Rating: 
Summary: Almost Impossible to Review
Review: You know you're reading good writing, but oh what a painful reading experience it is. Just when you find a shred of empathy for a character, Franzen extinguishes it. Think Ordinary People, only you can't stand the (adult) children either. If you're miserable, this book will be good company. Otherwise, you'll want to wash your hands after each reading.
Rating: 
Summary: overrated
Review: this is one of the most overrated books by one of the most overrated authors ive ever read. it easily could have been 100 pages shorter. the entire middle section was laborous. the beginning and end were good, but there was a lot of useless material which neither advanced the plot nor shed light on characters. dont read this unless you really dig being bored.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully observed and very shallow
Review: After all the hype, how could I not read the book? Easily, as it turns out. Franzen is an extremely observant man. He can capture and dissect people with a perception and thoroughness that any writer could envy. He notices and describes the actions and manipulations of relationships, the effects of needing love and recognition, the sometimes funny but often just unkind interactions between people who do not understand themselves or others. He is dead on particularly, in the clever manipulation of the Yuppie character, Gary, by his wife. He is persuasive in the sexual character of Denise. Chip is the comic character and his scenes veer between merely pathetic and truly funny. The characters are recognizable, and generally carry the burden of their assignments well. The book is a series of stories of the main characters, each of whom are 'correcting' what came before. They want to correct each other, their parents, their partners, their siblings and themselves. Each of them seems to think that if they change a behavior, the outward appearance of their lives, they will be successful is becoming the person they want to be. Or more accurately, avoid becoming the person they do not want to be. The inward journeys of the characters do not go deep. These are not thoughtful people. There is no moral basis for action, no questioning, no intellectual component to their lives, no weighing of choices, no wrestling with larger themes. Their lives and decisions are nearly always a reaction to something else and Franzen cooly, coldly and unkindly just watches.
The result is like being at a cocktail party,listening to an intelligent, perceptive and well spoken drunk skewer everyone else in the room. It's entertaining, but after a while, you begin to hope he will either reach a conclusion or just go home. Franzen see everything, and understands a good deal less. Or he is cleverly telling us that modern society understands nothing--which he could have done a good deal more briefly. For me, the book becomes distasteful in its lack of sympathy for the characters who are largely all flaws. Perhaps the requirement of contemporary writing is terminal cynicism. Perhaps the author thinks there is little redeeming about any person. Perhaps it is a clarion call to deepen the public psychological discussions of ourselves. If so, the snide, scarcastic and superior tone and lack of empathy ovewhelmed a larger message. There is no doubt he writes well, can sustain a narrative or, rather, a series of narratives barely tied together by a single Christmas. The day finally arrives, and for no reason, Chip's behavior changes, Enid is reconciled to her martyrdom, Gary fades away entirely, and Denise continues on. The father's physical and mental unravelling is detailed but unresolved. The day carries very little weight, no heavy lifting. I ended up saying to myself, "Yeah? SO...? And...?" Is it the writer's obligation to tie up, find conclusions, illustrate important things, simulate thoughts of what might have been, or what really was, or anything beyond the surface of the story? Perhaps not. Corrections has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is a very good act of observation. Because he does little else, I found it hard to care about the book, the characters or the author's point of view.
Rating: 
Summary: Out of my paradigm yet very interesting
Review: Definitely people that make me cringe, so it makes me applaud the writer just a little louder because to some extent I got it. More than that, I usually need to care about somebody to read 500 plus pages. These are never likeable people. THERE IS NO REAL REDEMPTION AT THE END. At best, they seem to want to change, but they also seem too weak and self-absorbed to work hard--unless for something material. Still, when I finished reading it, I put it on the shelf of books I really liked and would recommend. Go figure.
Rating: 
Summary: Trite
Review: longwhinded, boring, moorish. Unsympathetic characters with a male-orinted, egotistical point of view. Blech.
Rating:
Summary: Major family dynamics happening here
Review: Alfred is a retired railroad man who is losing his faculties and hiding in his basement lair. Enid is his long suffering wife who tries to find happiness in trying to get all of the family back to their midwestern home for Christmas. Gary, the eldest son, is in a nightmarish marriage to a neurotic woman, with the requisite spoiled kids. Chip is a failed professor who joins up with a Lithuanian wheeler dealer whose ex-wife he had been sleeping with, and gets involved in a shady scheme. Denise is a chef who keeps getting involved in destructive relationships. It sounds like the same old thing, but Franzen has an interesting style and detailed observations that make this different from the usual "dysfunction" kind of novel. At first I cared very little for the characters and their problems, but Franzen goes off on long tangents that really develop the inner workings of all of them, and one at least enjoys the social commentary and plot twists along the way. It's sometimes hard to read when it gets too intense , and some of the storylines don't make much sense (some of Denise's affairs, for example). I wouldn't go as far to say that I wished I could be reading it all again for the first time (as one of the testimonials on the cover said) but it's a pretty good read nonetheless.
Rating:
Summary: Playing Catchup
Review: "The Corrections" is a decent book about a family that skews more closely to the Bundys than the Cleavers, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing catch up the entire way. The book was divided up so that it would focus on one character at a time, usually flowing from the past to the present. The end effect of this is that so little of the book seems to take place in the present. In the final analysis, I wonder what the point of this book was. Every member of the family is so deeply flawed that they make my own family seem like saints by comparison. There's patriarch Alfred coming apart from Parkinson's and depression, his perpetually nagging wife Enid, selfish yuppie son Gary, aging rebel son Chip, and conflicted lesbian daughter Denise. As Franzen details each of the characters, I'm left feeling that if these people were my family I'd have disowned them long ago. This is not a story of hope, redemption, or family togetherness. It's just a yarn about a severely dysfunctional family that still can't pull it together in the end. What this book needed, in my opinion, was one central character, one primary focus and a smaller time frame. Seeing the Lamberts through one set of eyes through the Christmas holiday would have eliminated that herky-jerky feeling of jumping back to the past, coming to the present, and then jumping back to the past. Franzen's writing style tends to be wordy and overblown at times, taking too long to make simple points. That's why the book is almost 600 pages, when it could easily be 400-500. Like Michael Chabon's "Kavalier and Clay", I found myself just having to set the book aside because it would wear me down mentally to where I was almost falling asleep. I also didn't understand the point of the far-fetched Correcktall treatment and the fuss over Alfred's patent, neither of which made any real contribution to the plot. The only good thing is the characters, and that's why I kept reading. Even though there was no great epiphany where everyone got their stuff together, I thought these people were very realistic (just not like MY family). I suppose some small part of me wanted to see if they'd wind up killing each other in the end, sort of like not being able to look away from a train wreck. At any rate, this is an OK book. Flawed, but generally interesting. It wasn't the book I was expecting, but it wasn't bad either. In addition to "The Corrections", I recommend "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe. The humor, style, and widespread use of colloquialisms is very similar.
Rating: 
Summary: The best American novelist today
Review: This book is the best I have read in a long time. I believe that Franzen is the best American novelist writing today. I remember a time when it was hard for me to think of a truly great live American novelist; that time has passed. Franzen ranks in the highest orders of world fiction, on the level of Rushdie.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable and serious
Review: Jonathan Franzen dissects the Lambert family and its self-destructive ways. Franzen is a fine writer--his characters are fully realized and idiosyncratic, and his story is full of illuminating observations and darkly hilarious black humor. The book really takes off when Franzen is writing scenes; I love his dialogue and the interactions he constructs for the characters. I sometimes found myself losing patience during extended passages of backstory and/or interior experience. I also felt that the relatively rosy ending seemed at odds with the rest of the story.
Rating:
Summary: hilarious
Review: If much about contemporary American culture seems wrong to you, you might like this book as much as I did. Frantzen's sentences are magnificently constructed to reveal shades of bemusement and satire. It is a novel, so there is some bagginess. But for sheer over-the-top entertainment, indulge!
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