Rating: 
Summary: Corrections
Review: I hsted this book, didn't care about any of the characters or what was to become of them. Can't imagine why or how it is still a bestseller or why anyone could finish the book. I couldn't and didn't. Ruth L.l Nolin
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Summary: Sick and Boring
Review: I got through a little over half of this book before I decided that all the hype did not mean the book was good (and certainly not a "classic") and put it down for good. In fact, I thought it was bad and a big waste of my time. The sex was sick, the story a drag. I wish I had read the Amazon customer reviews before I started. I never would have started.
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Summary: Seasoned Reader
Review: One of the worst books I've read. I thought the characters were boring and the book trivial. What is all the hoopla about? Don't waste your energy reading this one.
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Summary: Arrogant Author
Review: Though I applaud Jonathan Franzen's attempt to redefine the quintessential American family, I find the author's voice so arrogant and condescending that it's difficult to enjoy the book. He hasn't written one likeable character; I wouldn't want to spend one second with any of these people, let alone devote hours to reading about them. Yet, I could still give this book a high rating because of the strong emotions it evokes in its readers if it weren't for the intrusive authorial voice that seems to say, "Look how smart I am. Look how much I know." It seems to me that Franzen has done extensive research for this book. He obviously learned a lot about railroads, metallurgy, culinary arts, medical research, Lithuania, and oh yes, Shopenhauer. He is to be applauded for his knowledge and his dedication to getting the details right. What I question is his obvious need to cram it all into one book. Pages and pages about the socio-economic structure of Lithuania! Who cares? My family's FROM Lithuania, and I don't care! But worst of all is that he sits in judgement of these people. With every line, he suggests that he - and therfore the reader - is better than the people about whom he writes. He needn't sugar coat their lives and their motivations for living such lives, but he could tone down the holier-than-thou quality that makes him just as unlikeable as his characters. Further, lines like, "It made her want to pinch her own nipples" come off as sophomoric, written by a man who believes that girls have pillow fights in their bras at slumber parties. Bottom line: Franzen's intentions were the best, but his "voice" could have used some corrections of its own.
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Summary: franzen rewrites faulkner?
Review: first things first: this book is sort of a masterpiece. these characters and the tensions within themselves and between each other comprise a web of astounding (and at times, jarring) realism, in all of its simultaneous crisis and hope. i could go on (as many readers have) about franzen's success thereof, but instead i want to raise a new, perhaps harebrained, idea.franzen's The Corrections elicits heavy comparisons to faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. i'll explain why i think this in four parts. I. start with the obvious: structure. like faulkner's novel, franzen's is told via a series of perspectives from within the same family. II. characters. franzen's chip, the fallen academic, parallels faulkner's quentin; gary, the insensitive-though-probably-wounded capitalist, parallels jason; in some strange way enid, the dismal matriarch, parallels mrs. compson; and of course, franzen's denise is kindred to faulkner's caddie. the obvious differences (which, to me, seem quite designed) are that franzen's novel gives voice to the patriarch and the daughter, whereas in faulkner's novel mr. compson is dead and caddie's voice is never heard autonomously. perhaps franzen's mr. lambert somehow parallels faulkner's benjy? i'm not sure what i think about that, but it could hold some water, in that they are both tragic figures (physically helpless/pathetic, and non-communicative to varying degrees) with insinuations of martyrdom. III. sexuality of daughter/sister. in The Sound and the Fury, caddie's sexuality functions as an axis in each of her brothers' worlds. her loss of chastity triggers a series of collapses in each brother's ability to relate to his world. likewise in The Corrections: all of the lamberts are preoccupied with denise's sexuality, and they yearn to see her validated by a certain type of normative relationship. IV. money. besides sexuality, the characters in both novels face life-long battles with the family's financial estate. although this idea leaves much to be explored, i introduce it in its yet cursory form with the hope that someone finds it of interest. in closing, i want to point to the subtle yet compelling moment at the end of franzen's novel, when mr. lambert is calling out to his physical therapist, an african-american woman. as mr. lambert's lifetime of emotional pain climaxes in bodily failure, he calls out brashly to this doctor; she is a figure of healing and recovery. in light of this, let's recall faulkner's final chapter, in which the third-person narrative perspective of dilsey (the matriarch of the compsons' african-american servant family) offers a glimpse of hope, peace, and beauty.
Rating: 
Summary: One Star Shy
Review: What if Tolstoy were writing Anna Karenina today? Would Anna be an Oprah Winfrey addict. Would she be dosing on prozac and diet pills. Would Lenin be struggling with an obsession for internet porn? Thankfully, we'll never know these answers. However, the questions seemed very relevant to me while reading 'The Corrections'. How beautiful can a scene describing an old man arguing with his own excrement be? Can a person grow to love characters that have every single one of their secrets revealed? Are there not things that all people consider private? Do you really want to know anyone this well? Jonathan Franzen has managed to collect together a family portrait so vivid that it captures the inside and out. However, the bad pun of truth here is that we only see the negative. Or, you might argue, we see only the truth, and there is no positive in the truth. Maybe, everyone is just this way. Maybe everyone is simply a pastiche of faults, clamboring through life, trying to make as little an ... of themselves as possible. An amazingly terrible insight that is bleated on and on throughout an otherwise brilliantly written work. Franzen's insights are too dead on to be produced by anyone other than a co-conspirator of the banal and hopeless. But if there is beauty in banality, if excrement - babbling nonsensical profanity as it drips down the side of a wall - can be beautiful, it is only Jonathan Franzen, in this big book, who has forseen this potential. My final question: is it wrong for me to rate this novel with only four stars, when I admit completely that it was wonderful? Full of wonders. What must it have included to garner that one extra star? What was it missing? Not reality. Not clarity. Not humor or wit. Character growth is there. It's all there. Is it too real? Does it hit too close to home? Is it true that we really want to escape the world when we read these days, and not face things as they are? Maybe the final star is a strike against me, and not the book. Regardless, my rating stands. As for readers interested in buying - do not take this book to the beach with you, or on a cruise. Save it for those moments when you are in your house, drinking straight from the bottle, and wondering why everyone around you is so full of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Dysfunctional Families are Boring
Review: I found the book to be a chore to read. The characters and the story were simply boring.
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Summary: It's not the worst thing I've read...
Review: but it's not the best either. I had a really hard time getting into the story and believing the characters. I do agree with other reviewers that it is more literary than a lot of books out there, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a great book. I do like some of the wordplay and imagery Franzen uses. He is excellent with using language to create emotion and images that make you think. However, some of his writing gets a little too over the top and it becomes hard to follow at all. The characters are really hard to understand because they are so dysfunctional and poorly developed. You really don't feel much for any of them because you just don't care. Would I recommend this to family and friends? No. I am reading it with a friend of mine who wanted to read it - I wouldn't have chose to read it otherwise.
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Summary: Ridiculous...what an arrogant person....
Review: I read this book, but felt is was intended for an intellectual to read and not the average person who frequents Oprah's books. It was a difficult read and many phrases and words were difficult to understand or apply. I did not like it at all and gave it to my public library. I am currently reading A Beautiful Mind, it's a difficult book to get through but 100% more interesting.
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Summary: It Glows
Review: It glows... Franzen's novel actually emits a warm glow. I am struck by this wonderful and dare I say, important work. So many themes are delicately covered(cornered) all revolving centrally around family. The novel is an act of unwinding the tight, prison-like familial constructs of the past(mistakes or not... lovely ambiguity is the key), while each member of the nuclear unit that is the Lamberts embodies their own slew of entanglements, dramas, tragic sparks of disorder and glee. These swirling themes include contradictions in academia, issues of acceptance, lust v. intellect, rash passion, passionlessness, image, materialism, American ideals v. the reality of their achievement, sexuality, morality, political consciousness v. action, the malleable fluid self, the obstinate and static self, death, the stock market, and (there are more but this is no dissertation), of course, corrections(in the economy, yes, but more specifically, the corrections we make in ourselves and in our lives... our responses and reactions to our upbringings and relationships and hopes and failures). Though The Corrections centers around our white, middle class, Midwestern Lamberts, the distilled themes of their story are wholly universal, a sober, inspiring, fully creative work. All the while it's a sincere rendering of a distinct American experience. The meticulous plotting is deceptively fluid(not linear, but ingeniously pieced, like the chronology is fixed to a slightly erratic pendulum), each member of the family appropriately developed, the past emerges like paint from a brush adding color and depth to these characters so fashioned with love, I found it hard not to weep on many occasions. I wept for their humanity, their confusing life struggles, their collapsing rationales, their attempts towards doing good, living right(whatever right is), and their noble failures and self-deceptions. Franzen does all this without the slightest hint of condescension, he lays it all out there, with a brave honesty and says many things I'm sure many people don't want to hear about life and dreams in this country, this world. All this in a prose that is brisk and at times dizzyingly, beautifully, poetic. My only complaint about the book is the pain in my lower back incurred from the long stretches of ill-postured reading that I spent enraptured and moved and humbled and inspired by this, like I've already said, this bold, glowing work.
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