Rating: 
Summary: Depressing Dissapointment
Review: This book was extremely dissapointing. After reading the first 100 or so pages, I felt let down and unsatisfied. The characters were consistantly negative and dull, and I found myself not caring what happened to them one way or the other. The plot took several unrealistic turns and I felt that the writing was un-necessarily "jumpy". I continuously pursuaded myself to continue reading hoping that it would get better. Unfourtuately, half way through the novel, I couldn't take anymore, so I jumped to the end. Almost to my relief, after reading the last 20 pages, I concluded that the overly depressing themes continue to the end. I was perfectly satisfied to put the book on a shelf to collect dust, never again to return to it. I have never left a book unfinished. Don't waste your time.
Rating:
Summary: No style, flat characters, no substance,
Review: This book is a joke. Franzen should go into hiding out of sheer embarrassment.(...)Aside from the first 2 pages, which are pretty good, this is one of the worst books I've ever read. It's a rambling, style-free, "story" devoid of all substance, as deep as a high school term paper, employing characters that are all negative, vile, and so selfish as to be sociopathic. WORST OF ALL THEY ARE UNREALISTIC AND UNBELIEVABLE. They don't seem like real people at all, but like forced self-conscious, and terribly FLAT, fictional characters. There is no one to like in this book, and no one who's even interesting. Reading this is a waste of time, and it goes to show you that marketing is everything. Unless a writer is a clever as Nabakov (and Franzen's about a clever as a shaving off Nabakov's toenail) he's got to use LIKEABLE characters because if you don't like a character you don't care what happens to them. And if you don't care what happens, then there's no drama. Just boredom. I.E. this book. One positive reviewer wrote: "By the way, those who gave it one star probably hate any movie without a happy hollywood ending or that doesn't play at your local megaplex cinema..." Actually, that's not true in my case. And the above reviewer is no doubt unaware THAT THE MOVIE RIGHTS HAVE BEEN SOLD!! This story WILL soon grace the local megaplex!
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant character development
Review: Ignore Oprah's Army- read it! Anyone sandwiched better aging parents and their own marriage and children will appreciate this book.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully Written. Funny & Raw.
Review: One thing that can definitely be said for this book: It will make your own screwed up family seem tame by comparison. Franzen has crafted a dense sprawling novel that presents the nuclear family stripped raw and bare. Within each titled "section" the book has no chapters, forcing you to turn page after page to find a good place to stop before bearing witness to another funny but painful situation these characters are in. Both hilarious and heartbreaking it's hard not to find some aspect to identify with this fractured family and their relationships.The book is demanding and may not be for people who want a happy pick me up. But I also feel the characters are ultimately redeemed, and the story ends on an uplifting note.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't believe the hype.
Review: I'd really, really like to be able to simply dismiss Jonathan Frazen's "The Correstions" as the scribbling of a pretentious little prig. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The book, standing on its own merit, didn't justify the pre-Oprah hype, and it probably doesn't deserve to be completely lost in the post-Oprah backlash. (For those who don' t know: The book was selected for the Oprah book club; hundreds of thousands of extra copies were printed; in interviews the author said he wasn't happy about the Oprah selection and that his book really wasn't appropriate for Oprah readers; perhaps figuring that anyone so stupid as to look this gift horse in the mouth wouldn't be smart enough to fill an hour-long show, Oprah cancelled his appearance). Let's start with the cons. First, Franzen's prose is frequently overblown and too self-conscious. A sample description of a windy day: "A sheet of newsprint wrapped itself around a parking meter with erotic-looking desperation." Please. Let's just say he's light years behind Toni Morrison. Second, the book starts very slowly. I'm an easy sell, and it took me over 200 pages to get truly interested. A minor plot point in the book is that one of the characters has written a screenplay. The big tip off that the screenplay is garbage and that the character has no idea what he's doing is that the screenplay begins with a six page monologue. Hello! Third, given that this novel is character-driven, it's unfortunate that a few of the leads are so poorly drawn. The women in particular are ill-defined. Which leads to point number four: no question about it - there's a huge streak of misogyny throughout the book. Rather consistent with the author's bashing of Oprah book club readers. Now for the reason we shouldn't all blithely ignore "The Corrections." This is basically the story of a family struggling to come to grips with the slow and painful deterioration of its patriarch from Parkinson's disease. Here Franzen hits all the right notes. The children have always known their father as a formal but unapproachable man. Only as his dignity is being slowly and painfully stripped away do they begin to know him. If Franzen hadn't cluttered the book with so many extraneous sub-plots and self-indulgent development of secondary characters, this could have been a truly great book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, not great.
Review: Jonathan Franzen has written a very good novel. His insights into a family with adult children with more than its share of troubles is without parallel. This relatively young author shows the ability to write a Great Book. This one is not quite there. He falls short as he unsuccessfully seeks to weave individual lives into the Lambert family but, that said, these digressions, are not without merit. At times funny and, other times, quite sad, each of these would be plenty of material upon which to predicate an entire novel. Perhaps Mr. Franzen has pulled a "Pat Conroy" and bitten off more than even he can chew. I would like to see him narrow his plot and allow his principal strength, i.e. his prose to realize its full potential.
Rating:
Summary: The Corrections is a Masterpiece
Review: This notion that writers ought to cut all that which doesn't "advance the plot" staggers and upsets me. In my mind, this is tantamount to suggesting that Chagall or Picasso not paint anything that doesn't PRECISELY represent that which they're attempting to represent. Women don't have three eyes - so don't give her that extra one, Pablo!! Like a multilayer cake, Franzen gives us plot then character then plot again then character then . . . and so on. And he describes each of these elements perfectly. Underscore, highlight, in bright red ink: PERFECTLY. If, as Steinbeck said, "the real challenge of writing is to describe things exactly as we see them" -- then Franzen has met the challenge. And to think like this guy! Imagine! I was sad to turn the last page, because I was so hungry for more of Franzen's apt and insightful understanding of a new world filled with a new people. Read this book. Now.
Rating:
Summary: Depressing - What was Oprah thinking?
Review: (... This) is a story about an obviously disfunctional family(I think).
None of the characters are very likeable except for maybe Chip. This is the oddest book I have ever read. The author seems to find a lot of "humor" in Parkinsons disease, which one of the main characters suffers from. He should write a book on the conclusion of the kids lives, which held my interest a little. Instead he just ended the story abruptly. Maybe it was on purpose, so he could sell a sequel to this book.
Very hard to follow the story line, he jumps around to much, and very boring in parts. This is the first "oprah" book I read, that I actually hated!
Rating:
Summary: What's the big deal about this book??
Review: I really do NOT understand why this book has been called "exhilarating" and "spellbinding". I started reading it from the beginning and was completely bored. So I skipped a few chapters, started reading again, and found myself extremely unimpressed. A few chapters more, and I had to give up. I just could not get into the book, and actually looked forward to putting it down! What a disappointment. I'm amazed it made it onto best-selling lists/
Rating:
Summary: Do the Lamberts need correcting?
Review: Hype is good. Hype is bad. If I hadn't read about Franzen's latest offering in The New Yorker I would never have known to look for it (I steer away from bestsellers). If I hadn't read about the Oprah conflict, etc. it would have been easier to simply open up the book and start reading without some armchair critic whispering in my ear every few pages. But read it I did and I must say Franzen really does have a gift for character development. I was pulled in and sold by the incredible inner dialogues the Lambert family members all get to take their turn at. Especially one scene where Chip is left alone at the dinner table to eat a grey slab of liver and cold rutabaga. The rest of the family do the dishes, play ping-pong and even turn the lights off and go to bed. The father comes upstairs from his workshop in the basement to find his son asleep at the table and carries him up to bed realizing that his son had been used to fight a battle for control with his wife. Here we get that "fly on the wall" feeling I love so much. That's where the empathy happens. If you need a plot-driven narrative then this probably isn't the book for you. If you like well-developed characters who come from a typical all-American dysfunctional family you can identify with, then give it a try. Franzen can go off on tangents about world politics, scientific discoveries and global economics that might have been better edited; a little too reminiscent of Pynchon in his encyclopedic knowledge and atention to detail.
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