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The Corrections [Paperback]

Jonathan Franzen
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (129 customer reviews)

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The Corrections The Corrections 3.5 out of 5 stars (129)
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Book Description

1 Mar 2004

The winner of THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, the New York Times No.1 Bestseller and the worldwide literary sensation, The Corrections has established itself as a truly great American novel.

The Lamberts – Enid and Alfred and their three grown-up children – are a troubled family living in a troubled age. Alfred is ill and as his condition worsens the whole family must face the failures, secrets and long-buried hurts that haunt them if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs. Stretching from the Midwest in the mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of globalised greed, The Corrections brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty into wild collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and New Economy millionaires. It announces Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.



Product details

  • Paperback: 653 pages
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate (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 (129 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 271,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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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

‘A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question, what life is for – and that is as much as anyone could ask.' Blake Morrison, GUARDIAN

'For anyone who has ever found themselves guiltily yearning for an Anne Tyler while in the middle of an Updike or Wolfe. The Lamberts are utterly believable, and once they have all told their stories you can't help but sympathise with them. Be prepared to be moved.' Laurence Phelan, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

'Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike & Roth. That's why there is so much excitement about it.' David Sexton, EVENING STANDARD

'A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch.' Jeremy Treglowen, FINANCIAL TIMES

'Impossible to dislike, an unpretentious page-turner.' Zadie Smith, GUARDIAN Books of the Year


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
58 of 64 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Intimate drama of middle-class American life. 28 Sep 2003
By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAME TOP 100 REVIEWER
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.... Read more ›

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51 of 57 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Up There with the Best 4 Jan 2003
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.... Read more ›
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing stuff 22 Nov 2001
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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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius 10 Feb 2006
Format:Paperback
While I often struggle to remember names of people I've just met, I remember the names of all the Lamberts a few years after reading the book and I'm sure I'll still remember them in another twenty years. Frantzen's characterisations are so sensitively and brilliantly observed that by the time I finished the book, I felt like a friend of the family. Sitting in awe at the rare ability of the author, I felt grateful for the insight into the thoughts and minds of each of the five very different characters which were so vivid that reading this book felt as close to mind-reading as I will ever get. The Corrections is the work of a genius and I can think of few authors capable of writing at this level.

It's a hard read and yes, in places it can be uncomfortable and occasionally, briefly laborious, but that's part of life and this book couldn't be more lifelike. Read and persist with this book and you will be rewarded for keeping it real. At the end, I'm sure you'll love even those bits you found to be a chore and realise that no words were used without purpose and which didn't add to the overall effect of this book, which is haunting and incredible. Loved it!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars Well-written but dull
I could see that this is a well-written and constructed book but I found the characters and their (mostly self-inflicted) dilemmas uninteresting and it seemed overlong for what it... Read more
Published 13 days ago by nads
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 1 month 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 3 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 5 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 8 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 10 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 10 months ago by Jack Barak
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