Rating: 
Summary: Writing that simply took my breath away
Review: I love good writing, and read it all the time. But this book--every single word--from page one to the last page just held me enraptured. How can someone do this with words? with just words? Rarely have I been in the company of such a genius. Yes, I laughed at the satire; I loved characters like Gary whom I'd want to strangle in "real" life. I even understood my role in my own unfortunate marriage so much more deeply. The writing doesn't just aesthetically make you jump for joy, but it changes you--unless you're too much like poor, sweet clueless Enid and unwilling to see what's right in front of you. Damn, I just love this book. I'm re-reading it, recommending it to everyone in the world who loves literature. Thank you, Mr. Franzen!This novel resonates so deeply inside me, I feel like it's more than a book, it's--omygod--family!
Rating: 
Summary: did we have to go through Therapy with Jonathan?
Review: Let me first begin with this statement: I Am An Avid Reader!!!
I first heard about this book and was intriqued by it when I learned of the controversial flak regarding Jonathan's disdain for being chosen as Oprah's latest pick. His attitude suggesting that he was above and beyond Oprah's recommendation was intriquing in its own right. I borrowed the book from a friend who purchased it from a garage sale. That alone should tell you something. I was not put off at first by the thickness of the book as I've read all the Harry Potter books to my children. The beginning pages (say the first 30) were interesting and compelling. The parents depicted in the story reminded me of my own at their geriatric stage. The sibling rivalry and dysfunction mirrored my own. But then, Jonathan started really getting into the character's heads. We knew so much about each one so fast that there was NOTHING left for speculation...nothing left to surprise us later. After the first 100 pages I started feeling like I was along with Jonathon at his personal Therapy Sessions. I felt like I should start charging him. The book went on and on...often disjointed...almost as if the real story was never decided upon so he decided to just throw everything in. I finally made it through to the end...not without skipping several parts and then going back through them, thinking that I might be missing something if I did that...But NO..I missed nothing...
Rating: 
Summary: Ad Nauseam
Review: What a bore. Jonathan Franzen is really taken with himself, or so it would seem. He reminds me of a salesman I know that just can't shut up long enough to hear anything except the sound of his own voice. The book is about 250 pages too long. Talk about being verbose! Personally, I found the book to be extremely boring. There wasn't one character in the book that I cared what happened to them. I cannot understand what all the hype was about. Hopefully, if Mr. Franzen decides to write another epic he will implore his editor to "edit", "edit", "edit", and not spend so much time on promotion.
Rating:
Summary: THE DUMBEST BOOK EVER!!
Review: I enjoy reading and since this book rec'd such rave reviews from professionals I bought it as a Christmas Gift for me. I forced myself to read the thing since it cost so much (hardback). I can't believe people like this stuff. This guy just liked to use big words and sound impressive in telling a stupid story about a dysfunctional but ordinary family. The story goes nowhere and you hear way to much details about all the characters in the book. The youngest son going to Russsia is just stupid. This was one of the most over-rated books I have ever read. Give me a break. I will never buy a book again that I havent read a review by a normal person. Professional critics like pain and suffering I guess.
Rating:
Summary: Slow, confusing, distasteful
Review: I couldn't get into this book at all. I have read a lot of the Oprah Book Club books. This was totally different from any of those. Most of the books she chooses has a lesson to learn. This book did not. I do not recommend this book at all.
Rating:
Summary: _The Corrections_ made Oklahoma and Texas fly by...
Review: I was first exposed to books on tape during a cross-country trip from Nashville, TN, to Seattle, WA. My patience severely taxed by the god-talk and pop-country radio that dominates the big middle of the country, I ended up buying a book on tape at a truck stop. That was another (bad) book, which shall remain unnamed, but I discovered I loved being read to as an adult at least as much as I did as a pre-literate toddler. I nearly passed up _The Corrections_ due to a snobbish resistance to all things Oprahfied, but when I realized that Dylan Baker, one of the best (if not THE best) character actors working today, was the reader, I gave in. The fact that _The Corrections_ would provide many, many hours of listening and I had only gotten as far west as Little Rock also influenced my decision. The story is described in detail in other reviews. As far as the audio book is concerned, the quality of the performance is excellent and the characters' voices are well-differentiated. I enjoyed the tape well enough that I ended up purchasing and reading the book, and found that I agree with the judicious edits made in the taped version - they are minor and serve to remove plot slumps and ramblings that drag in the print version. That said, I would recommend either the book or the tape to any serious reader (or serious long-distance driver). Having read several Oprah books before they became "hers," I was surprised that she made *this* selection for her book club. Frankly, _The Corrections_ is just too mean-spirited and acid to appeal to readers for whom _She's Come Undone_ (which I liked) represents an uncharacteristically "serious" choice. There are no characters to fall in love with, no triumphs, no uplift. Everyone is fairly unpleasant and remains moderately unhappy to the bitter end. Still, a good story is not necessarily a happy story and many disappointed reviewers need to keep that in mind...
Rating: 
Summary: Franzen Doth Protest Too Much
Review: Based on all the hype and lofty comparisons to Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, I expected a difficult read, one that would require a dictionary at my right hand. Imagine my surprise when, upon finishing the novel, Franzen has more in common with Danielle Steel than Wallace or DeLillo. I came to the conclusion that the main reason Franzen was so upset by the selection of his magnum opus as an Oprah™ selection is that down deep, he realizes that this book is the perfect Oprah™ selection; that save for the verbiage and occasional placement of a few multisyllabic words (that may send the average reader to the dictionary), The Corrections is a very middle-American, not-too-terribly-highbrow, only slightly above average novel. Perhaps he's concerned that his big secret --if you dazzle them with wholly overwritten prose, they'll be so stupefied they'll call it a Masterpiece™ -- would be discovered once enough people, i.e., the members of the Church of Oprah™ were exposed to it. ...The Corrections isn't a terrible book. On the contrary, I found it an engaging and enjoyable read. I would certainly recommend it to friends and/or buy a copy as a gift. His commentary on American pharmaceutical culture, the fractured American family, and (upper) middle class consumerism is solid. It's just not anything new. The book reads as if Franzen set himself out on a dare, on a quest to write the seminal American novel, and while he tried valiantly to do just that, he ran out of steam, or passion, or booze. Whatever it was, the end result of his four years spent locked away in Harlem a good story, but not the definitive American novel. The Corrections is a smart novel written by a smart guy. Despite Franzen's protestations regarding mass culture, it doesn't exist in the rarified air of Infinite Jest. I'm left wondering whether the moniker Great American Novel™ is a hoary, overused cliché, a sloppy bit of literary shorthand that can't be measured quantitatively, and is passed around far too frequently to have any real meaning. And perhaps that's the best lesson of all.
Rating:
Summary: Overwritten, Overpraised-but Still Worthwhile
Review: Jonathan Franzen's novel,"The Corrections", provides an object lesson on how to garner lavish critical praise, and ultimately the Pulitzer Prize:1) Select as your subject matter that by now wearisome topic, The Dysfunctional American Family, 2)Take obligatory aim at the follies, fatuities,pretenses and everyday annoyances of modern technological society, and 3)never fail to show off your facility with obscure polysyllabics, when simpler, more comprehensible prose will suit just as well. Franzen's novel focuses on the Midwestern Lambert family consisting of parents Enid and Alfred, two sons Chip and Gary,a and daughter Denise. True to the dictates of dysfunction conventions, Enid and Alfred's relationship has become basically estranged and non-communicative, both between themselves and vis-a-vis their children - a situation greatly exacerbated by Alfred's intensifying senility and Parkinson's Disease, as well as Enid's obsessive sense of dutiful "correctness" and unquestioning allegiance to middle American orthodoxy. Naturally, their three children, all of whom have moved to the implicitly Godless East(Philadelphia and New York), have gone about more or less making untidy messes of their own lives: Chip, a 39 year-old radical college professor who manages to get himself fired for having an affair with one of his students, borrows money shamelessly from his sister, works as a part-time proofreader for a law firm, while laboring endlessly on a screenplay that stands little chance of making it onto the big screen. Through a series of plot contrivances, he winds up flying off to post-Communist Lithuania with his ex-girlfriend's husband to pursue an Internet dummy company funding fraud. The other son, Gary, a successfulbut weak-willed investment manager,allows himself to be badgered and nagged by his manipulative wife and two elder sons, while obsessing on whether he's depressed or not, and, if so, to what degree. The daughter, Denise, a cordon bleu chef, is a workaholic who is wrestling with her sexual identity -jumping from failed marriage, and heterosexual affairs to the arms of female lovers-while working 16-hour days trying to open her own successful haut cuisine eatery. The trials and tribulations of this off-kilter clan is the subject matter of this alternately exhilirating, exasperating, and much too often distasteful read (much too much tortured prose is devoted to eliminatory and excremental matters). Also,when dealing with Denise, Franzen irksomely bedevils the reader with line after line of culinary arcana, as if trying to impress with his gourmet erudition. This reader got quickly, (pun intended), "fed up". This last complaint crystallizes too much of what, in the final analysis, is wrong with "The Corrections". The book is simply shamelessly overwritten -at times the reader almost feels as though he needs a machete to hack though the dense prose. When Franzen, forgoes his self-conscious desire to be "oh so literary", the book is quite entertaining and lively, but too often he bogs himself down and becomes downright dreary. Some episodes go on far too long towards unsatisfying dead-ends(this is especially true in the "Denise" portion), while Chip's misadventures in Lithuania seem hurried and superficial. There are also confounding contradictions in his attitudes towards his characters. For example, Franzen implicitly takes son Gary to task for using "insider" information to make a killing in the market, but than is critical of the father Alfred for not doing the same in a similar situation earlier in his life. Finally, although the ending of "The Corrections" is reasonably moving, the reader cannot help but feel that it is somewhat illegitimately grafted on- not quite earned or following logically from all that preceded it. In the last analysis, Franzen's sprawling novel is a worthwhile read, but it is flawed, too often as annoying and tiresome, as it is provocative, insightful and entertaining. But, I suppose, 3/5ths of a loaf is better than none!
Rating:
Summary: It's good
Review: I stayed away from this book for a while; I'm not totally sure why -- I wasn't swayed by (was, in fact, unaware of) the hype or controversy or whatever -- but I think it might have had something to do with the cover, with which, having read the book, I have no qualms, but which bothered me somehow at the time. It looked boring. Kind of embarrassing, but true. Anyway, I finally read it, and it's actually good, albeit rather depressing. The characters were well-drawn and their dialogue realistic. The sections on Lithuania were a little unbelievable, but didn't hurt the novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's New Clothes in bookform
Review: At our most recent Bookclub Meeting we discussed amongst other things the question: What makes a book literature? The Corrections is certainly hailed as that. Does it deliver? To give you a hint: so far I seem to be the only person in our bookclub who has been able to finish it, which may have been helped by the fact that I was prevented by an injury to do a lot of other things I'd rather have been doing - such as going to the library to get something else to read. Now... what brings me to this unfavourable opinion? Maybe it's the picture of the author. He looks a lot like my ex-husband, possibly a bit smarter (not so difficult) but equally self-absorbed. Maybe it's the way this self-absorption shows in his writing. OK, he has a good eye for all those cunning little details. Does that mean he should be allowed to wallow on and on? He certainly has to be praised for his doggedness in filling more than 500 pages. Unfortunately half of them could have been deleted without being missed. Maybe his literary agent was too busy fanning the hype instead of calling Franzen to order? If so, the mission was succesful. This book has been very effectively advertised, even to the extent that I wonder if Franzen's refusal to 'be an Oprah book' was not just another marketing trick. For me a good book is one that moves me in some way. Favourite books are like friends, to be enjoyed time and time again. This book is about a so-called dysfunctional family. I don't know enough about families to judge if this one is truly dysfunctional. What I do know is that none of the characters in this book moves me. I have absolutely no desire to revisit this family. Even if the descriptions are poignant and lots of things happen, the total impression is one of gloom and doom. This could of course be intentional and even part of the selling proposition (let's make it more depressing - that way it will look more like literature!).
However, I'm totally baffled by reviews that call this book 'sexy' or 'funny'. 'Heartwrenching' I could agree on. After all, some people enjoy watching trainwrecks or another person going to pieces, don't they? Or do they? More importantly, do you? And if so, what does that say about you? After finishing this book I reread one of my long time favourites: a Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy Sayers. First published in 1923 I have never seen this promoted anywhere, but that does not stop Dorothy Sayers (or Nevil Shute, to name another truly great author) to still have a loyal following of readers. This book, too, is full of superfluous words and descriptions... each and every one of them enjoyable. Which proves that it can be done - but not by Jonathan Franzen. At least not until he grows up and starts to be either entertaining or truly meaningful. The Corrections is neither. If you really want to read this, don't invest your own money. Loan a copy first and see if you still want to read it after the first ten pages or so (I can promise you it will not get any better). And by all means do not buy a so-called collectible copy, with as only 'collectibility' that two pages are reversed. Sellers are charging between fifty and almost two hundred dollars for first editions of this book.... (Chip would love to be in this business, a living example of exactly the kind of hype described in the book. But then - he is already in this book, the poor thing.) Our bookclub got it at Amazon, first edition, sticker and all. Now I must correct myself (see how I, too, cleverly can insert corrections in my text? gee, it's easy to write!). In one way this book did move me. It moved me another big step further away from books that are intensely promoted by the relentless USA publishing industry. And it will move this copy out of my book case FOREVER. If after all this warning you still want a copy - our bookclub has several for sale.
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