Rating: 
Summary: Correct Me If I'm Wrong But...
Review: ....is this book boringly pedantic or what? I think Franzen needs a spanking for putting his readers through paragraph after paragraph, page after page of extraneous details. I simply skipped these passages until I got back to the main thread of the narrative. Alas, I must admit I did keep reading because of *all the hype* I had read about this book. NONE of the characters is likeable! I think that's the main thing that stuck with me. He's a good writer. He has a way with words, I'll give him that much. But, overall, the book is much ado about nothing.
Rating: 
Summary: Franzen Fools the Critics
Review: Corrections is an arrogant attempt by Jonathan Franzen to impress his elite literary friends. Franzen's book was a tremendous disappointment. The characters are unsympathetic. There is no plot. Clearly the critics were fooled because of Franzen's clever command of language. The book appears to be a vehicle by which Franzen can distance himself from his upper middle class midwestern roots and align himself with the literary crowd in New York. The author has foisted on the public a dark series of contrived vignettes that are being passed off as a novel worthy of reading. Don't waste your money or your time.
Rating:
Summary: Catch-23
Review: as a reader of literary fiction, i am appalled at the truth that this so-called writer, a man who supposedly wrote this novel blind folded and in his basement, has gotten away with one of the grandest literary rip-offs known to readers everywhere. the only thing worth saying is that this novel is funny, though it was funnier the first time i read it, when it was called Catch 22. The stylistic similarites are so obscenly close (the brother attends D--- College, J. Hellar's masterpeice has a Major De C---, Gitanis is the Syndicate)that anyone remotely familiar with Catch--22 should be able to put, well, 2 and 2 together and realize that every transitional paragraph is bitten from the great one himself. i am surprised, well, not really, that readers of this work, that reviewers of fiction, have been unable to recognize the blatent mimicing of this overwritten, underthought novel. If you want to read the corrected Corrections, read Catch 22, at least it has a moral purpose.
Rating:
Summary: Too much Franzen
Review: I enjoyed the word-play, the inventive descriptions, the utterly implausible situations the characters found themselves in, and the placement in an historical context. But I did dislike the book for several reasons. First, the characters were basically unbelievable. They not only gave absurd responses to unreal circumstances, but they seemed to be totally without character features that might make them seem lovable or at least attractive. But what bothered me the most was the paragraph by paragraph demonstration by Franzen of how cool and smart he is. He kept stumbling over himself proving how snide and sarcastic he could be in describing how dumb and absurd his characters were. How many times does an author have to use the word 'matoor' in a character's internal dialog to show how superior he is in his knowledge of English pronounciation? I think I counted four times he did this. The first time was once too often. I don't think this book could have been saved by a good editor. I doubt that Franzen would have permitted an editor to touch his divinely inspired words.
Rating:
Summary: Unreadable
Review: If this is high literary art, I must be missing something. This is one of the most tedious, overwritten family sagas I have ever read; I simply could not finish it. Try Christiana Stead's THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN or Eudora Welty's THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER. They are better examples of literary art, and are more satisfying by a mile. Once again, I find the richest examples of literary art on the backlists from which most publishers earn their bread and butter. Much better books were published last year, too, and were all but ignored.
Rating: 
Summary: All About Corrections
Review: I was pleasantly surprised to find this story both approachable and enjoyable. Most modern writers who write Fiction remind me of part of a W.H. Auden poem: "...existentialists declare/That they are in complete despair,/ yet go on writing." In college I found modern lit to be both morbidly depressing and excruciatingly tedious. This novel was actually very compulsively readable. It was easy to slip into.
The major themes strongly reminded me of Don DeLillo's White Noise: academia, pharmaceuticals, modern family life, consumer culture, just no Hitler studies. But the satire is in the same tenor. It struck me as witty and incisive.
I would like to have seen more of a post-Christmas follow-up for Denise and especially Gary. I liked Alfred, like Franzen meant for us to, but felt like Alfred was missing some characterization.
And some of the streams of consciousness you had to go back and re-read, but there weren't many. Wickedly clever, Not politically correct: Just someone try to apply political correctness to a novel all about Corrections. Good fun.
Rating: 
Summary: miserable family
Review: While I think that the author is incredibly insightful and captures all the minute details of human relationships, this family is so miserable and screwed up you feel depresssed hearing all their unforgiving, selfish and materialistic thoughts. Generally a downer.
Rating:
Summary: The Worst!!
Review: I had so looked forward into diving into a big, thick novel on the hilarity of family disfunction. As one who will finish a book 99% of the time, regardless of how bad it is, I've put this one down smack dab in the middle. I cannot fathom wasting another moment of my life on this ill-conceived, unfocused piece of trash.
My complaints: This book goes NO where. You are stuck with unbeliveable and unlikeable characters doing nothing. And when the characters might do something it is wholly implausible. (A former college professor going to lithuania to set up a mail fraud scheme with his lover's ex-husband?! Please!) I put the book down when Franzen attributed complex thoughts to a five year old.
While it appears from other reviews this book is a love/hate proposition, I cannot fathom what anyone could have liked about this book. No plot, no real characters, no direction, nothing. I would compare this book with getting teeth extracted. In a word: horrible.
Rating:
Summary: Shrink-Wrapped
Review: It's a rare treat to read a book that makes me love it. And despite my misgivings, I was overwhelmed by _The Corrections_ in all its prolix portentousness and smarty pants slickness. Why? 1.I couldn't put it down once I'd got going.
2.I was intrigued by the Oprah brouhaha
3.It was summer (I am in Sydney, Australia) and I had time to indulge myself
4.I am an academic and this is the best portrayal I've read of my generation's experience of the academy
5.I know these people
6.The book starts with brutality,and ends with compassion, but it's never corny
7.Franzen writes like an angel
8.It's a very great old-fashioned novel, in the style of Henry James, not Thomas Pynchon -- I've read enough second-rate Pynchon to last me a lifetime
9.It made me think
10. I laughed my head off. It's good!
Rating:
Summary: Like many, I bought into the hype
Review: After hearing so much about this author who was uninvited from the oprah show, i was pretty curious. I think this book took me about a month and a half to read, I'm a very busy college student but somehow I just couldn't get myself to pick it up as much as I should have. Its not that it was bad, it was just easy to put down without needing to know what was going to happen next. Still, I finished it and I have to say that there are many funny, true to life moments in the book which made it worth it. Certain aspects of the Lambert family mirror ones of my own, Franzen did write very real characters but the story kind of felt half-baked. Without giving anything away, the book kind of ends abruptly after the writer put way too much detail into everything else. I believe this book wouldn't have suffered if he would have cut out about 200 pages. Maybe then, I actually would have taken less than a month to finish it.
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