Rating: 
Summary: Laughing Again
Review: My copy of The Corrections arrived via UPS ground delivery on 9/13, at a time when I felt everything that had happened or been written before 9/11 was now moot and irrelevant. Nevertheless, by the weekend I gave this book a chance. Unable to sleep last night, I awoke at 2am and absorbed myself until dawn in wry laughter and astonishment at Franzen's ability to articulate the absurdities in ordinary life as it was. A mixture of Anne Tyler, Phillip Roth, Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe - all my favorites roled into one. I look forward to living in Franzen's pages for a week or more longer, and then sharing him with my dearest friends, who also need to rediscover laughter.
Rating:
Summary: Who's is this guy...?
Review: Jonathan Franzen is who. He's got it down cold, and it's got all the things that you could ever want from a novel. Forget Wolfe and Pynchon, you read this guy, and your doing yourself a favor. Franzen covers the whole shooting match with 'The Corrections', and does it with wit, intelligence, smarts, style, and a whole lot of heat. From the dippy parents, to the food obsessed daughter, to a depressed son, to a mirrored version of that depressed son, another brother who seems to be completley lost in the mid thirties turmoil of deciding what to do. History's are shown from one to the other, train schedules are met, meals are cooked, cruises taken, science and the stock market even get their share of typed space. If you want to read the most original novel of the last twenty years, and the freshest voice of the next twenty, then click on over to your shopping cart, fill it with this book. If I could have amnesia and read it again, I would. It's really that fantastic.
Rating: 
Summary: book of the year?
Review: After reading and enjoying the "27th City" and after reading all of the reviews of "the Corrections", I expected much more. The characters are interesting and i read the book straight through over a period of two days but I don't think that the book justifies the hype. Its worth buying and its worth reading but it is not the great American Novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Longueurs
Review: Franzen has persuasively demonstrated that a diligent and determined forty-something author can crank out a nice, old-fashioned, bloated novel of social commentary. The book has about it the air of a revivalist feat and museum piece. Franzen is a dab hand at the longueurs inflicted on previous generations who had sufficient leisure to devote to slogging through uncompacted narratives stuffed with make-weight details. The novel was of course written to prove a point--to show that his carryings-on in Harper's were not all bluster and tantrum--but was it a point worth devoting half a decade to? I wish he had tried to write something new, something fresh. The Corrections is reactionary stuff, a long step backward.
Rating:
Summary: 10 stars
Review: Ignore the hype; this is a terrific book. Franzen does swing a little too hard for the fences at times, but these minor blemishes are few and far between. The characters are interesting, complex and sharply delineated as fascinating individuals in their own right -- yet recognizably part of the same family with the same shared history. Their interaction with each other and the world unfolds in a fascinating tale. Parts of this book are so overwhelmingly sad that it is difficult to go on, but it is worth the effort. (Parts of it -- especially the minor episodes of overheard conversations in a deli and an elevator are screamingly funny). Franzen has a great way with dialogue and description, to the extent that you forget you are reading a book for minutes on end and are just caught up in it. Makes Don DeLilo look like Danielle Steel. If only all contemporary writers could write like this and Tom Wolfe...I guarantee you won't be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: A Cunning form of Propaganda
Review: Mr. Franzen is an attractive young man, has a whiskey kick to his style, balances plates on the tip of his nose, etc. But surely this cannot be anyone under the age of 40's idea of an enjoyable novel-i.e. something to say about that abstract outside world. I suppose we could all gather round and pronounce this a "social novel" in the guise of W.D. Howells or those other pranksters under his bony wing. Meaning I suppose there is something to be said about the world, steering characters into social/political/medical formations and traps that seem to be obvious to anyone watching the Oxygen Network or reading the cliff notes to some of Updike's mistakes. Meaning these are things that motivate us to change.I tend to look at this as a new kind of propaganda, since propaganda has moved from convincing us to supporting institutional wars and flashy products, to today where it has finally reached into the marrow of American fiction, from "Underworld"'s sunny trip in the Lexus, to the boredom of Moody's quiet sentimentality, to DFW's strain to keep the blood from his brain mechanically dripping onto the page. Franzen's attempts to resurrect the glamour of classified traumas of some personal instinct for politics. And what is the message behind all of this, what is the strain, why are we so eager to swallow this whole? Supposedly because it "says" something. If this is the revelation, if this it was "epic" might mean in any NYTBR footnote, then we as readers will have to pass on this. It is a shame, because his style is appealing, more than the other jim jim boys that turn up on the shelf. But here, he is straining to depict both characters who live in the mind, to his ideas of what the world could be like, or what it is, or what it was. Suffocating the potential of the voices of the former, to the ego satisfaction of the latter. Another New York novel sadly, even if not completely set there. What if all the writers decided one day to leave? Is there another America that isn't completely imagined from this island? I appreciate Franzen's gifts, and his historical vision, but it unfortunately does not have those strands of truth that reside outside of social theory, outside of quick personality constructs , or easily supposed midwestern wisdom.
Rating:
Summary: Franzen repetes himself
Review: After all the hype I thought I was in for a great read. I wasn't. Franzen writes no better in this novel than in his others. Obtuse, ponderous and dull. One moves from scene with the prolixity of a snail. It is a work that is touted for it's humor and well draw characters. I blink my eyes -- where in heaven's name are they? It's a rambling, cluttered novel that has been over sold with heavy advertising and precious reviews. Help yourselves, my friends, to my share of it.
Rating:
Summary: a cut above average
Review: A solid book, but fatty and vividly unedited in spots. Franzen is a capable purveyor of middlebrow fiction-as-usual. Not a work of genius, not a masterpiece, but an earnest if clumsy piece of overreaching commercial fiction. He should consider writing for a TV drama series, because he has a sure sense of the expected detail. Or he could become an op-ed columnist.
Rating:
Summary: A cozy snapshot of late 20th century America
Review: (excerpted and condensed from NYTimes review)
By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting, "The Corrections" not only shows us two generations of an American family struggling to make sense of their lives, but also cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way toward the millennium. "The Corrections" is a remarkably poised narrative held together by a myriad of meticulously observed details and tiny motifs that create a mosaiclike picture of America in the waning 20th century. And while the story line is propelled by several suspenseful questions - whether Alfred's patent for a metallurgical discovery will pay off, whether Chip will escape from Lithuanian thugs, whether the shotgun in the Lamberts' basement will be put to use - the real tension in "The Corrections" stems from the characters' emotional dramas, rather than from the sort of contrived plot points found in the Franzen's earlier novels. ...
Rating:
Summary: Not your average Buddenbrooks
Review: Coming off a publicity campaign laden with words such as "masterpiece" and "genius", as well as a NYTimes Magazine piece that he may one day come to regret for its inadvertently comic self-indulgence, Jonathan Franzen is poised for some kind of greatness, though, having finished The Corrections I'm not exactly what that might be. This is a well-written--at times quite stunningly so--novel that could have used the iron hand of an editor not quite so in love with his author. For anyone accustomed to reading Don DeLillo and William Gaddis and even retro old John Updike, the opening pages seem derivative. Then the reader begins to enjoy the characters, and Franzen's style, still faintly redolent, especially of DeLillo, catches its own kind of fire. In the end, though, The Corrections comes off more as five dense character studies in search of a more well-defined story. This would have made a wonderful novella, especially with its muted and rather reticent ending. It's been compared to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, but that was a a study not just of a family but of a whole social order in a time of serious change. But Franzen likes the sound of his voice, and there's no doubt many will like it too. I just wish he'd now and then let his characters out of their net of irony and have their say, as well.
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