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Summary: FANTASTIC Saga of the Dysfunction of American Family Life
Review: Jonathan Franzen's masterpiece, The Corrections, starts off very, very slowly. In fact, the first couple of pages are a real muddle --- confused and possibly overwritten. We later learn that Franzen has intentionally modeled this after the script his character Chip Lambert is writing.The book soon picks up. After about 10 pages, in fact, the book is so damned good that you absolutely cannot put it down. At times funny and at times absolutely and tragically sad, The Corrections is the book of the year. Big, sprawling, and never anything less than compelling, I'd put money on a Pulitzer Prize for the uber talented Mr. Franzen.
Rating:
Summary: The Corrections
Review: Insightful book, right on the mark and observant of the small details which make the whole so stimulating. Makes my family look almost "normal". The author has focused on the soul of a situation to explain a family member's reaction. A definite "must read".
Rating: 
Summary: Started out slow, but got much better in the end.
Review: After picking up this book and reading the reviews. I thought this was going to be a long read for me. Well at first it started out slow for me. I struggled to get into the few pages. But once I got to Gary's story is when the book started to pick up for me. Each of the characters had there own story to tell and sometimes I felt like they took just too long. Overall the story was wonderfull and the last few hundred pages kept me hooked to the point where I never wanted to put down the book. The end to me was something I had expected and kinda knew would happen, but the rest of book kept me wondering how things would turn out except for a few points.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible Book
Review: I believe this is absolutely one of the worst books I have ever tried to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Puzzled by praise for this soap opera with pretensions
Review: It must be that male writers and critics just don't read books written by women, because there are hundreds of books so much better than this soap opera of a novel. But this book has no staying power and won't even be read by anyone in a few years, whereas Marilynn Robinson, in HOUSEKEEPING has a far more interestingly dysfuntional family, the members of which all hold our interest. Many great writers write about unlikable people, but Jonathan Franzen doesn't like his own characters, and we never get a chance even to know what they're like. This is a book that makes you despair about being human, but when you finally get all the way through it you put it aside and despair of the time you wasted reading it. This book's ideal audience are white male prep school students or college English majors.
Rating:
Summary: The Corrections
Review: This book is 200+ pages too long. Way too much filler, etc. A good editor would have been helpful. I will never read this author again. Scanned many of the pages of description and unnecessary "side-bars." What a waste. I know there is a story here but just give us the story. I read way too much to be bothered with nonsense in any book!
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Summary: Many resentful "writers" in NY or one writing many reviews?
Review: The Corrections is a fine novel. Not a masterpiece, not the great American novel, but very good. I can only assume there a people out there so incensed at Franzen's sudden success (after years of unrewarded toil) that they must throw dirt clods: "TV drama," "Jackie Collins," "thirtysomething," "middle-brow." Jane Threlfall's insistence that novel-writing ought to be the exclusive province of chest-beaters, heavy drinkers, and jet pilots is charmlessly reactionary. If you want to write, you don't go out and fight bulls; you sit down, engage your imagination, and write. (And fight bulls on your spare time if you're so inclined.)
Rating: 
Summary: Another American Novelist
Review: I hold in high esteem all of the people who lent jacket copy to Franzen's new book, but it escaped my notice, before I began to read The Corrections, that all were men. After I began to read it, in fact eighty-seven pages into it, I checked. You may wonder why. The opening section, which deals with an aging married couple, is brilliant, and I entered the wife's predicaments and feelings with painful vividness. No such vividness attends the presence of any of the not-old women characters in the second section of the book, which concerns a a failed/failing professor/writer. Nor--and this is important--is it at all clear that the man's point of view is the problem here. My husband has the book at the moment, and I will return to it hopefully when he has finished it. But at page 87 I said oh no not another American novelist whose brilliant work I can't read (and you know which 5 or 6 writers of my generation, which came of age before the sixties, it is that I mean) because of this, well, this vagueness. Maybe the guy (the character I mean) will turn out to have some better luck.
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Summary: Excellent read they say? Correction!
Review: After reading excellent reviews for "The Corrections", I pre-ordered this book from Amazon.com and very much looked forward to reading it. When Oprah chose it as one of her selections, my enthusiasm only increased. Alas! This book is torture to read. Each sentence drags on with overly poetic, overly detailed, overly worded prose. Each character a pathetic and uninteresting bore (who really cares about these people??). Midwesterners deserve a better description than this book has to offer. Trust me when I advise you not to use your hard earned money on this one. Borrow the book from a library or a friend (she'll probably be happy to fish it out of the recycle box).
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Summary: Dull and pedantic
Review: Franzen, who originally changed his name from Hans Craven, has composed a symphony of words in this thriller for teenage hermaphrodites. His focus on the trials and tribulations of a high school age boy-girl correcting his-her paper is fascinating for those interested in the most boring aspects of the irrelevancies of adolescent life. There are few passages which are written with grammatical accuracy, most of the sentences fail to include verbs, although the occassional gerund attempts to supplant the cosmic mystery latent in his psychological account. The middle chapters, which are devoted to the protagonists travel to Babylon through the vehicle of her poorly written thesis statement seems crudely inserted within what is otherwise a naturalistic text. Still the introduction of chronic angst as the main character faces the ambiguity of his-her own sex in premodern times speaks voluminously to the errors of modern chicken farming. I would recommend this book only for those who have a full grasp of both the history of italian cinema and the dialects of early western India.
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