Rating: 
Summary: Good not great
Review: When I picked up "The Corrections" I thought, "Oh, great. Just what the world needs: another book about a dysfunctional family." Now having finished it, I'm still not sure the world needs it, there's no new ground broken here, but it is well written and worth the time. None of the Lamberts are sympathetic characters, try as Franzen might at times to make them so. The only difference is the degree to which they are unlikeable, with Gary scoring off the charts and Enid deserving of both pity and censure. One weakness in the book is that, with the exception of daughter Denise, we never really learn specifics of what happened in Gary and Chip's childhoods that made them become the people they are. Where Franzen is right on is in skewering early 21st century America. The conglomeratization of Alfred's railroad, biotech companies and their wonder drugs, the high-flying stock market, the faux attempts at market economies in former communist countries is all wonderful. There are laugh-out-loud observations like the bank that went under because of lack of demand for its Dilbert Mastercard. If 50 or 100 years from now want people to look back and see what America was like in 2001 and why we were this way, this would be a good book to study.
Rating: 
Summary: Artful combination of the artistic and the entertaining
Review: This is a great book that will temporarily be marked with a stigma. As it is a great book, the stigma will pass. What matters most for Mr. Franzen as a writer (and he is one hell of a writer), is where he goes from here. I know that many people have a problem with the attitude that Franzen seemed to reveal with the Oprah comment. To be honest, I don't really care all that much about it. Maybe it's just that I agree with what he said, I don't know. What is troubling to me is that implicit in the Oprah debacle is an ugly contradiction: by accepting the endorsement, Franzen received nearly three million dollars from his publisher. By turning it into a scandal, he probably earned even more money. All of which, I suppose, is great for him. I don't really have a problem with Jonathan Franzen getting rich from this book. I wish more quality writers had the opportunity. I just don't like how he did it. If he loathes talk TV, if he is repulsed by everything she and it stand for (whatever that might be...), if he is truly a traditional intellectual who values the distinction between marketing and art, he could have quietly turned down Oprah's endorsement. He didn't. Rather, he turned a rather embarrassing public denunciation into marketing itself. That was sort of vulgar. That said, I think the book is brilliant. It's true that in the two months since I've read it, I have had some second thoughts about its overall value. Even after all of my reconsidering, I'd say that it deserves the National Book Award. It probably deserves the Pulitzer Prize and any other applicable distinction you could throw at it. It is a seriously ambitious book that artfully combines the artistic with the entertaining. And, AND, on top of all of that, it is a great leap from his previous novels (worth reading, if only for the pleasure of watching a writer develop). As for the hate thing, I suppose Franzen's particular contempt never much bothered me. I mean, depicting a classically screwed up family as he did doesn't seem especially malicious. Maybe he hates his family. Maybe he feels undeserved contempt for everyone. That might make him an ass, but I don't think it diminishes the value of his book. I think writers like DeLillo excelled in the post-cold war era because they directly addressed the suburban malaise that was left when the fear of annihilation passed. DeLillo (and the cadre of like-minded post-modern authors) never offers relief, but if you dismiss the possibility of any capital letter truth, what relief is there? Fear and anger offer an odd break from it all. September 11 bloodied our face. It instantly complicated life, filling what had become mundane with meaning and altering (if only temporarily) the challenge of creatively depicting contemporary society. In the 1990's, with the simplifying (albeit temporary) illusion of Pax Americana to gird them, people fell easily into the mundane. But then, if there's nothing over the horizon to terrify you, a dark possibility (or, to be fair, a happy possibility) against which to check your own existence, how do you define your life priorities? Once again, we are afraid and we are angry. We have received a wound and it has grounded us. And yes, it does make it easier to look at Franzen's book with diminished enthusiasm. I think that would be a mistake.
Rating: 
Summary: A Dysfunctional Novel
Review: I can usually tell in the first hundred pages of a novel whether I want to push through to the end. Not with The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen fooled me for 269 pages before I finally gave up. I'm a fairly dogged reader, so it's saying a lot that once I hit the half-way point I was willing to write the thing off and NOT find out what happens. The Corrections is a well written, sometimes humorous, novel about a family dealing with the mental decline of its patriarch. It examines the social dynamics that go along with the passing of the generational torch. Franzen writes vivid and clever scenes that allow his characters to demonstrate their own complex construction. But what characters! What eventually drove me to put The Corrections down was the loathsomeness of the people in this book. With very few exceptions, the pages are populated with the most selfish, egocentric souls you could imagine. I kept reading and reading, hoping to get to the part where someone wakes up and becomes sensitive to the pain of the people around them. But no! Nothing but self indulgence, self pity, and self destruction. Maybe it happens in the second half of the book, maybe someone comes around and redeems themselves with genuine altruism -- far too late for me. Bottom Line: Despite the book's solid literary foundations I found it impossible to care what happened to the characters and therefore put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Your Typical American Family
Review: Although I rarely read books on Oprah's list, or fiction written by men for that matter, making an exception for "The Corrections" was certainly the right choice for me. "The Corrections" tells the story of your typical American family (???), so frought with disfunction and agnst that only through the father's debilitating illness can they become whole again. Although not a fast read, well worth the time and effort that goes into it. The plot is full of twists, the character development is superb, and evrey reader will be able to recognize someone they know in the story's multi-faceted cast.
Rating: 
Summary: "This wasn't the Christmas I'd hoped for."
Review: "She was seventy-five and was going to make changes in her life" (p. 568), Jonathan Franzen tells us about one of his memorable characters, Enid Lambert. In its nearly six hundred pages, Franzen's engaging novel illustrates Tolstoy's observation that "all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Set symbolically in the Midwestern heartland of America, THE CORRECTIONS takes an honest look at a modern, dysfunctional family as they celebrate one last tumultuous Christmas together in the book's final pages (pp. 459-560). Franzen basically structures his novel through his well-drawn characters, Chip Lambert (pp. 15-135), Gary Lambert (pp. 139-238), their parents, Enid and Alfred Lambert (pp. 241-338), and the Lambert daughter, Denise (pp. 341-458). It follows them through their stubborn family ways, through their history of denial, depression, dementia, Parkinson's disease, incontinence, and the individual failures that makes each character unique, and through their attempts to cope by using "personality optimizing" drugs. And along the way, I laughed and cried. Franzen has written his poignant novel with equal doses of drama and humor, and its last hundred pages in particular made me realize I was in the presence of a truly exceptional book, deserving the National Book Award it won recently. But this is not a book I'd expect to find on a bestseller list. Many readers will quickly find themselves in deep water in THE CORRECTIONS. It is not an easy novel, and I applaud Oprah for recommending such a challenging book, and for encouraging her audience to take a long, hard look at what it means to be family. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: American Beauty Redux (with a few corrections)
Review: I loved this book. The thing's 568 pages. Franzen endlessly tosses out ten-cent words like 'paragon.' Readers can easily get lost because there's no clear plot and because Frazen likes to jump from timezone to timezone, person to person. It's very easy not to like any of the characters, particularly because a positive spin never gets put on their actions, and because they engage in bouts of depression, extramarital affairs, and alcohol and sex addictions while never contributing anything positive to the world. And those are all valid reasons to hate the book after trudging through it and cursing at every pageturn. But those are also the exact reasons that can make a reader love the book. To read Franzen describe the inner workings of the individuals that comprise a family in 568 pages is almost magical--you may despise the characters and the way they interact with the world, but at least you'll know who they are, and you can then easily identify yourself or someone you know with them. They're enjoyable to follow, if for no other reason to see what mess they'll get into next and whether they'll correct their messes in the end by means of family. Franzen laments the characters' problems but also allows you to laugh at them. Franzen's attention to detail and his explicit descriptions of hedges and the sky and the colors of chairs, make the book a joy to get through, if for no other reason than to see what ordinary situation Franzen can make interesting without attempting to bore the reader by saying something tired like, "the room was pulsating with energy, almost like spirits of forlorn pasts were circling overhead." Thumbs up from here. (Give "White Noise" by Don DeLilo a shot if you want something similar but funnier.)
Rating:
Summary: Author of "THE SECOND COMING OF AGE" gives five stars
Review: The Corrections is well written and a jolly good read!
Rating:
Summary: The Corrections
Review: It is encouraging that Jonathan Frazen demonstrates the ability to write with style and sophistication; writing as artistic expression is a welcome change from the standard tripe regularly published as modern fiction. However, despite the richness of Frazen's writing, the novel does not earn my recommendation. The cynical profiles of Chip, Gary and Denise do not add up to a satisfactory sum, nor do I think they stand strongly on their own. Narrowly defining them from their mother's perspective, the author has failed to establish any other expectations for these three primary characters. In this vacuum, their failings and virtues are flat and meaningless. In contrast, I'd like to refer to Jane Hamilton's terrific novel "The Short History of a Prince." Hamilton depicts a family of (quirky) individuals, knitting their stories together in a manner both lyrical and resonant. This is a novel that successfully creates, and delivers, a valid perspective. In my opinion, "The Corrections" fails to offer such a reward.
Rating: 
Summary: YUCK!!!!!
Review: I have read most of the "Oprah" books and have generally liked, or at least, found them thought provoking. This is one of the worst books I have read in some time. If the author's objective was to make sure you disliked his characters he has prevailed triumphantly. I found no sympathy, no caring and little compassion for these nasty people. We all have some of these people in our families and in ourselves, but this took all these flaws to extreme. The only reason I finished this book was I thought it must get better to get the reviews it had (...) I don't even have the heart to let anyone borrow this book to read.
Rating:
Summary: Mighty Fancy Writin'
Review: This is mighty fancy writin'. Unfortunately, Franzen's cleverness and conspicuous command of language call attention to themselves and stand between the reader and the story. The characters and events range from patently contrived to somewhat less than credible, the varieties you'd expect in a pretty good Hollywood comedy. Nonetheless, Franzen IS clever and the book, like a pretty good Hollywood comedy, is entertaining.
|
