- Paperback: 653 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate; New Ed edition (1 Mar 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1841156736
- ISBN-13: 978-1841156736
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 4.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 68,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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
46 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intimate drama of middle-class American life.,
By
This review is from: The Corrections (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
42 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Up There with the Best,
By
This review is from: The Corrections (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.
30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
look, Mom, no hands!!,
By
This review is from: The Corrections (Paperback)
I finally came around to reading this much hyped book and at first I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I found it was written with a real verve and flair. However, about three quarters of the way through I had to give up, because I simply gave up caring for the characters and what happened to them. Also, the flair and verve I had so admired initially became more like showing off. Obviously, Franzen has some talent for writing, but as the novel dragged on and nothing much happened it began to read like one big exercise in writing brio, an almost childish exclamation from Franzen to the literary world at how brilliantly he can write. Sure, for all the clever similes and tragi-comic spirals, it couldn't disguise the fact that these characters just weren't very interesting, only spoiled and self absorbed, which is fine in small doses but hard to make a novel out of when its impossible to like any of them, no matter how flawed and 'human' they're supposed to be. I think Franzen has succeeded in dazzling many readers and critics of this novel with his showy writing so that they cannot see how vapid and uninteresting this novel really is.
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