Name: The Corrections
ISBN: 9780007317998

Jonathan Franzen

From the author of ‘Freedom’, a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes.

The Corrections

Really enjoyed the beginning and I think Chip’s arc was my favorite. It dragged so badly for me in the middle and I think the voice lost its charm as I went on :( A lot of recollection, I felt like not much happens after the point where we began so I thought more would happen but it does come around I guess? Good holiday book about American midwest / east coast malaise & family 👍 

chiara

Roman

Die Korrekturen

Tieftraurig und dann wieder sehr komisch beschreibt Jonathan Franzen das Porträt einer zerrütteten Familie aus dem Mittleren Westen der USA. Ich war überrascht wie nahe ich mich den wirklich sonderbaren und schwierigen Familienmitgliedern am Ende gefühlt habe. Die Beschreibung der Charaktere ist großartig! Zeitweise ging es für mich aber an uninteressanten Stellen zu sehr ins Detail und das Buch hatte dadurch seine Längen. 

Marlene 

hileahrious

An expertly-written, awkward, family story about regular lives and serious problems. 

At first I wasn’t sure about this book, I thought it wasn’t my preferred type of story. Plus, it’s hella long. However, I was pleasantly surprised. The dysfunctional relationship between family members is frustrating; their decisions make you want to punch them, but their hopelessness is simultaneously endearing. It’s real, nitty-gritty family “fun.”

My favorite part is probably the way Franzen writes the perspective of Alfred in his dementia... sounds a bit grim, but it shows just how hard the struggle is for him and his whole family.

Joe Ross

This book was the first book I read in a long time that seemed to let the characters really push the story. Too often, even in good literature, the characters seem inexplicably pushed on by the story; The plot seems more real, more palpable, than the people.

This plot, however, clearly rests on the shoulders and conscience's of the characters. Anyone interested in character development (or stories that take place, much of the time, in Philly) should consider this book an indispensible read.

Irene Alegre

I FINALLY finished The Corrections.

Long read.

I ended up liking it but I can't say I enjoyed every single bit of it. Some paragraphs I could have done without. But all in all it was good.

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.

Emmett

In 60-plus pages and that was enough. If the author hoped for crass ribaldry - even in the spirit of mockery - to convey humour then he would be disappointed, as is this reader. The affair between Chip and Melissa was gratuitously meaningless, a series of tasteless sex scenes fronted by two characters who are little more than walking cardboard cut-out failings of the imagination, fulfilling only, one suspects, the pleasure of the writer who so generously coloured in the details. This reader can brave word vomit and odd syntax in the spirit of characterisation and narrativised monologue, but not uninteresting characters whose 'quirks' (and not particularly thought-provoking ones at that) occupy the whole of that shell called their personality. Reading 60-plus pages was enough: they give no reason to go further.

John-Paul Teti

Bob Simone

You know when you tell someone about something that's bugging you and they don't really get it? This was the opposite of that for me. YMMV.

Christopher McCaffery

Joshua Line

Tara King

Well, here's something: I'm about eight pages in and it's already knocked me on my butt. I read the first paragraph three times before I could go on. Phew. This one's gonna be a doozy.

Michael Camilleri

As engaged as I was at points, a lot of the time this felt like a slog. Franzen seems to almost go out of his way to make each character in the Lambert family as dislikable as possible. There's a degree to which this pays off in the end but, even then, it's still pretty bleak. Making you care nevertheless is certainly a skill, I'm just not sure I needed 600 pages of evidence of it.

Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award An American Library Association Notable Book Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul. Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says. Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints. Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.