Rating: 
Summary: ...Awful
Review: This was one of the worst books I ever read. Don't bother with this book. I don't care that it won some award...
Rating: 
Summary: I've read a lot...
Review: ... of contemporary and classic literary fiction. This is is one of few books that I keep re-reading.
Incredible story of a bitter family with a lot of hope. Doesn't fullfill all the hopes of life, but it gives outrageous circumstances real substantive evidence and emotion. And by far the best use of settings I have ever read. Certainly New york and Philadelphia are well know cties, but he'd have to have some very personal experience to know some of the information he reveal about those cities. I cannot vouch for his knowledge of Lithuania or St. Jude, but I wouldn't be surprised if he went as far as to visit those cities to find out just what he needed.
The writing is gorgeous. Without without stoopifying (not an error) his audience, he is cear about every aspect of his characters and what they face at each moment. I could almost smell the juices of his receipe. Escpecially notable is the style he eithere cleverly stole or ingeniously created to relate the feelings of a person with parkinson's disease is horrifying real to a lay person like myself.Best fictional journey I have ever taken with a creative mind.
Rating:
Summary: Tale of an unhappy family in the Tolstoy vein
Review: Unhappy families have been the source of some of the greatest literature ever written from Tolstoy to Cheever. In much the same vein Jonathan Franzen delves into the lives of the Lamberts, a typical midwestern family with a pair of imperfect parents and three dysfunctionally operating grown children. P>What sets this novel apart from other, for lack of a better way of putting it- "Oprah" novels- is the way the approach to the Lamberts is connected to the era which we live in, beyond just the commonality of family strife and dysfunction. There are serious themes in this book just below the surface. But Franzen doesn't draw his characters without a vast amount of compassion. His writing, or better, his "connection" with his characters has improved immensely since his "Twenty Seventh City" novel. In the same vein this novel has been compared to Don De Lillo's "White Noise". In my opinion Franzen's compassion and connection to his characters is far superior than De Lillo's, though "White Noise" is a more comical story. In an age when there seem to be very few great novels "The Corrections"- though maybe not the "great novel" of our time- comes as close to that title as anything I've read in the last ten years.
Rating:
Summary: Incorrect
Review: I knew something was wrong when on the first page I crashed upon the phrase "gerontocratic suburbs". Uh-oh, a "clever" author who wants you to know how clever he is. This book seethes with vile, show-off writing. I do however give it one star for the sleeve photograph of the author disguised as a soap opera actor, complete with 3-day face stubble. I'm going back to Proust.
Rating: 
Summary: Just OK
Review: The story is written well, but it works so hard to show that all is hopeless. I could never find anyone that I liked.
Rating:
Summary: most of the negative reviews here are idiotic
Review: If you read the one- and two-star reviews posted here, you'll realize that Franzen's detractors have some pretty weak reasons for disliking the book. You'll see a lot of "Where's the story?" and "Why does he write such long sentences?" It's clear to me that all of the Oprah and Harper's hype behind this book caused it to get into the wrong hands. By "wrong hands" I mean people who were expecting a Clancy-esque plot or trite TV characters. The Corrections is not so easily digestible, and for many, it will simply be too difficult. What this says about Franzen's experiment to write a novel that is both socially important and appealing to the masses, I don't know. Maybe it's not possible. Ironically, the plot is simple. Enid Lambert is trying to get her scarred and scattered family together for one last Christmas. If you need more thrills and explosions, don't read The Corrections. If, however, you have a decent command of the English language and a love for characters who are as internally explosive as anything you'll see in a Vin Diesel movie, then by all means read it. (Now that I think of it, the book does contain it's share of actual explosions, particularly in the Lithuania scenes, as well as a fair amount of steamy sex.) You don't have to be an academic to appreciate this book. You just have to love a rich, witty, and complex story in the great American tradition of Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Don DeLillo. The Corrections, like all other fine novels, is not perfect. Rather than nitpick at its minor flaws, just let yourself get lost in the story and you'll find that its pretty hard to put down. The Lamberts, like the Compsons and the Joads, will soon become members of your extended Amerian family.
Rating:
Summary: What is the big deal about this book?
Review: I just don't get it! How this book has been a best seller and received good reviews is beyond me!! I passed this book along to my daughter, thinking maybe I was just too old to appreciate the story, and she agreed: it was awful!
Rating: 
Summary: Great linguist but what about the plot
Review: The writer has an amazing, almost unparalled, ability to convey thoughts and scenery concisely and with 100% visual clarity. You know just what the character is thinking or seeing. The characters, although possessing common personality disorders we all share to one degree or another, are one-of-a-kind and fresh. The plot however is disjointed (perhaps purposefully) and the author often overanalyzes characters by providing too much, often tedious, background/flashbacks. The only force unifying the book is the disfunctionality of the family, otherwise it's just a collection of 4-5 different vignettes that awkwardly come together toward the end of the book. I enjoyed most of the book and was constantly impressed by the writer's language. But I also skimmed over whole sections because they became too boring to read. The author has considerable talent but took a great premise for this book and made a mess of it.
Rating:
Summary: Sometimes sloppy is just sloppy.
Review: This guy belongs on Oprah. Or somewhere worse than Oprah. I mean, it's a book that plays to the worst cliches of TV melodrama, the lowest common denominator. That it is considered a "literary" book tells you just how sorry is the state of things literary. Tell you what--go to the store. Read the 1st chapter standing there. If, having read chapt 1, you want to buy it, well, more power to you. It gets better, too, after chapter 1, but it has so far to go. Too far. Buy something else.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Did I Mention It Was Amazing?
Review: I didn't read this book - I listened to it, the unabridged recording by George Guidall (15 CDs, 22 hours!). Without a doubt, Guidall's interpretation and performance added much to this novel, but you gotta give props to J-Fran. Here is a novel that not only tries to make a point (many points, actually) but is consistently entertaining and ridiculously accessible. There was not a single moment where I felt as if the book was dragging. I even liked all the Lithuania sections, which some people thought too pedantic. The book is crafted by joining long, third-person-voiced sections together, and there's nothing too spectacular or brilliant about the way it moves. They're all just very solid sections that give us the opportunity to be with each of the main characters of the Lambert clan - first Chip, the failure son who's a stand-in for Humbert Humbert (tangent: Melissa - 3 syllables, just like Lolita; Lambert - sounds a bit like Humbert, no? Coincidence? I doubt it); Gary, the oldest son who is succesful in business yet a powerless moron with his vicious family; Alfred and Enid, the parents, as they spend a wretched vacation on a luxury cruiseline; Denise, the daughter who's a chef and has issues with her sexuality.... If I can find one fault with The Corrections (and believe me, it's not easy), it is this: sometimes, it felt as if the characters were being put through the ringer just so Franzen could make a point. Sometimes, you could see the strings on the arms and legs of the characters as they were being yanked and jerked by the author. But even when this was happening, I could never honestly say that I didn't enjoy it. This book made me laugh, if not through the black-humor-laced plot, then through Franzen's pure ability as a writer. I laughed because some parts were genuinely funny; other times, I laughed because I didn't think a human being was capable of writing down so many great lines in a single paragraph. The Corrections came with much hype, and I'm happy to report that it truly lived up to every red and orange line of accolades printed on the back of the dust jacket. In this novel, Franzen has managed to join together the dark beauty of Vladimir Nabokov and the concise brutality of Richard Yates. Franzen is the Cirque de Soleil of verbal acrobatics. My personal favorite part of the book was the last section, because by that point, Franzen seemed to have exhausted all the bigger ideas and was only interested in dealing with the Lamberts. The family drama that unfolds is funny and moving, just perfect.
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