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Summary: FINALLY IT HAS ARIVED!
Review: For long, a book hasn't been composed of lively characters. Franzen's characters pop out of the pages right in your face whenever you like them or not. The book is a masterpiece of psychological understanding of human development in comtemporary American culture. Briliant! It was worth the years of solitude and cultural starvation.
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Summary: Spectacular Honesty
Review: The magic of this book lies not so much in its plot as in its honesty about human nature. The condition of each member of the Lambert family is catalogued in a series of rationalizations they have made to adjust to a life they otherwise don't understand. An honest reader will recognize these voices as their own, those of friends and loved ones, those of bosses and other authority figures. I would be hard pressed to think of another book that so captivated me in recent years. Perhaps Roth's AMERICAN PASTORAL or Steinbeck's EAST OF EDEN. This chronicle of dramatic inner and inter conflict and turmoil in the context of the most mundane (and some not so) of events is destined to be a book that is talked about long after Franzen, may he live to be very very old and happy, is gone.
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Summary: The HYPE machine is working OVERTIME!
Review: I don't know how this could be called a Great American Novel. There are so many points I don't know how to begin. Only that the hype machine is ridiculous and buzz sells a lot of books. Franzen hasn't even lived an interesting life to reiterate his experiences (living cooped up in a flat with his ex-wife writing for years going out once a year <anniversary> doesn't make for an interesting human being). It's academic writing (I suspect an MFA in his past). Really interesting writers live life and don't need to STUDY their guts out to write. The New York Times review was the most accurate I saw. Kaukutani <-sp? was right on and the most honest of all critics who read this. Get real people. You could never call this the best book of the year. At best it's a really good episode of Thirty Something. And getting on Oprah's list - Nuff Said! Read James Salter instead.
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Summary: Brutal book: dysfunction is not to be celebrated
Review: This book is bad on so many levels. Each member of this family is self centered and evil. None of them take responsibility for their actions, and the christmas climax made me hurt. There is no resolution to this story...no one is redeemed at all...not one character has sympathy or empathy for the others.
It is NOT the American way to hate your parents, siblings, lovers, spouses. This book seems to esteem hatred of those you are suppossed to love. I hated it.
Rating: 
Summary: Vertical Rather Than Horizontal
Review: Nothing much "happens" in The Corrections, yet this novel absorbed my attention for over 560 pages. Rather than a horizontal storyline, the reader is thrust into the book vertically, going deeper and deeper into each character as their hopes and fears are finally exposed. Franzen is at his finest when he's dealing directly with the Lambert family and all its eccentricities; the Lithuania subplot did not entice me. I also felt that alhough the Denise character was intriguing, she was not always authentic; I did not "buy into" her various relationships or her "coming out." Franzen seemed far more in control with his male characters, Gary and Chip. While this is not the "great American novel", it is certainly a worthwhile read, and many of the scenes will stick with me for a long, long time.
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Summary: At Last! The Great American Novel!
Review: Stop reading this review, go to Amazon orders and order this, right now! It is great, terrific, and swell! Franzen is comical, witty, and amusing. The novel is rich, dense, and jam-packed. The family is nutty, goofy and loving. you are going to love, adore, and savor The Corrections. Go! Buy! Read!!!!
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Summary: A Jackie-Collins-Style Novel for Prep School Boys
Review: This is my theory about why this book is so popular: It's essentially a melodrama with about as much depth as a Jackie Collins novel, but the members of the literary boys' club that are raving about it have never watched or read a soap opera before, and are therefore 100% vulnerable to its cheap, addictive pleasures. Franzen is a really smart, maybe even brilliant, definitely talented guy. When I read an excerpt from this novel which appeared last spring in The New Yorker as a short story, I thought it was one of the most profound and beautiful things I'd ever read. I expected the novel to be a contemporary Anna Karenina. Instead I got characters so flat, they seemed headed for a vacation on Gilligan's Island: the harping, mindless, chirpy mother; the hot blond chick wearing tight blue jeans who doesn't enjoy sex with her husband -- how could that be? -- because, as it turns out, she's a lesbian; the henpecked husband and his pathologically manipulative wife, blah blah blah. (Yeah, this novel is not "epic" enough to include even one mature female character.) Each of the main characters have their own subplots and I felt as if Franzen used the plots to flee exploration of character, and romp, instead, in irrelevance. One of the characters is this hip, professor-guy who's disaffected (or something)and doesn't know what to do with his life. He gets fired for having an affair with a student. (By the way -- such a shocking surprise -- the student is a sex/drug crazed maniac who preys on her teacher. Not the other way around. How original. Franzen's gone and reversed the stereotype. How did he ever think up that strategy?) So Franzen sends this down and out ex-professor character off on a wacky-hijinx-never-stop tour of Lithuania that seems to have nothing to do with who the character is or what he's facing. For me, the most boring section of the novel. When I finally got to the section I had loved as a story in the New Yorker, it flew right by and I had to recall its shape from memory. I think that's because Franzen smushed it into the midst of so much shlock involving a highly dramatic bisexual love triangle. Again, I didn't think the lesbian route (at least his totally un-profound rendition of it) goes toward the heart of who the Denise character is. My sense is that Franzen used the story line to flee Denise. Another thing -- The pacing and the shape of the novel as a whole are totally flat. Every single moment in the novel is weighted equally. It's just a string of episodes, with no breathers, no peaks, no valleys. Practically every sentence is an episode. The good stuff: The Alfred character is real, absorbing, interesting, poignant. Likewise the details about the railroad line where Alfred works. Also, if you like Jackie Collins (as I do when I'm in the mood), this book provides exactly that kind of entertainment. And if you're a prep school guy, you can pretend that your brain is being enriched as you read this 700-something page tome. And how do I describe the profound "subtext" of this book? Franzen bashes you over the head with it in the first chapter of the book, then periodically bashes you over the head again every time the word "correction" comes up (every 75 pages or so.) If it's that frigging easy to bash readers over the head with your "subtext" maybe you should just write it up as a five paragraph essay, and then if you want to write a novel, you can devote yourself honestly to character development and a thing called "story", which is what a novel is supposed to be.
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Summary: The Corrections
Review: Although I finished reading "The Corrections" a couple of weeks ago, I hesitated at first to write about it here. I couldn't decide if, after all the pleasurable hours I'd spent with it, the slight disappointment I felt once I'd reached the end was the result of its hasty-seeming final few pages or of my realization that there was no more of the novel left to read. The truth, of course, was that it was a little of both. After coming to know so many divergent characters so well, and after reading so many incisive and engaging portrayals of contemporary culture, it was unfortunate to have to leave them behind. But at the same time those last pages, in which Franzen tries admirably to bring some kind of closure to a wide-ranging novelistic world, only emphasize that what precedes them has the feel more of overlapping novellas, one per character (give or take), than components of a unified whole. Still, I'm not complaining. Some wit once said that a novel can be defined as "a long prose narrative that has something wrong with it." I gladly accept my minor frustrations with "The Corrections" as the price of reading such entertaining, moving, and almost stupefyingly well-written prose.
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Summary: Human Emotions/Family Relationships
Review: An American family under a microscope...I don't know of anyone reading this book who will not recognize themselves or their own family in at least some small aspect; the themes and events are universal. I found it to be a story of parenthood, childhood, adulthood and the search for individual recognition within the context and confines of family expectations and disappointments, the near-desperate reaching out from the limitations of being someone else's father/mother/son/daughter/sister/brother/husband/wife to find one's self and how long and hard that journey can be, how family is initially what defines us in all our relationships, and how we have to go through a series of "corrections" to discover what and who we really are. Jonathan Franzen is adept at handling the emotions of each of the characters in the book. While not offering detailed visual images of them in the form of physical description, the reader nonetheless is readily able to identify with each of them and "see" them, connect with them on an emotional level. The lack of overt physical description, I feel, tends to make the reader intially somewhat stereotype the characters in their appearances and it is only until after I finished the book that I realized this was perhaps what Franzen had in mind...that we tend to disregard the typical until we discover what lies beneath, even more so with family members and the "roles" in which we cast them. The author perhaps recognizes this tendency in each of us, to label, to see only the successful investment banker son, only the independent restaraunteur sister, only the loser brother with no direction. With Franzen's facile use of simile, layer by layer, he bares the underlying soul and vulnerability of the apparently "typical" members of the Lambert family. The book is engaging from the first page -- I read it in a day and a half. "The Corrections" is an intelligent and thoughtful book, bittersweet, ironic and, in the end, hopeful.
Rating: 
Summary: overworked, overrevised, overdoctored novellas
Review: Franzen bleeds his intestines in the first chapter -there are a million taps of a goldsmith (Look Mamma...); then settles up an OK pace: interesting characters (!!!) rumble through steely grooved narrative. He is supposed to be in the same gang as Pynchon/Delillo/Gaddis polarized (Foster Wallace gives a quote)and if he set out to produce an alternative to their form, he has merely succeded in writing a glorified mass market novel which will make people who otherwise could never digest tougher works, feel a bit more intellectually attuned but wouldn't jack up their general awareness.
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