Rating: 
Summary: Tedious
Review: I was looking forward to reading an American family saga with a dysfunctional American family. I found this saga very long, wordy, and boring. Unfortunately, it was very depressing reading, just one big problem after another. The book should have been titled the Family Stupid because everyone wallowed in their misery and no one wanted out.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a perfect book, but very good, especially for age 40+
Review: No, this isn't a perfect book - there are plot loose ends and it could use some tighter editing in spots, but it has a lot to offer. If you're in your 20's, you probably won't "get it." But if you're in your 40+ years, having to start parenting your own parents, and realizing that your life maybe isn't going to be what you thought when you were 20, then you'll find enough in this book to make it worthwhile. If you want an easy read, it probably isn't for you either -- but if you want a challenge, a book that makes you think, and to meet characters you'll be thinking about weeks later -- then, this is definitely worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: Can't Finish!
Review: I was looking forward to a "great book". What a disappointment. I don't like the characters and I don't care what happens to them. After letting the book sit for 3 days on page 188, I dreaded having to finish. I donated the unfinished book to the library and I went and bought Susan Isaacs new book, Long Time No See.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Style, Little Substance
Review: The Corrections is a mind-boggling book. On the one hand, the author's style is amazingly litterate and thoughtful; every word in the book feels carefully chosen in order to liberate the desired emotions/feelings upon the reader. On the other hand, this also creates a problem since Franzen seems to place more importance on the stylistics than on the plot and narrative.What you end up with is a book with greatly defined characters but with very little substance. Here, the reader enouncters a family that is more disfunction than anything else. The parents are suffering; the mother is trapped between trying to keep her life the way it is why living with her Parkinson-and-dementia-afflicted husband. The children have all moved to different cities where they live empty, unhappy lives. As a matter of fact, no one seems to be happy in this book. Every time an event comes along which should make a character happy, this very character finds a way to complain his or her way through it. You never really identify with any of these characters because they seem to complain all the time. A little bit of happiness in their lives would not have killed them. But they all seem so closed up and distant that they refuse to let anything remotely happy enter their lives. And yet, one has to admire the books for its style. Franzen's writing is beautiful and fulfilling. It's just too bad that this style isn't part of a more complete book, a book where plot and style do mesh together in complete harmony. This could have been a great American novel but it ends up feeling like a barely satisfying attempt.
Rating:
Summary: The Corrections - uneven but worthwhile
Review: There was a lot that I enjoyed in this book and a lot that I didn't. The story was most successful when it concentrated on presenting the lives of the main characters in the homes and towns where they live, which constituted about half of the book. The less successful parts, I felt, were the overly clever subplots about the evils of corporations and the politics of developing nations. Even the theme of medication, which was much more central to the Lambert family's situation, was too heavy-handed at times. The book tried to fuse the postmodern style of Pynchon, et al. with a more traditional character-driven story, but overall I didn't feel that it was successful. Each section was heavily weighted in one direction or the other, so the tone of the novel flipped back and forth, instead of the styles working together. With that said, the final section of the book, where the Lamberts finally got together for one last Christmas, was beautifully written and very moving. The author made me feel that the characters were really living through the pain they were feeling and finding their own ways to deal with it as the threads unraveled and snapped. So, was the finale worth the time spent getting through the uneven ~450 pages that preceded it? For me, it was. For others it may not be, but I recommend reading it and finding out.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult to Read?
Review: I began this book with a desire to become lost in a story. But maybe I've missed something. It is full of sentences 8 lines long and many words I'd never heard of before. It probably is well written but what is the plot? I do not like to use the dictionary every 5 pages. It takes away from the enjoyment. Even though I am a college graduate, I was not impressed. If you feel as I do, try reading "Sing Me A Bawdy Song." It is probably not as well written, however, it has a great plot and it will make you laugh and it will make you cry. Maybe.
Rating:
Summary: Like all the other "Oprah" boooks
Review: Many of my friends groaned when I told them that I had bought the new "Oprah" book. They all said that the books she picks are too depressing. I ignored them, much to my own peril. About 60 pages into the book, I have put it down and do not even want to go on. Even if a book is marginally good, I will read it to the end to see how it works out, but with this book, I don't even care. Every single character is a mess of a person. That wouldn't even be so bad, but the writing is awkward. I counted a sentence that ran for 1/2 the page. That is not an anomaly. Many of the sentences are stream-of-consciousness and I wind up having to reread the beginning of the sentence to refresh my memory of what it was about. I was hoping that I could relate to the characters since I come from a family that gets together at Christmas. But I don't even like the characters enough to find out what happens to them.
Rating: 
Summary: Definitely worth reading
Review: Is *The Corrections* the long-awaited Great American Novel? One cannot tell, given particularly that in this time of flag-waving patriotism there could not possibly be any agreement regarding what the themes or content of the GAN might be. What Jonathan Franzen has created , however, is an engrossing, insightful, sardonically humorous journey into the heart of darkness that is the American nuclear family. It's not perfect, but it sure is a satisfying read and definitely one of the better novels to emerge in this country in recent years. Before I read the book, someone told me to expect a combination of the best of the writing styles of John Irving and Tom Wolfe. That, in fact, turned out to be an apt description, so I will pass it along. The tone is unabashedly derisory as he skewers the contemporary institutions of marriage and family with devastating skill. Along the way, Franzen offers apt satire regarding other topics, institutions, and trends, including the arrogance and cruelty that underlie American economic "globalization" and the jargon-riddled snake pit that is contemporary academia. Franzen's deconstruction of the complex and often contradictory ways that family members perceive and manipulate one another is superb. He shows how beneath our veneer of alleged "maturity" we are overgrown children acting out emotional impulses borne of deeply buried wounds that are almost always opaque to ourselves. Although much of what is presented in the novel demonstrates the pettiness and weakness that is apparently our lot as human beings, his message is not monolithically negative. He shows that even the most bitter familial bickering can be punctuated by acts of devotion and loyalty, and reveals how even the most superficially insensitive characters (in this case, the father figure, Alfred) can surprise us through hidden acts of nobility. Throughout, the writing is vivid and dazzlingly creative without ever becoming pretentious or impenetrable. This is a fine novel, but it is not without flaws. Whereas Franzen demonstrates an uncanny ability to "get inside the heads" of various contemporary male types, I found his attempts to capture the inner lives of female characters to be less convincing. In particular, the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of the Lamberts' daughter Denise did not seem authentic to me. For the most part, Denise's often inexplicable decisions seemed calculated to advance the overall story line rather than to demonstrate any real insight into how a "contemporary American young woman" perceives herself, her family, or the world around her. Overall, however, this is one heckuva good read that once started, is hard to put down.
Rating:
Summary: stunning
Review: J.F. gets right to the heart of one's innermost thought patterns. i have never read an author who reveals so well the architecture of the absurdities and illusions we all labor under most of the time. I don't mean the particular content of those five charactor's interior thoughts, but the structure we all inhabit. it's hard to believe people are so overly sex-crazed as the charactors are, but hey. Occasionally, while reading, i too felt only grim fascination as another reviewer here said, but i think the book stands as an acheivement of funny and self-exposing reality reading. A tad more editing would have been welcome, but i recommend the book highly.
Don't read it in extreme life decision times, read it during christmas time IF YOU DARE; it'd be best on the beach.
Rating:
Summary: I was disappointed
Review: Though I saw many good insights in this book, the characters and plot got lost in a sea of rhetoric. All of us stem from some family disfunction, but we need to find the glue that holds us together. This book spilled the glue and left the family in worse distress than we found them.
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