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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (2001-09-01)
ISBN: 0374100128
EAN: 9780374100124
Dewy Decimal #: 813.54
Hardcover: 567 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: 07946
Condition: Collectible: Good Fi
Comments: First edition book, in good condition
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
THE CORRECTIONS is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century-a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home. Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, THE CORRECTIONS brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
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Amazon.com Review
Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East. All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye: Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity. Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo
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Customer Reviews
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A Modern Classic
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-11-21
This is the first novel I have read by this author. From the very beginning, his style captured my interest via wit and insight that would seem so obvious that no one would have thought to put it in words before.
The theme of this novel isn't a "correction" but more akin to a loyalty found in family bonds that can be strained not just within one generation but from one to the next.
The characters each have their own foibles, angst and overall despondency each of them painted on to a background of atypical American family life from the mid twentieth century to the modern day.
Is there any one specific goal for each of the characters to achieve; maybe, but if you're looking for that, then this book is not for you. This novel is heavy with characterization and the development of a simple idea by the matriarch - to have one last Christmas in the house the family grew up in.
If you enjoy character driven novels or are looking for something fresh in perspective about the modern day, style and humor then this novel is for you. It's one of the few books I look forward to reading again later in my life.
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A seemingly unending stream of word vomit
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-11-17
I can think of no other way to describe this thing.
I really, really despised almost everything about The Corrections. I finished it solely so that I could write a horrible review and have it be valid.
At no single point before the last 10 pages of this 566-page monster did I feel a shred of sympathy with any of the characters. There were several moments where I thought Franzen would have been better off writing dialogue-for-the-average-Joe instead of the trumped up and out of place Dawson's Creek-esque vocabulary in almost every human interaction. His insistence on using the "25-cent word" at every turn made reading the story choppy at best... aggravating and unenjoyable.
I also couldn't help but see the author in a lot of his characters' worst personality traits. Annoying hipster-lecher I'm-better-than-capitalism-but-still-depend-on-it Chip. Whiny too-good-for-anyone Gary. Ungrateful I'm-a-bitch-but-require-all-your-love-and-attention Denise. The parents? Alfred is the only one for whom I felt any sympathy and that didn't happen until the last dregs of the book... and I think maybe even then it was a knee-jerk reaction at being so close to the book being over. Enid's issues rubbed me the wrong way for many reasons, not the least of which being that I could see my own mother in her... which means, I suppose, that Enid was probably the most well-represented character in the novel.
The secondary characters were almost entirely a sorry lot with personalities to the extreme in any number of directions - too smart, too stupid, too needy, too plain, too EVERYTHING.
I know that I'll never understand the praise this book received from critics and readers... and I'm ok with that. I do wish, however, that I could meet some of the people who relate it so easily to real life. Meeting them, perhaps, would truly terrify me. [close]
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A Real Mixed Bag
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-07-22
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have very mixed feelings about this book. I found it a very unpleasant read, although obviously well written, by a talented author.
On the downside, these were among the most pathetic, unsympathetic characters I can remember meeting in a book in a long time. The main characters are the members of the Lambert family, consisting of Enid, the incredibly insecure wife of Alfred, a retired engineer, and mother of three grown children, Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred, is a wholly uncommunicative, repressed, overly moralistic mid-westerner deteriorating from Parkinson, dealing with the embarrassment of incontinence, and facing the onset of dementia. The author spends many harrowing pages describing Alfred's terrorized hallucinations.
Like so many older people, Enid faces an uncertain future due to Alfred's health problems. Enid is in exquisite denial about Alfred's deteriorating condition, believing that everything would be OK if he just "tried harder." The one thing that Enid is clear about, is that she wants her three children to spend an idealized Christmas in their small, midwestern town of St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes).
While hard to believe, the Lambert children are in no better condition than Enid or Alfred.
Chip--the smart one--is a college professor who loses his tenure track job in an affair with a student, and is reduced to sniffing his couch for vestiges of his former lover's body odors to achieve sexual comfort.
Gary, perhaps even more pathetic than Chip, is an investment banker with a developing alcohol problem, completely henpecked and controlled by not only his attorney wife, but by his children as well, and seething with poorly concealed rage against Enid and Alfred.
Finally, there's Denise, a well regarded chef, who loses her job in an affair with a desperate, shelf-hating lesbian affair with her investor's wife.
While the characters achieve some small modicum of redemption and growth in the last 25 of the 600 or so pages, the getting there is a harrowing ride--particularly as it relates to Alfred.
On the other side, if you can get past the depression and pain, there is some real merit in this book. Its undoubtedly well-written, Franzen being a truly talented wordsmith. The pace tends to move relatively quickly,offsetting the extended length of this book.
Franzen shows great insight into the human condition, doing an exemplary job presenting the factors that drive the Lamberts to their desperate situations--but desperate they are. As I read this book, I kept imagining myself on the freeway, looking over to the other side of the road where the emergency workers were removing the dead and bloody bodies from the twisted wreckage.
While the novel does hold up a mirror to the reader, it tends to focus almost entirely on the uglier side of life.
Again, if you have the stomach and patience to get through that, the book is worth the read.
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Well worth the investment in time
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-07-07
Don't believe the hype about the hype. Brilliantly imagined, extremely well written, and just a pleasure to read.
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mmm, not that impressed
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-06-30
After seeing this on best selling lists forever, finally picked it up from my library. Liked the beginning, but it really waned. Made myself finish it since SO many people loved it, but I'm not feeling it.
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