Rating: 
Summary: Great advertising campaign! Lousy novel!
Review: While there's nothing here quite as repugnant as the depiction of Jammu, a power mad Indian woman, in Franzen's first novel or the frighteningly hokey TV 'After-School Special' take on abortion in his second, this remains a trite feeble work.Chockfull of purple prose, facile characterizations, dumb jokes and hackneyed social observations, the whole opus is then suffused with the author's preening self-love. If you have a fourteen-year-old nephew who thinks David Foster Wallace and 'The X-Files' represent the pinnacles of Western Civilization and the boy's got a birthday coming up this might be the perfect present for him. Alas, it's simply not fare for adults. I don't know what I was thinking when I decided to give this writer yet another chance. Guess I, too, fell for the buzz. Foolish me. Final thought: it's a shame we can't grade the hype a book receives. The obviously very skilled Powers That Be which are foisting this turgid, glorified 'young-adult' novel on the public -- the Oprah Book Club, the hysterical author's photo of our man Jonathan scowling through three-days-growth of beard on back, the ludicrous comparisons to fine works of contemporary literature, the interviews, the articles, etc. -- deserve five stars and the reading public's perverse admiration. Just not our money.
Rating: 
Summary: A Look at American Life with an Unforgiving Microscope
Review: Jonathan Franzen treats us to an unforgiving exploration of the nature of early 21st century American in this sharp and witty novel. The Corrections focuses on an average American family--average in that they are like no other, yet with hopes, dreams, flaws and foibles like so many others. The Lambert's are kind of a mess. Alfred, the family patriarch, suffers from Parkinson's, and his wife, Enid, is in denial about the nature of his suffering, as well as many other details about her family. She is trying desperately to have "one last Christmas" at the family home in the midwest, trying to convince her three grown children to leave the East coast where they now live to let her have this one dream. Good luck Enid getting them all together. Her youngest, Denise is the only one who agrees to come. Denise perhaps has to escape the mess she has made of her life in Philadelphia. Chip, the middle child, has left New York, after being fired from his cushy academic position for sexual harassment, and is somewhere in Eastern Europe perpetrating securities fraud on an unsuspecting American public. And Gary, well Gary's wife doesn't see the point of dragging their three boys out there because she cannot get along with her mother-in-law. Franzen explores this family through their various viewpoints. We see their struggles, their despair, their happiness, narrated with an ironic wit that makes The Corrections a terrific read. The Corrections is a big, long, enjoyable novel (that maybe could have used some editing, but there are only a couple passages I could see taking out). It's funny, it's sarcastic, it's amusing. (and, it's not your typical Oprah selection, if that's scaring you away; it's got much more edge). Have fun with this one.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning prose without pretension
Review: Quite simply a masterpiece. Franzen combines linguistic acrobatics (words and phrases like "gerontocratic" and "barbiturate pace" jump off the page) with a tightly woven tapestry of plot lines and character relationships. A grand work that manages to feel intimate, he sends up American culture as well as postmodern pretensions in a enrapturing story of family dysfunction. To call it a "great American novel" is too complimentary to those who earned that epithet before.
Rating:
Summary: Franzen forgets the basic rule of communication
Review: Because Oprah hyped this novel so much, I gave it a read. It has the expected complexity one associates wtih Franzen's work, a multi-layered premise, a slice of life examined most thoroughly. There is dark humor and pathos, but in the end, I felt it unfortunate that the author still seems to miss the target slightly when it comes to storytelling. If he were telling it verbally to a group of campers around a fire, they'd all be snoring before he had completed three chapters. While extremely talented and skilled in phraseology, the excessive use of vocabulary for it's own sake soon became tiresome and often redundant. This book suffered from a lack of editing it down to a more essential, basic form. The potential of the premise was never quite consumated, despite the obvious amount of time and effort put into the writing, and the ending was ambivalent. Author's egos sometimes drive them to parade their ability to manipulate the language beyond the level required to communicate the story in an easy to understand and entertaining manner, thereby dulling one's enjoyment, and that's what a fiction novel is supposed to be, an enjoyable and entertaining experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Less than the sum of its many parts
Review: This is a big book that is stuffed to the gills with sometimes nearly unending sentences on popular enthusiasms, memories and memorabilia, good and bad luck, sexual desire, images of the American midwest, nostalgia for idealized middle-class family life, lust, academia, over-the-counter drugs, prescription drugs, petty rivalries, American place names, international politics, cogent observations regarding parenting, love, married life, aging, the exigencies of American business life, some information about Parkinson's disease, and the great twin staples of families: unhappiness and anxiety. There is dialogue that is familiar, tiresome, sometimes funny, hip or dated; and interior monologue that is occasionally moving and important. Franzen can write lucidly about anything and everything, and does so in this very long story. Unfortunately, nothing has been left out. By now the plot is familiar to readers. There's not a lot to it. The pre-publication hype has been intense. A family (two parents, three adult children and several in-laws) is to gather from around the United States for one last Christmas together. This plot requires of the reader an agreement to assign "Christmas" a considerable emotional weight. (Some people really do watch "It's a Wonderful Life" every year.) This will succeed with some, but not all, readers. Parts of the text are nearly soporific. Here's an excerpt, about the matriarch, Enid: "She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days." Is it an important book, and will it change your way of seeing the world? Probably not. It's 570 pages long. It weighs two pounds. Some of the descriptions of the most commonplace things and inner states seem to stretch on for pages. Parkinson's disease afflicts the family's patriarch, and getting old is no fun, either. Franzen describes how the disease looks to others ' but not, really, the experience of the disease. In more than a few places Franzen squanders the chance to go deep, in favor of yet more description of how things looked or sounded. For a novel that uses this much paper and ink to tell its story, the emotional lives of his characters are often frustratingly slight. The visual-details-laden, dialogue-heavy tale of a complicated and somewhat interesting (but also quite average) American middle-class family is a sure draw, but readers old enough to recall the best-selling page-turners of the 1950's and '60's of Leon Uris, James Michener, Jeffrey Archer and even Harold Robbins might not be wowed by this novel. Younger readers new to the genre may well be pleased.
Rating:
Summary: Ambitious but Flawed
Review: I have read Jonathan Franzen's other works and found this new novel to fall into the same category - more potential than results. Mr. Franzen obviously has talent, but at times he seems more interested in seeing how well he can phrase sentences rather than how they all fit together. The first few chapters in particular suffer from an over indulgence of language which makes it a bit hard to follow. The premise is ambitious but one could have hoped for a better execution.
Rating:
Summary: A work that engages your attention
Review: Alfred Lambert was the patriarch and the disciplinarian of a family of five. However, he now suffers ignobly from Parkinson's disease and has plenty of elder care needs. His spouse Enid wants to remain loyal to her long time mate and provider, or at least her memory of him. However, she feels more like a hostage to his sickness though choosing to ignore his illness and dream about anything more uplifting to care about.
Their only daughter Denise begins a job in a hip bistro in Philadelphia. However, she puts her work in jeopardy when she begins an affair with her boss' spouse. The oldest son Gary struggles with depression. With the help of his wife he steps closer to the abyss of a breakdown. The youngest son Chip loses his academic job due to a student. He almost loses his life next on some fraudulent scheme in Europe. The Lambert brood appears all ready to self-destruct and yet each one keeps alive in their heart a glimmer of hope for a better future.
THE CORRECTIONS is a humorous yet extremely serious look at an American family against a backdrop of the world scene. The story line is bitter, melancholy, and yet somehow manages to be optimistic as well. Each member of the Lambert brood is a genuine individual struggling to cope with life. Though harsh in many respects, humor keeps the novel from becoming too maudlin. Jonathan Franzen, who writes a novel every decade or so, shows why he is one of the best authors with this must read classic look at the American way of life. Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: How Depressing
Review: This was, by far, one of the most depressing books I have read in the recent past.
I began The Corrections with the highest of expectations, and perhaps this fact alone was the cause of my disappointment, since I wanted the book to be great. Frankly, I was suprised when Oprah picked the title, as from all I had read, I didn't think it sounded like an "Oprah" book. Unfortunately, it follows the theme of so many of her selections in that the family is terribly dysfunctional and the characters are all so very, very sad.
This is not, however, a critique of the Oprah selections.
I at least wanted to discover a character, or a group of characters that "puts the fun back in dysfunctional". These folks are not the group to do that, for me, or I suspect, for anyone. In addition, I believe that Mr. Franzen wishes to emulate John Irving, but just doesn't have the skill or the life experiences to pull that off. He is however, judging by the author photo, terribly good looking, so perhaps he can learn to get by on his looks alone, much as this book will have to do.
Rating:
Summary: Correct me if i'm wrong about this one!
Review: Franzen has written a novel with awesome character development, wit, insight and humor into one family's dynamics. I personally loved to deplore Gary's wife and him at times;and their spoiled rotten kids. Denise was the wonderful, carrer-driven, lesbian-confused daughter who also had my sympathy. Chip from the onset was hilarious with viewing his parents in the NY airport as "killers". Enid and Arthur are the demented mainstays and midwestern parents. Read the book. Love the book. Take it slow though, you'll regret it when you do turn the last page that it's over.
Rating:
Summary: Not an Oprah book, but a Franzen book
Review: Franzen has chased down the Great American Novel. He must surely rank together with David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon and Richard Powers as heirs to a time when the printed word actually meant something, and when today's quasi-literacy was not an option for an informed citizen. Read "The Corrections" and weep, not for Jonathan Franzen, but for all the deaths of trees needed to make paper for all the other sub-standard prose out there posing as literature.
|
