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  • Reading The Corrections

  • I was extremely unhappy with this book. An epic novel that comes in at more than 500 pages, every character is contemptible and impossible to relate to. Early on, I thought there was a chance I might be able to find common ground with Alfred, the patriarch, and Denise, the sister/daughter, but alas, ... Continue

    I was extremely unhappy with this book. An epic novel that comes in at more than 500 pages, every character is contemptible and impossible to relate to. Early on, I thought there was a chance I might be able to find common ground with Alfred, the patriarch, and Denise, the sister/daughter, but alas, it wasn't to be.

    The Corrections centers on a Midwestern family that has spread out and lost touch. Father and mother live in their St. Jude home in an unnamed state (Illinois? Indiana? Iowa?) while the kids have relocated to New York City and Philadelphia. We weave through their various existences as we learn more and more about each individual and the reasons they are the way they are.

    One of my biggest issues with the book is Franzen's treatment of women, though admittedly the men don't fare better. His contempt for the female persuasion seems to shine through. I wish I had given myself permission to quit on the book after about 150 pages, but I felt as though I ought to see it through.

    

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• ― moogle said on Mar 27, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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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