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 announces Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18571 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

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

Sunday Times - Summer Reading Choice
'At once epic and humane, its panoramic vision is infused with wit and warmth.'

Paperback of the Week - Sunday Times, September 8, 2002
'With its finely variegated characters and strong emotional undertow, Franzen's sublime domestic saga... is a must.'

Customer Reviews

A truly aweful book
This is a book for the "Daily Mail readers". Those who love soap operas, gossip and watching other people's lives. It is dull, it is predictable and an insult to anyone who has ever read any work of literature.

Bitter and mean
Hmmm. I was recommended this book by my brother and, unfortunately, we have not been speaking since! No, we are, but I didn't really understand all the hype around this book. I hate to not finish a book and so, labouring through, when I got to the end I found myself looking at the back cover and swearing silently I would never again waste time on another book I did not enjoy. It seemed to me that I could not find a single trace of the humanity or lightness of touch the slipcover said were there. Instead I thought it was mean spirited, cruel and - one of the particular storyline threads - plain unbelievable.

As a premise it seems like it might work, dysfunctional family somehow trying to get along despite life's tricks and so on. In fact, as I'm typing this I'm finding it hard to locate the energy to fully describe the premise, so sapped of energy did it make me feel. The brother in question said he just found it funny in places but for me, it seemed like one of those college pranks where they think it might be funny to feed a pledge a keg of beer, attach electrodes to his gonads and get him admitted to hospital. Nasty, sarcastic, bitter humour.

Perhaps if I read it again I might find the humanity and humour promised but I don't think I'll be torturing myself again. It just didn't play nice.

Very, very good
A lovely, poignant book this. Here we have a typically disfunctional family with the parents slipping into old age, indeed Alfred the Father is slipping into Alzheimers. Somehow the rest of the family have to deal with their parents - with a mother that won't acknowledge reality - while their own lives are falling to bits.

Anyone with parents who are getting that bit old will empathise with the characters here. Frantzen has written a lovely book which is well worth reading. Far better than I had imagined it would be.