era of home surveillance, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalized greed.
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Amazon 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.
Review
/ 'Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture -- our culture. And he has done it with a sympathy and expansiveness that bends the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision.' Don DeLillo / 'Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords.' David Foster Wallace / 'In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment.' Michael Cunningham 'I only put the book down when my life needed tending to ! no one book of course can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as The Corrections seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read.' New York Times
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
57 of 63 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
51 of 57 people found the following review helpful
By Paul Turner
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.
28 of 32 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I was enormously impressed by this novel. Franzen has crafted a strong, deep ,tightly woven tale of a family, encompassing themes such as love,death and aging, sex, money and much more besides.
It succeeds in being both a novel of the heart and the head. There are plenty of ideas in this book but Franzen doesnt let the ideas and themes obscure the characters in the book, of which there are several, all realised in clear detail. Apparently the author wrote parts of this novel in the dark to avoid cliche and if so his technique certainly worked. The writing is witty, loaded with insights into our routine and habits: in short the way we live our lives.
Franzen tackles a variety of subjects with aplomb. He can be humorous, touching, sexy, informative, sad, farcical, but is always, always, honest. And, as he gropes around the edges of the story, riffing on the things that interest and intrigue him, he always reins evrything in for the greater good of the structure of the novel.
A book which,like so much good literature, shows you the way the world works, in a way you always knew but never realised you really did until you were told.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cracking reads.
I loved reading this fast despite its thickness! Drags a tiny bit in the middle, but very good characterisation, and a warmth for all the characters. Read more
Published 15 days ago by paris david
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible
Incredibly boring book with too much in it. Different parts barely relate to one another; different events and characters are mentioned and then forgotten.. Read more
Published 2 months ago by M. Rami
4.0 out of 5 stars
Absorbing and Enjoyable
Great read, Franzen's intricate detail and description of the main characters gets you thoroughly absorbed in their lives, thoughts and actions.
Published 4 months ago by Adam Watson
5.0 out of 5 stars
the joys and bitterness of family life
Wonderful wonderful read that sucks you in from the very first paragraph...into the lives of the elderly Midwestern couple, Alfred and Enid - he in the first stages of Parkinsons/... Read more
Published 5 months ago by sally tarbox
1.0 out of 5 stars
I do not stand corrected.
I had not read Franzen before so had no idea he wrote like Ian McKewan but with jokes - have you heard the one about the man who thought he was being followed by a turd? Read more
Published 6 months ago by Arj Maxwell
4.0 out of 5 stars
An important book
A really clever, subtle and ultimately poignant account of family life in western society. Franzen is the contemporary American novelist for our times, if only a uk author could... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Richard dare
4.0 out of 5 stars
Buy on the dips
Nothing is perfect, nothing is ideal, nothing is quite as it should be in the American dream. Society is in need of corrections, and sometimes corrections occur on their own, as in... Read more
Published 7 months ago by reader 451
5.0 out of 5 stars
I really enjoyed it ... second time round!
As you can tell from all the previous reviews this is a real 'love it' or 'hate it' type book. It was bought for me as a gift quite a few years ago (probably when it was first out)... Read more
Published 9 months ago by EmmaS
1.0 out of 5 stars
Truly awful ... a very poor effort
A boring and meaningless novel! It is so badly written I gave up after 150 pages ... which I never do! Read more
Published 9 months ago by Jack Barak
5.0 out of 5 stars
The dysfunctional family at its best!
I am a keen American literature enthusiast and enjoyed this book immensely. The plot lines are interestingly woven together from the perspective of the three adult children, each... Read more
Published 10 months ago by lovebooks
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