The Corrections: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312421273 ISBN 13: 9780312421274

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction

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.

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

From the Publisher:

". . . large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords." (David Foster Wallace)

"A literary masterpiece . . . thrilling, heartening, and inspiring about seeing life revealed so accurately, so transparently -- and finally, so forgivingly . . . Dazzling." (Francine Prose, O magazine)

"It creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world . . . it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read." (David Gates, The New York Times Book Review)

"An energetic, brooding, open-hearted and funny novel." (Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post)

"The Corrections . . . renders its mysteries with the fine filament and moral nuance they require . . ." (Richard Lacayo, Time)

"By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting, The Corrections . . . shows us two generations of an American family struggling . . ." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)