The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections (Barnes & Noble Reader's Companion) (4th Estate Matchbook Classics) (Reading Group Guides)

by Jonathan Franzen

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

After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity, and their children have long since fled for the catastrophes of their own lives. As Alfred’s condition worsens and the Lamberts are forced to face their secrets and failures, Enid sets her heart on one last family Christmas.

Bringing the old world of civic virtue and sexual inhibition into violent collision with the era of hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare and globalised greed, `The Corrections’ confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of the American soul.

Reviewed by jamiereadthis on

4 of 5 stars

Share
4.675 stars. "It was, alas, good," ...and appropriately enough, right on the heels of "Envy," an essay by Kathryn Chetkovic, the equally gifted, if less substantially successful, longtime partner of Franzen. (Oddly, a little act of fairness in reading her before him, and even, reading him because of what she had written.)

And this book was, in fact, marvelously substantially good. Sprawling, claustrophobic, deeply human and deeply personal— if claimed to be overwritten, it's overwritten in a way that absolutely works. I came close to not putting it down.

Last modified on

Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 13 December, 2008: Finished reading
  • 13 December, 2008: Reviewed