Customer Reviews

The Corrections

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In Jonathan Franzen's much-discussed novel, "The Corrections" (2001), one of the main characters, a failed academic named Chip Lambert, hopes to restore his fortunes by a screenplay he has written on the Tudors which opens with a long, unperformable section on the sexual foibles of that age. Near the end of this long novel, Chip decides to recast his unpromising script as a farce rather than as a "serious" -- work. Thus, the play-in-progress moves "from tragedy to farce" which might be taken as the theme of Franzen's own book.

The novel tells the story of a disfunctional family, the Lamberts, mirrored in a disfunctional society. The two major protagonists, Alfred and Enid Lambert have been married nearly 50 years and have spent their lives in a town called St Jude, Iowa. Albert is a retired railroad engineer who, since his retirement, has spent his life in a recliner and who has recently developed Parkinson's disease and probably dementia. In his younger days, Albert spent much of his time in his basement in a metallurgical lab, where he secured two patents for his amateur studies. Enid, his wife, has the burden of taking care of Albert. She wants to have a lively life in retirement,to go on cruises and have fun. She craves the company of her family, the couple's three children. In particular, she wants her children and three granchildren home for one last family Christmas in St Jude. Enid has been frustrated, emotionally and sexually, by Albert's aloofness, silences, and frequent business absences during their marriage.

The couple has three children, Gary, the above-mentioned Chip, and Denise, each of whom have severe problems in their lives. Gary is financially successful with three children but his marriage is in difficulty and he, as did Albert, suffers from a depression that he won't acknowledge to himself. Chip, the failed academic, lost his teaching job due to an affair with a student. He borrows large sums from his sister, Denise, and finds himself in Lithuania in a con-scheme with a former Lithuanian diplomat with whose estranged wife Chip has had an affair. Denise is a successful restauranteur, who had her first sexual experience as an adolescent with an older married man when working as an intern on her father's railroad. She later marries and divorces a restauranteur substantially older than herself, and then finds herself involved with a married man as well as with his wife in a lesbian relationship. The stories of Albert, Enid, and the three children are all told at great length with many flashbacks, culminating in the final section -- the long-awaited and predictably disatrous Christmas dinner in St. Jude.

The book has aptly been described as combining elements of Thomas Mann's early masterpiece, "Buddenbrooks" and the contemporary American writer Dom DeLillo's "White Noise." As does "Buddenbrooks", the work involves the decline of a family and a culture. Importantly, both books emphasize the works of the German idealist and pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. (Albert in the book, somewhat too obviously is an inveterate reader of Schopenhauer.) The book gets its brash, overwritten, irreverent and highly critical tone from DeLillo, a writer I have never been able to enjoy.

Franzen's book has good moments and moments I thought were dreadful, but ultimately it for the most part worked for me. His characters, both the members of the Lambert family and the many secondary characters, are brought to life in all their troubles. The social criticism -- the discussion of the claimed materialism, selfishness, lack of values, technological obsessions, lack of sexuality and intimacy of the current United States, is unmercifully pounded home again and again. There is a tone of alienation, superiority, shrillness and judgment in this book which I found off-putting. One looks for both compassion and understanding. There is little of this until, perhaps, the end of the tale. The book is far too long for what it says and in many places overwritten.

In spite of these distinct shortcomings, the book moves along and pivots convincingly from "tragedy to farce" as it least some of the characters achieve an insight into themselves and to the dissatisfactions in their lives. For all the modernist trappings, the book has a relatively traditional message -- in its emphasis on trying to enjoy life in the everyday, to take the moments of love and sexual intimacy that come one's way, to not shut oneself off from others, and to avoid negativism -- of the sort otherwise on too much display throughout the book. There is the hint of a possible redemption from the woes that beset the characters through lightening up a bit and through working towards a happy sexual and loving relationship. The book is probably worth the effort it takes to read -- as these efforts tend to point out that the achievement of the goal the book sets forth is not easy, under the best of circumstances, and requires a degree of reflection and insight to see and realize.

Oprah Winfrey did this book an honor by featuring it on her show.

Robin Friedman

The plot revolves around the efforts of Enid, the status-obsessed matriarch, to get the family together for one last Christmas before the formerly overbearing patriarch, Alfred, permanently succombs to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and/or dementia. The eldest son, Gary, is dutiful, financially successful, arrogant, and self-absorbed and has the task of persuading the his wife and children (who are currently engaged in their own civil war) to comply with his mother's wish. The middle daughter, Denise, is a sexually-confused rising star in the culinary world. Chip, the youngest, is taking his time growing up and, being the least successful, least responsible, and most spoiled, seems most likely to let his mother down.

The writing is often splendidly funny or entertaining, and the book is not without some insights into the American family, but too often the book veers into satire or shallow caricature apparently to avoid addressing complexities of character.

In my view, Franzen did not effectively use the many fantastic (synonym "unreal", not "superb") episodes to weave a coherent statement about American life today, but allowed them to devolve into jokes simply for humor's sake. There is nothing wrong with that, but I think Franzen could have achieved more.

Overall, it was an engaging and enjoyable read, but it left me a bit disappointed. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was left wanting a bit more. My biggest gripe, again, is a lack of complexity in the characters. I do recommend the book, but with reservations: Don't expect too much.

At the start of this book, I wondered where the author was trying to take me but less than half way through,I understood. I found this book to have a bit of everything...it stirred many emotions. The writing was excellent and the character development was great. I believe readers could honestly identify with the characters and in fact, could see their own family in the troubles and trials of the Lamberts. This book gave me pause to think about my own family and just how well our parents know us or even how well we know them. We often believe that as our parents age, WE know what's best for them as though they are unable to think for themselves just because they are over 65!!
In short, it was a quirky, intelligent read...but not if you enjoy some of the formulated tales that are on the market today!!

The first 150 pages or so I was engrossed in the book. Then I kept reading and I couldn't take it anymore. I started skimming over large sections of the book to get through it faster. The characters were not interesting enough to have ~100 pages written about each one of them. I started using this book as a tool to fall asleep on the airplane.

I am not going to say much about this book except that I hate it in a way that I have never hated a book before. For the life of me I cannot fathom how so many critics think so highly of this author. It is self absorbed, pretentious, un-funny garbage. The book feels like it was written by a teenager after two philosophy classes and about 20 MFA programs who oh so desperately needs to be told he is a genius. Mission accomplished: A talking turd for sure.

This book is about as pedestrian as it gets. The characters are flat and typical. Maybe Franzen should have made their "corrections" before he started writing. It just doesn't seem like he knows them. A character in a novel like this must be someone that you could conceivably and believably meet. They have to have their own personality over which the author himself has little control, but Franzen is beating his characters into submission with a pen.
My major peeves with this story:
1) The style is too constructed, Franzen is a poor writer and attempts to hide it by doing something different and experimental, but his experiment would be more effective if it were coffee house poetry. Save it for the cappuccino drinkers.
2) The language is excessive. Use the words in your own lexicon. If you need a thesaurus to find a better word, maybe you need to start taking those Increase your Word Power tests in Reader's Digest. Use your instincts, not your pretentions.
- zoysia (Pg. 1) perennial grass
Not in a typical pocketbook dictionary or thesaurus, not even in an abridged Oxford. I found it in the Scrabble Player's Dictionary.
- gerontocratic (Also on the first page) authority or government of old people
Yes, we all think you're very clever. Your adjectives are overblown and unecessary. Here's a phrase "verbal eructation".
Maybe I'm just being a "mome" (That's a nit-picking critic Mr. Franzen) but I just read a review of Franzen's new book, in which he "laments the fiction being produced by many younger writers today". It takes courage to write. The only reason I have been so willing to nit-pick over Franzen's book is that he is so willing to dismiss the efforts of others.

I was held by this novel for most of its length. For four hundred odd pages it had all the qualities of the best American prose: urbane, witty, richly descriptive, full of sentiment but not sentimental. But I'm afraid that my reading experience left me cold. The novel which had masqueraded so brilliantly as a uniquely American tragedy, by Franzen's own indirect admission, gave way to farce. The characters were revealed to have motivations that originated outside themselves and suddenly it became impossible to care about them. As they became absurd in Franzen's eyes, they became absurd in mine. He abandoned them and cut them down to less than human fictive types. They were no longer human beings and hence I felt little for them in the end. I think this is a very good book except for Franzen's fatal misstep. His desire to be cool, to not seem to be investing too much of himself in his characters emptied the book of a sincerity it needs to succeed as a humane and human document. In the end, Franzen lacks heart. And this is the worst sort of novelistic failure because it cannot be corrected.

Jonathan Franzen's `The Corrections' is a skillfully conceived and adeptly written novel about a family, the Lambert's, who are navigating the new realities of modern society with mixed success. The patriarch and the matriarch, Alfred and Enid, still live in St. Jude in the home where they raised their three children. Alfred, who is a retired railroad executive, suffers from depression and battles the onset of Parkinson's disease, while Enid perpetually competes with the Jones'. The Lambert's oldest son, Gary, lives in Philadelphia with his manipulative wife, Caroline, and their three sons. Like his father, Gary denies that he may suffer from depression. The middle child, Chip, is a disgraced college professor who lost both his job and his chance at tenure by willingly allowing himself to be involved with (and manipulated by) a precocious female student. Emotionally bankrupt and having no place else to go, Chip agrees to travel with Gitanas, the husband of his recent former girlfriend, to Lithuania and create an Internet business to defraud American investors. Finally, Denise an accomplished chef in a trendy Philadelphia restaurant and a part-time lesbian, is beautiful but has no moral compass.

The superb prose is no better illustrated than during the extended metaphor Franzen uses to allow Denise to compare her romantic experiences with her ex-husband, Emile, with those of her same-sex lover, Robin. With Emile, Denise thinks, "The last thing she wanted late at night was to follow a complicated and increasingly time-consuming recipe for a dish she was too tired to enjoy. Prep time was fifteen minutes. Even after that, the cooking was seldom straightforward. The pan over-heated, the heat was too high, the heat was too low, the onions refused to caramelize or burned immediately and stuck; you had to set it aside to cool off, you had to start over after painful discussion with the now angry and anguished sous-chef..." Conversely, continues Denise's stream-of-consciousness, "Robin was pręt-a-mange. You didn't need a recipe, you didn't need prep, to eat a peach. Here was the peach, boom, here was the payoff."

The title is a multifaceted play on words that relates to themes and ideas in the parallel story lines. For Chip, the corrections are literally his belief that his screen play immediately requires changes. (Chip's girlfriend, Julia, gives Chip that idea when, after she reads the screen play, she dumps him.) For Alfred, corrections to his deteriorating mental state may be possible through a phase-II testing drug being manufactured by a biotech firm that bought a patent that Alfred himself developed in his basement many years earlier. The idea of corrections permeates in some way each of the main characters' lives, some of the secondary characters' lives, and throughout the entire story as well.

The stories build to a climax when, after a great deal of emotional blackmail from Enid, the family, sans significant others, convene for Christmas at the Lambert ancestral home in St. Jude for one last time before the train in Alfred's mind leaves the station for the last time. The event is not exactly what Enid had anticipated, but does provide a reasonable resolution, a somewhat happy ending, and even more corrections. In this reviewer's opinion, corrections are, if not synonymous with, are certainly a close relative to rationalizations.

While the pages in `The Corrections' turn very easily, the reader detects an undercurrent of cynicism, which is just a bit disconcerting. While the reading is technically superb and the story is rock-solid, the tone may be suggestive of the author's arrogance, aloofness, or superiority to traditional family values...but THAT is part the story. To base one's dislike of this literarily sound novel on the author's contemptuous opinion of what family life in the Midwest may be is akin to panning the film `Leaving Las Vegas' because it was written in the context of prostitution. In spite of cynicism may be disagreeable to some readers, that component of the setting does not make `The Corrections' any less interesting or the prose any less inspired.

This book is everything the movie American Beauty should have been. It's thought honest, provoking, and insiteful about life without being different just for the sake of being "artistic."

It took me about 80-90 pages before I really started getting into the book. Every page is better then the previous one, all the way to the end. The author writes intelligently about so many things, you just can't help but wonder how knows so much.

I never understood how a book could be funny and sad at the same time, but this book pulls it off masterly.

Definitely 5 stars.

I read this book before I knew there was any hype about it. It wasn't a "bad" book, but I don't understand the hype that followed it. I found it merely average. There was nothing groundbreaking, nothing particularly insightful, nothing that I hadn't read before by better-written, more entertaining novels. Perhaps the "controversy" is less about the story itself but more about what happens when someone jumps on a bandwagon. As soon as it was hailed as a Great American Novel, people began to look for reasons to tear it down. I didn't find this story interesting enough to keep my copy... I left it at an airport for someone else to pick up. It wasn't even worth dragging back home to donate to my library. That's just my opinion, of course, but I'm not planning to check out anything more by Franzen... there are too many writers I enjoy to bother with this one.