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The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
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The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

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7,316107201 (3.72)116
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I think people are tired of hearing me rave madly about this book, but it completely blew my mind, so they'll just have to deal with it. ( )
  alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 |
I think people are tired of hearing me rave madly about this book, but it completely blew my mind, so they'll just have to deal with it. ( )
  alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 |
I think people are tired of hearing me rave madly about this book, but it completely blew my mind, so they'll just have to deal with it. ( )
  alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 |
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1336126...

Long and tedious book about the disastrous Christmas celebrations of an elderly couple and their three adult children. Was probably meant to be funny in places, but I did not laugh. ( )
  nwhyte | Oct 24, 2009 |
I'm getting sick of the use of family's as a structure / lens into society. This is the umpteenth novel that goes "hey look what capitalism does the nuclear family structure". Franzen's a good writer and there's lots of fun lines but honestly I'd rather read Pynchon or Gaddis or somebody with something more unique to say. ( )
  phette23 | Oct 19, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 105 (next | show all)
Franzen’s brilliant achievement is that he creates a set of stereotypical characters and then opens the door and allows us see, in suspenseful, humorous, mesmerizing detail, their defining moments. What was once a silhouette becomes three-dimensional. The complexity becomes a dim mirror of our own complex interiority—writ large, the way we like it writ, because then we can’t help but see ourselves in it.
 
Canonical titleThe Corrections
Original publication date2001-09-01
People/CharactersAlfred Lambert, Enid Lambert, Chip Lambert, Denise Lambert, Gary Lambert
Important placesSt. Jude, Kansas, USA, Vilnius, Lithuania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Awards and honorsNational Book Award (Fiction, 2001), James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction, 2002), Oprah's Book Club selection (2001), Time's All-Time 100 Novels selection, Pulitzer Prize finalist (Fiction, 2002), International IMPAC Dublin (Shortlist, 2003) (show all 16)
DedicationTo David Means and Geneve Patterson
First wordsThe madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.
Last words(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
DescriptionThe Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one l... (show all)
Book description
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium.

Amazon.com (ISBN 0374129983, Hardcover)

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

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)

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