Rating: 
Summary: A triumph if out-oprahing the oprah selections
Review: Yes, Franzen is a good writer. I wish his writing came off as less egotistical about it. It is rather intriguing that his writing conveys some kind of narcissism.
This is a book about a majorly dysfunctional family. Warning: do not read it before you go on a cruise.(Or maybe while on a cruise.)
The only way I could enjoy this book and get through this book was wondering if Franzen intentionally was doing a spoof on Oprah books, by out-Oprahing them all. Unfortunately I think Franzen seriously liked writing this, not as a satire on Oprah books.
It was a book I hated to love because of the writing, but overall, hate it I did.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I tried to make myself read this book but just could not. It is one of only maybe 5 books in my life I have ever started and decided not to finish. I simply did not care what happened to any of the characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazing, simply amazing
Review: You can't really appreciate how fantastic this book is. Franzen speaks in so many clever voices... you'll be amazed by how seamlessly he channels so many different characters -- perfectly capturing every nuance. Once I started, I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Finding hope in lost causes...
Review: When I look back at the 300+ books I have read over the past ten years, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections"is near the top of my list of irresistable, up-all-night, can't put down books. It is the kind of book that makes me willing to slog through mediocre book after mediocre book, looking to find a new discovery like this. In a book like this, the beauty and ease of the language was enough to keep the pages turning, but it is so much more than lovely prose; it is the examination of one family's dysfunction, seen through their eyes. Enid Lambert, the family matriarch, is a woman with an agenda: after she marries the handsomest man she has ever seen, she endevors to change his shapeless character over time. Her spectacular failure frames the lives of the couple's three children: Chip, Gary, and Denise. The novel takes place over a year in the characters lives, as Enid attempts to reunite the family for one last Christmas before her husband declines fully into Alzheimer's. Gary and Denise are successful yuppies living in Philadelphia (he a married banker with 3 sons; she a restauranteur on the brink of a personal discovery), Chip is a penniless writer living in New York after being fired from a Connecticut university for fraternizing with a co-ed. He is writing a screenplay and living off loans from Denise. The novel weaves back and forth through events over the year and flashes back on how these characters have ended up with their lives in such amusing disarray. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the trainwreck lives of these all too human characters. Both Chip and Denise show profoundly poor judgment on a regular basis; Gary is a complete jerk, and the Lamberts could be bestowed with the Ron and Nancy Reagan Neglectful Parenting Award. Enid is particularly irksome, like Donna Reed crossed with Joan Crawford. The legacy of their flawed dreams plays out in the empty lives of their children; it is hard not to sympathize with what got them into their sorry states. "The Corrections" has much to say about the way we live our lives today, and the language it uses is gorgeous and compelling. This is one of the few books recently I have re-read immediately after finishing and I'm sure I'll read it again and again.
Rating: 
Summary: Reminds one of that kid with the 4.25 GPA
Review: I think just about everyone knows at least one of the characters in Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS. With me, it was the father dying of Parkinsonism.
The plot revolves around Alfred and Enid Lambert and their three children, all of whom are trying to escape St. Jude, the Midwestern town in which they were raised. Gary, the jerkiest of the bunch, is an investment banker. He's so self-centered that when his wife hurts her back, he barely notices. Chip is a former professor of Textual Artifacts (whatever the heck that is) with the sexual appetite of a rabbit. Denise is a self-destructive Philadelphia chef whose dream job at a five-star restaurant proves ephemeral. Enid wants them all home for one last Christmas.
There's not much plot other than wondering when they're going to put poor old Alfred in a nursing home. Franzen's style is mostly narrative summary, but nobody I've read does it better. He also has a penchant for cataloguing, something that ordinarily drives me up a tree. The story runs the gamut of emotion, from hilarity to pathos. There's a scene where Alfred is trying to give himself an enema that's especially heart-wrenching.
Franzen will remind you of that kid in high school with the 4.25 GPA, who was also the president of the National Honor Society, captain of the soccer team and running his own business on the side. He uses words like "metempsychotically" and his sentences are Faulknerian to an extreme; but I didn't have any trouble staying absorbed. I doubt any other writer working today could show us Parkinsonism, from the inside.
Rating:
Summary: The Corrections not worth your time.
Review: The Corrections is a story about a family growing up in suburban Saint Louis. Dad has a good job with the railroad and Mom is a stay-at-home housewife. They have three children who have normal childhoods and go off to college. The basic story line is about the adult relationships of the family members as they work through their individual obsessions. The characters are mostly unlikable but have qualities you recognize in people you know. There are no heroes in this book. There is no sense of the protagonist overcoming a life obstacle. The story is light on plot and focuses on the characters shallow relationships. Franzen, occasionally, demonstrates real skill at descriptive writing but I doubt if this book will stand the test of time. It doesn't have anything universal about it to carry it forward. The book is sardonic, cynical and pointless.
Rating: 
Summary: So much promise ... so little delivery.
Review: Other reviewers have more than adequately recapped the overall plot and theme(s) of this book, so I won't waste time on that. What I will say is this: there are moments in the Corrections that I found to be absolutely brilliant. Franzen has a gift that peers into his characters at times and simply understands the human condition like very few other authors of recent times. That being said, it was those few moments of greatness that soured me on the rest of the book. Knowing he could write so brilliantly, I could hardly bear the arduous trudge through the rest of the mediocrity. Families are dysfunctional, we all know that. There's even a certain charm to recognizing the frailty of maintaining a "functioning" family. Unlike others, it wasn't this extreme dysfunction that turned me off, but rather the way in which Franzen dealt with it. His fleeting attempts at social commentary were more than just cynical, they were flat out self-righteous. Indeed, in reading the book, I felt the constant sense that Franzen was condescending not only toward his characters, but to the reader as well. His words seeped of self importance and backhanded the intelligence of his readers. All in all, I found it to be a turn off to a book and an author that had so much promise. For my money, read Ian McEwan's Atonement. There's a book that truly delves into the human condition without being disingenuous or haughty.
Rating:
Summary: pretentious hype
Review: Why do we torture ourselves by reading books like The Corrections? Are we masochists who enjoy having our native tongue mangled until it is a souless corpse? I could barely get through the first page of this book without a burst of hysterical giggles at how pretentious and bloated the language is. The author spends several paragraphs in the first few pages of the book describing the characters' internal alarm without making one original observation ("an overlay of overtones" and other such nonsense.) Yet this book receives rave reviews from the critics while better written genre fiction is panned for being clear and having characters one can actually sympathize with. The only thing a book like this can teach us is how to write badly.
Rating:
Summary: Terrible Book
Review: I could not force myself to finish this book. The characters are so dysfunctional and depressing that I began to feel blue. This book in no way reflects my family or any family I know. I gave the book away. I read and liked most of the other Oprah selections.
Rating:
Summary: Loved it
Review: I respectfully disagree with all those folks who didn't like this book. I for one, loved it. True, for the first 50 pages or so I would find myself stopping and saying aloud "I hate these people." And I did--sort of. But I kept reading because the characters are so interesting. How do people turn out like this? I know people say that there's nothing redeeming about any of the main characters, but I disagree. There are redeeming aspects of the characters--it's not spelled out for you. A book isn't bad just because one doesn't want to marry the person one is reading about. Having grown up as a Hoosier and then spending a few years on the east coast, I at times felt like Mr. Franzen had grown up alongside of me . . . or maybe in the town over. His details are spot-on--the descriptions of various subdivisions, the contour of the land, the neighborly relations and underlying tensions, the teacher who brought a bit of the outside world to the small town of St. Jude. Wonderful. While this book isn't for everyone, I would highly recommend it.
| 
