Rating: 
Summary: Good Read
Review: I enjoyed reading the Corrections. The descriptions of the physical settings, family home, restaurant kitchen, cruise ship bring you right into the novel. I could almost smell the cooking and the dirt being tilled in the garden. The personalities of the family and how they relate to one another kept you reading. However, at the end I couldn't care less what happened to any of the family members. Perhaps it was all the hairs and warts being exposed or the raw apathy for the characters by the writer that made me, too care less about their fate.
Rating: 
Summary: I Am Glad I Didn't Read These Reviews First
Review: Being someone who tends (Through my own pessimistic streak) to trust negative reviews over positive ones, I am glad I didn't look The Corrections up on Amazon before reading it. I found it enthralling, and I believe Franzen has a keener grasp of character development, and how to portray the workings of the human mind than just about any writer I can think of. This feature alone was enough to keep me reading (even through some of the admittedly wordy, but nontheless important passages), but the humor and dramatic tension were also well done. The anticipation of what these poor, crazy, ordinary people were going to do next keeps it moving.
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There were a lot of dry facts included (For example, the information about Lithuania's plight, and the portions dealing with the Axon corporation), but I found it well placed, and did not detract terribly from the story flow. I cared a great deal for the characters, which is something that I've missed in most novels I've read in recent times. This is a book primarily about the modern American mind, And I recognized almost everything in it frighteningly well.
Rating: 
Summary: Composition 101
Review: The Corrections was hard to read, because J.G. tried to use too much research, too many obscure words, too many incomplete sentences, and sentences that were too long. Except for the father, the characters were unsympathetic and never seemed to learn from their mistakes. A little improvement was shown in that regard toward the end of the book, but it was too little too late. It is surprising to me that this book has received the acclaim that it has.
Rating:
Summary: Sorry John, maybe next time
Review: This book did have potential, but unfortunaly feel quite short. The biggest problem with this book is that I hated all of the characters. This book is compared with Anne Tyler - which for the quirkiness aspect of the characters has some merrit - but with each of her characters we find ourselves LIKING them and able to empathise. Here, the characters were all dispicable whiny annoyances.
Rating:
Summary: A Good American Novel
Review: It may not be the Great American Novel, but Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" is certainly a damn good one. Through 568 pages, Franzen chronicles a lifeless, ordinary family called the Lamberts. The book is equal parts domestic drama and social commentary targeting everything from consumerism, the penal system, HMOs, luxury cruises, the pharmaceutical industry, celebrity culture, and even Oprah Winfrey. The big criticism Franzen draws is about his characters. They are shrill, depressed, and immensely dysfunctional, but they are, nonetheless, empathetic. Franzen does not want us to like these characters, nor does he want us to condemn them. He merely wants us to observe them, and from their miserable lives perhaps the reader may be able to glean some sort of understanding and connection. Franzen trusts his characters enough to make them almost unlikable, but he also trusts the reader enough to be patient and understanding. The last 200 pages are a marvel of restrained emotion. The book's finale is Franzen's reward to the reader for our patience and attention. In a way, "The Corrections" is a cautionary tale, but to see it merely as that would be to minimize its force. "The Corrections" is an unflinching, wildly entertaining, and surprisingly tender-hearted novel about family and America. More than this, however, it proves that--as Robert Frost said--home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I envy those who have yet to read this terrific book because they are in for a wonderful read.
Rating:
Summary: A tight fit
Review: In this novel, which does not pretend to be thoroughly realistic, Franzen flatly lays out what each of his creations must do. The children, Chip, Gary and Denise, fit the clichés one expects from many authors, usually male. An academic cannot be seen marking papers, attending committee meetings or serving on grievance panels. Instead, he must 'transgress' against hierarchical structures and have a career-terminating affair. A successful businessman has to be married to a non-supportive wife. For a young woman who was Daddy's Girl, the future holds a string of failed relationships and the am-I-straight? routine. Enid and Alfred Lambert, the parents, must be unorthodox in a very prescribed fashion. Franzen does not disappoint here, establishing five individual paths so relentlessly that the stereotyped Lamberts emerge on the other side as complete cartoon figures, perfectly matching the unrealistic plot. (Enough reviewers divulge plots, as if that was the only element in a book, so it won't be addressed here.) As in a sitcom, where spit-takes and mistaken identities occur all too often, in this book sexual mistakes, marital discord and illnesses come across as tired devices. So what is Franzen up to in utilizing them with such vigour? Before one can answer that, another element must be talked about, something that strikes one from the first word. The narrative voice is rarely differentiated from the internal voice of the main figures. To the unnamed narrator the world is completely poisonous. If he was commenting on you and I having tea and coffee in a café, then the discarded brown sugar packet lying on the table would be a turd, and the packet would have been vanquished, breathing distress from its crushed brown lungs as it expired in the too chilly air-conditioning. This would chime in with what you and I would have said to ourselves, that in the sordid light from the fluorescent lights, or the waning daylight from a livid, smog-tainted sunset, the clientele look sullen and sallow. Nothing is good or restful for either the narrator or the main figures - which might come off as unfair, since the narrator just has to do the telling, not the living - resulting in an even tone that makes the work a tightly-knit piece. _The Corrections_ is so densely woven that none of the figures has space to move. Generally, tailors leave a little room for the body to expand, say after a dinner, yet Franzen, perhaps out of a dislike of ambiguities, doesn't want readers to carry away any message other than what he has said. This is revealed tellingly in the one or two moments of freedom a figure experiences. Alfred enjoys - probably not the right word, considering his circumstances - a few moments to himself, away from the defining confines of his tics, when he can recall the quiet pleasure he took with his children in, as Franzen's narrator, or Alfred, puts it, "plain vanilla closeness." It could be either speaking because the figures and the narrator have been so welded together that for there to be a separation would be to say there was a loss of vision and crack of tone, which likely would go against Franzen's desires. In one respect _The Corrections_ is very realistic. When the major figures are bothered it sounds close to how people think, which is no small achievement. However, this isn't enough to prevail against the uniform mind that utters every line. There is a comic's stance in the narrator's presentation, or else in Franzen's, with the narrator performing to an audience and having complete control. One minor figure, late in the book, repeats the familiar-sounding line "A tragedy rewritten as a farce," and that points to two things the book is not. There can be no tragedy when the anvil drops on the coyote, and without characters there isn't much that can be farcical in a serious way, if that doesn't come out like a contradiction. There is nothing larger than fictive lives at stake; there's no connection to humanity. In exercising dominance Franzen must be aiming at a very specific target. It is the rare novelist who doesn't sound flat now and then over the course of a few or several hundred pages. William Gaddis' _JR_ is a magnificent whole from first line to last, as is Henry Miller's _Tropic of Cancer_. Whether or not one likes them, they are delivered in one breath, as if instead of being novels they were one line of pure poetry. _The Corrections_ exhibits the will to succeed along those lines, but instead of being a series of notes, as in Gaddis and Miller, the material is delivered in a monotone. The narrative voice is, essentially, totalitarian, coming through a megaphone and not a human throat. Unknowingly, the narrative voice addresses its nature in a passage where Gary is thinking to himself: "But _enough_, he told himself. A too-annihilating will to specialness, a wish to reign supreme in his superiority, was yet another Warning Sign of clinical D." In _The Corrections_ the narrator's supremacy is based on Irony. Not the technical device, but the attitude, which in its ripest manifestation regards all actions, plans, scenery, devices and sentiments as ludicrous. The narrator is so much smarter and above-it-all than anyone, and this attitude is shared among the Lamberts, except when they've been outmanoeuvred. There are risks to writing satires that mock everything without provoking considered thought on the problems or situations the author has raised, particularly when the fun is at the expense of cartoon figures who repel a reader's emotional investment. One has to think that Franzen knew those risks and was willing to be judged on his successful schematization.
Rating:
Summary: It just doesn't add up. . . .
Review: I, like many reviewers here, am at a loss for the literary significance of this book. For those who've read my reviews in the past, you know that I have the 100-page rule. If an author can't engage me in the first 100 pages of the novel, I can't commit to finishing it upon the first reading attempt. In the first 100 pages of "The Corrections", we are introduced to brother, sister and aging parents, all of whom failed to interest me in the least bit. I'd like to think that things pick-up later in the novel but based on the reviews posted thus far I suspect it doesn't get much better. Given the literary and mainstream publicity afforded this novel, I'm hard pressed to understand how, with over 100 reviews, the novel only averages 3.5 stars on a 5 star scale. I'm afraid this novel has distracted the reading public from a much more powerful and engaging novel released around the same time (see "About The Author" by John Colapinto). "The Corrections" is no masterpiece. Once the media mania ends perhaps I'll attempt to read this one again.
Rating:
Summary: Awful, just awful
Review: I hated hated hated this book. I found it pedantic, depressing, and boring. The characters were all unlikeable; self centered and rude. If this is supposed to be a look into a family, it is the most disfunctional fmaily I've ever come across, and that includes the Bundys and the Manson fmaily. An awful book, don't waste your time!
Rating:
Summary: How About ZERO Stars?
Review: Ah, heck! I don't even want to rate this book, because I didn't read it. I didn't want to. Now I don't need to. You know why? Because I'm going to write this book. And do it better than what'shisface. And a year from now, you'll be reading all the mean things people have to say about the *newest* Great American Novel.
Thomas Pynchon my little pink FOOT!
Rating:
Summary: Self-important book, over-rated author
Review: It must be getting close to Thanksgiving, because this book is really a turkey. At least once a year, the New York literary community gets together (are they drunk? Stoned? Stupid?) and unites behind a book that justifies their prejudices. In this case, it's the cherished academic and literary view that all American families are dysfunctional. Well, we probably don't need another dysfunctional family literary work (King Lear pretty much said it), but, if we have to have one, it should at least be well-written and convincing. This book's over-heated prose and reliance on cliches of characters just make it an eye-roller. Actually, I suspect this novel is emblematic of a much greater problem with the campus-to-Manhattan literary axis: These young writers simply don't have any experience of the greater world. They continue to write pretentious little books about how squalid "average" American lives are, although they know little of those average Americans (who were pretty impressive on September 11th) and far less about life in general. Hanging out in the faculty lounge or at love-you-loathe-you New York parties does not make for good, robust, imaginative, convincing writing. This is self-important drivel.
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