Rating: 
Summary: Franzen Fools the Critics
Review: Corrections is an arrogant attempt by Jonathan Franzen to impress his elite literary friends. Franzen's book was a tremendous disappointment. The characters are unsympathetic. There is no plot. Clearly the critics were fooled because of Franzen's clever command of language. The book appears to be a vehicle by which Franzen can distance himself from his upper middle class midwestern roots and align himself with the literary crowd in New York. The author has foisted on the public a dark series of contrived vignettes that are being passed off as a novel worthy of reading. Don't waste your money or your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Catch-23
Review: as a reader of literary fiction, i am appalled at the truth that this so-called writer, a man who supposedly wrote this novel blind folded and in his basement, has gotten away with one of the grandest literary rip-offs known to readers everywhere. the only thing worth saying is that this novel is funny, though it was funnier the first time i read it, when it was called Catch 22. The stylistic similarites are so obscenly close (the brother attends D--- College, J. Hellar's masterpeice has a Major De C---, Gitanis is the Syndicate)that anyone remotely familiar with Catch--22 should be able to put, well, 2 and 2 together and realize that every transitional paragraph is bitten from the great one himself. i am surprised, well, not really, that readers of this work, that reviewers of fiction, have been unable to recognize the blatent mimicing of this overwritten, underthought novel. If you want to read the corrected Corrections, read Catch 22, at least it has a moral purpose.
Rating:
Summary: Too much Franzen
Review: I enjoyed the word-play, the inventive descriptions, the utterly implausible situations the characters found themselves in, and the placement in an historical context. But I did dislike the book for several reasons. First, the characters were basically unbelievable. They not only gave absurd responses to unreal circumstances, but they seemed to be totally without character features that might make them seem lovable or at least attractive. But what bothered me the most was the paragraph by paragraph demonstration by Franzen of how cool and smart he is. He kept stumbling over himself proving how snide and sarcastic he could be in describing how dumb and absurd his characters were. How many times does an author have to use the word 'matoor' in a character's internal dialog to show how superior he is in his knowledge of English pronounciation? I think I counted four times he did this. The first time was once too often. I don't think this book could have been saved by a good editor. I doubt that Franzen would have permitted an editor to touch his divinely inspired words.
Rating:
Summary: Unreadable
Review: If this is high literary art, I must be missing something. This is one of the most tedious, overwritten family sagas I have ever read; I simply could not finish it. Try Christiana Stead's THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN or Eudora Welty's THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER. They are better examples of literary art, and are more satisfying by a mile. Once again, I find the richest examples of literary art on the backlists from which most publishers earn their bread and butter. Much better books were published last year, too, and were all but ignored.
Rating: 
Summary: All About Corrections
Review: I was pleasantly surprised to find this story both approachable and enjoyable. Most modern writers who write Fiction remind me of part of a W.H. Auden poem: "...existentialists declare/That they are in complete despair,/ yet go on writing." In college I found modern lit to be both morbidly depressing and excruciatingly tedious. This novel was actually very compulsively readable. It was easy to slip into.
The major themes strongly reminded me of Don DeLillo's White Noise: academia, pharmaceuticals, modern family life, consumer culture, just no Hitler studies. But the satire is in the same tenor. It struck me as witty and incisive.
I would like to have seen more of a post-Christmas follow-up for Denise and especially Gary. I liked Alfred, like Franzen meant for us to, but felt like Alfred was missing some characterization.
And some of the streams of consciousness you had to go back and re-read, but there weren't many. Wickedly clever, Not politically correct: Just someone try to apply political correctness to a novel all about Corrections. Good fun.
Rating: 
Summary: miserable family
Review: While I think that the author is incredibly insightful and captures all the minute details of human relationships, this family is so miserable and screwed up you feel depresssed hearing all their unforgiving, selfish and materialistic thoughts. Generally a downer.
Rating:
Summary: The Worst!!
Review: I had so looked forward into diving into a big, thick novel on the hilarity of family disfunction. As one who will finish a book 99% of the time, regardless of how bad it is, I've put this one down smack dab in the middle. I cannot fathom wasting another moment of my life on this ill-conceived, unfocused piece of trash.
My complaints: This book goes NO where. You are stuck with unbeliveable and unlikeable characters doing nothing. And when the characters might do something it is wholly implausible. (A former college professor going to lithuania to set up a mail fraud scheme with his lover's ex-husband?! Please!) I put the book down when Franzen attributed complex thoughts to a five year old.
While it appears from other reviews this book is a love/hate proposition, I cannot fathom what anyone could have liked about this book. No plot, no real characters, no direction, nothing. I would compare this book with getting teeth extracted. In a word: horrible.
Rating:
Summary: Shrink-Wrapped
Review: It's a rare treat to read a book that makes me love it. And despite my misgivings, I was overwhelmed by _The Corrections_ in all its prolix portentousness and smarty pants slickness. Why? 1.I couldn't put it down once I'd got going.
2.I was intrigued by the Oprah brouhaha
3.It was summer (I am in Sydney, Australia) and I had time to indulge myself
4.I am an academic and this is the best portrayal I've read of my generation's experience of the academy
5.I know these people
6.The book starts with brutality,and ends with compassion, but it's never corny
7.Franzen writes like an angel
8.It's a very great old-fashioned novel, in the style of Henry James, not Thomas Pynchon -- I've read enough second-rate Pynchon to last me a lifetime
9.It made me think
10. I laughed my head off. It's good!
Rating:
Summary: Like many, I bought into the hype
Review: After hearing so much about this author who was uninvited from the oprah show, i was pretty curious. I think this book took me about a month and a half to read, I'm a very busy college student but somehow I just couldn't get myself to pick it up as much as I should have. Its not that it was bad, it was just easy to put down without needing to know what was going to happen next. Still, I finished it and I have to say that there are many funny, true to life moments in the book which made it worth it. Certain aspects of the Lambert family mirror ones of my own, Franzen did write very real characters but the story kind of felt half-baked. Without giving anything away, the book kind of ends abruptly after the writer put way too much detail into everything else. I believe this book wouldn't have suffered if he would have cut out about 200 pages. Maybe then, I actually would have taken less than a month to finish it.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book is Why I Read
Review: This book has altered my life in several significant ways. I am fifty-seven with a dead sister and a brother ten years younger than I. We grew up in a world similar to the world Enid and Albert raised their children in. My dad, going on ninety, shared the work ethics of Albert. My dad's name is William, and he has Alzheimer's disease.
Jonathan Franzen's portrayal of Albert's interior life knocked me to my knees. Sad as I am about the almost daily deterioration of my father as the man I use to know, I can't honestly say that I gave him credit for occasional moments of lucidity until I meant Albert in the pages of The Corrections. Near the end of the novel,Albert has a very telling moment that may very well be right around the corner for my dad.
It had not occurred to me to try and get inside my father's head and appreciate what the world has become for him. It took me three months to finish this novel mostly because it causes me physical pain all along the way. Periodically I stopped to take a breather.
Last month, a young colleague of mine came to me to ask if I had read this book. I had almost forgotten its existence, but I said that yes, I was in the process. She said she didn't really like the book but because it took place in Philadelphia where I grew up, she thought often of me as she read it.
She said she didn't like the book because she didn't like any of the main characters. I said, "Not even, Denise?" "You haven't read her section yet have you?", she responded. And I hadn't. I went back to reading it the same night.
I was glad that it was Jen that brought Franzen's book to my attention again. I would have thought that it was my age that kept me from enjoying it more. Jen, however, is only 28 or so. Her connection with Franzen's world is more real than mine. The lifestyles of the main characters, including the use of drugs and rampant promiscuity and countless partners, etc. kept me from relating at first. Then I discovered the book is really about families and intimacy and characters who live and breathe as real people that we can only know in this way when they are our siblings.
Franzen's photo on the inside back flap of the cover makes clear that he is Chip. It is Chip that you can finally relate to and even feel some degree of affection for. This book is the kind of novel you set down because you don't want to be made to feel anything. You, the reader, are going to feel a great deal. You are going to understand something about knowing people, really knowing people, and then forgiving them. I have a great need to speak with the author mostly because I want to know how he knows what he knows about growing old, despising it, and ultimately dealing with it. Mostly I want to know how to do what Franzen did. He crawled inside the minds of divergent people and revealed them through their own thoughts. I think Jonathan was right when he turned down Oprah. Her audience strikes me as not being up to the task. I also don't think he needed Oprah's stamp of approval. I think that his is a book people need to force themselves to read because they will be ultimately changed by it. Let me just add that his vocabulary can be quite interesting; he truly used some words I had never seen or heard before. Never! Trust me when I say I read all the time and have since I was six. I like that. I like knowing their are still surprises out there. In the end these people, Enid, Albert, Gary, Chip, and Denise are like my family. You can't choose your family, and you can't choose these characters either. They exist for you in the same way and you learn to accept them. They are still out there somewhere for me but I am not yet ready to talk to them.
|
