Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections

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.

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

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.

The Corrections

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