Rating: 
Summary: Ignore the hype, enjoy the book
Review: When a novel is published with the hype, publicity and media fanfare of "The Corrections" it seems to create an odd backlash. The book is rarely judged on its own merits, on whether of not it is simply a good, entertaining novel, but instead, judged on whether of not it is the greatest piece of literature ever created, an inherently unfair standard. There are probably a whole plethora of reasons as to why this is the case, from inflated expectations to the bizarre animosity many readers of "serious" fiction have with anything that becomes too popular or makes money. In other words, I would be willing to bet that had "The Corrections" been published without the immense fanfare, you would find its average Amazon.com user rating much higher, since people would be judging it on its own terms, instead of on whether or not it is deserving of its status as the "it" book of the time. After finishing, "The Corrections", two things are for sure: Franzen is an excellent writer, equally adept at both humor and drama, and he also has a keen and observant eye for human behavior. Franzen's characters are some of the most three-dimensional characters to ever hit the page. Each character is so fully fleshed out that it is hard to believe they are fictional. Franzen doesn't just give you just a base level understanding of each character and then move on, instead you get even the most subtle details of each characters personality. You have the overbearing mother, who stubbornly refuses to face reality, the repressed, distant father rapidly losing control of his body and mind, to their grown children, all of whom, in their own way, have made a mess of their own lives in an attempt to "not be like their parents". While the topic of dysfunctional families if far from original, it is rare to see the subject dealt with in such an entertaining and authentic way, without stereotypical characters or a convoluted plot. I had two criticisms of "The Corrections", having nothing to do with the story itself, but more to do with the length and pacing of the book. Each primary character in the novel is given his or her own section, almost like a novel within a novel, which, while serving to give the reader a detailed understanding of each character, did get a bit tedious. The section where the parents, Alfred and Enid, are on a seniors cruise was so long and often boring that after awhile I was ready to jump overboard myself. That chapter easily could have been cut down by half. Also, while I appreciated that each character was given equal coverage in the book, I thought the novel would have flowed better had it been paced differently. Instead of separating each characters story into individual sections, I think it would have been wiser to have interspersed between the various characters throughout the book. Franzen could have kept all the same information in the novel, but made each section seem less exhausting. Another problem with dedicating an individual section of the novel to each character was it made it a bit hard to keep all of the various stories straight. For example, Chip, the character who is the focus of the novel's first section, doesn't return until several hundred pages later, so by the time he reappeared I had forgotten so much about his situation that I had to spend an annoyingly long amount of time going back to the first section of the book to refresh my memory. Outside of these two complaints, I thought "The Corrections" was a solid effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Franzen sporting two day stubble in jacket photo...
Review: ...is your first warning. You can skim entire sections of this book without missing anything. Lots of scenes are clearly written for big picture deal. I might not have been so severe had I not just finished reading Sijie Dai's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" -- a wonderful book that probably makes Franzen's writing seem worse than it is.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't Like At All
Review: I thought this was a boring book and I thought it would never end!
Rating: 
Summary: blah blah blah
Review: While reading this book, I was completley uninterested and bored out of my mind. It was about a mother and father who decided to have a little fun and travel to see their children after spending a long time away from them. The transition between each sibling went fluently, but it was still a bit dragged on.The summary on the inside flap of the book states that it is about a father getting Parkinson's and Alzheimer's Disease, but little did it tell of the effects the diseases had on the father and his family. Most would think the story is about a family tryin to help their father (from the decieving inside flap), when in reality, little is about him and his struggle through the diseases. It was extremley long, and overrated by many peopl. Most of the parts in the book were over elaborated and not necessary in order to understand the plot, if anything, it made the book harder to read. Everything someone said had a story behind it. The author,Jonathan Franzen, was not creative at all by taking a very simplistic veiwpoint on an average family's life and doing nothing with it. The Corrections is a waste of money.
Rating: 
Summary: Depressing and Draining
Review: Like so many other Oprah Book Club books, this one will sap you of any emotional optimism and resiliency you may have built up over the last 12 months. However, it is also well-written, insightful and allows you to see a sad, horrible situation from the many points of view that allowed it to become what it is. It is everything you hope your family will not be.
Rating:
Summary: Good, not great.
Review: Look, it's a good book, and I enjoyed reading it. Parts of it are a bit of a slog, and parts of it miss the mark, but on the whole it's a worthwhile read. But the rabid kudos from people who are anxious to prove their literary avant-garde bona fides are overdone. Surely it's no coincidence that two of the most obsequious reviews were from people who (1) casually mentioned he'd read the book in one night; or (2) bragged about how he reads 100-150 "mostly literary" books per year.
Ok, I'm impressed that someone can get through the book in one night. They're clearly cooler than me. But come on; we're talking about a 700-page book here. Maybe if you read (or should I say "skim") that quickly the rougher patches don't trouble you much (at least you won't be stuck reading them for very long).
Almost all of the wildly enthusiastic reviews I've read scream out the reviewer's need to be perceived as a member of the intellectual/literary elite. (E.g., "People who don't like this book as me just aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate it.")
As I said, it's a good book, probably one of the better books to be published last year. If you enjoy good literature, you'll probably enjoy the book. But don't believe the hype that it's the cultural event of the decade.
Rating:
Summary: Po Mo Pop
Review: Franzen's novel is heart-breaking. He should be commended for taking such a risk in our hip, Po Mo age. The Corrections is, at once, a rejection of postmodernism's sarcastic irony (a rejection of emotionless fiction) and, ironically, an attempted rejection of Pop fiction. Pop fiction and sentimentality are, by many accounts, inextricably intertwined, and Franzen (again, commendably) attempts to walk this fine line between the unwanted label of Pop Fictionist (hence, the famed Oprah dismissal) and a resuscitation of emotion in literature. Much of the book, however, is written like a ch(tongue)eek homage to Pop fiction, thereby solidifying Pop fiction's exclusive claim to emotion in literature. His novel, it's apparent purpose, unfortunately, defeats itself.
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointed
Review: How did this win an award?! Parkinson's WHAT? This book had very little to do with the disease. I didn't learn a single thing about the disease from this book, and I don't know much about it to start off with. I felt Franzen used the disease to pump up & sell his book, and then instead dealt with ridiculous issues of this family. And the issues of this family are so OLD & pathetic. I didn't really need to read ANOTHER book about a disfunctional family where one brother can't hold down a job, the mother is ignorant & inept, another sibling is having marital problems & another can't hold onto a relationship!! How over-written about is that?? Where did the Parkinson's come in?
Only a tiny portion of the book came from the fathers point of view, and in that, it was dealt with very superficially & I didn't get any idea of what it was like to be him!! That's why I was reading this book....It was very slow, the end did pick up though, (I admit the ending was a bit better than the rest of this large book). I kept reading to see how it would turn out...would Franzen EVER deal with Parkinson's??? Barely.
Rating:
Summary: Another Novel Full of People with No Depth/Character
Review: First of all, let me give Mr. Franzen credit. He is a very gifted writer. At times, his sentences are lyrical and reminiscent of the simple fact that good writing is art. With that said, WHAT he writes about is banal and lame and is very disappointing. In his Nobel Prize Speech, William Faulkner correctly delineated between good writing and bad:
"[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."
I submit that Franzen labors under a curse. There is no pride in his characters, no hope, little sacrifice, no honor, and little love. This book is a wasted talent. This is a book with no redeeming value because it offers no redemption, no aspiration, no notion of what we might strive for or achieve in our lives. Instead it is reminiscent of an animal program on the Discovery Channel where one views harm done without commentary. In this way, the book is neutral when it ought not be and, as such, cannot claim to be anything close to great literature. I felt worse for having read it. It brought nothing to my life.
Rating:
Summary: What's all the hubbub...bub?
Review: I wish I could do a good George Bush, Sr. impression...but just imagine him saying this..."Don't get it!" Portions of the storyline were interesting, and the bouncing from sibling to sibling character twists was extremely well executed, but for the most part this novel was just OKAY. The most confusing thing is the title...since it is not explained at all until the end of the novel and even then, "The Corrections" wasn't a well chosen summary of the story...perhaps a better title would have been, "Misunderstandings".
|
