Jonathan Franzen has an impressive resumé. After being named one of the best writers under forty by both the New Yorker and Granta, his third novel went on to win the National Book Award and garner praise from writers as diverse as Don DeLillo and Pat Conroy. The Corrections is a huge book, an ambitious, chaotic saga — from Lithuanian financial markets to academic adultery laws, it contains a vast amount of fascinating minutia. But the novel is most satisfying in its precisely detailed characters: the Lambert family, struggling with everything from affairs to dementia, manages to stay sympathetic, irritating, and contradictory. The New York Times Book Review reminds us that "Franzen is a writer with old-fashioned virtues....he creates characters whose emotions reach us even when they are hidden from the people feeling them." And at heart, The Corrections is funny, messily realistic, and even tender, despite — or because of — Franzen's incisive insight into the dynamic of the modern American family. Jill, Powells.com

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century — a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.

After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man — or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

"No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as The Corrections seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read." David Gates, The New York Times Book Review

"In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment." Michael Cunningham

"Ferociously detailed, gratifyingly mind-expanding, and daringly complex and unhurried, New Yorker writer Franzen's third and best-yet novel aligns the spectacular dysfunctions of one Midwest family with the explosive malfunctions of society-at-large." Booklist (starred review)

"Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections is the brightest, boldest, and most ambitious novel I've read in many years. With this dazzling work, Franzen gives notice that from now on, he is only going to hunt with the big cats." Pat Conroy

"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." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Let's not mince words or pussyfoot with fancy lit-crit lingo. This is a great book. It needs to be read....A panoramic work that frequently zeroes in, with almost claustrophobic clarity, on human foibles....A huge, ambitious, powerful, funny, imaginative yet realistic novel. This book is a gift." Philadelphia Inquirer

"Smart and boisterous and beautifully paced....His rendering [of the autumnal prairie of millennial America] is frighteningly, luminously authentic." Boston Globe

"Remarkable....The best comparisons are to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo's Underworld...but The Corrections has more heart." The Oregonian

"The last 100 pages of The Corrections is an unforgettably sad, indelibly beautiful piece of literature....[Franzen] is a writer with talent to burn." Newsweek

"More engaging and readable than other chilly magnum opuses in the same league....Unlike his Big Book peers, [Franzen] wants things tidy — not in the middle, maybe, but at the end. The chaos-theory math wizards of antimatter fiction don't often show such good manners, such politeness, and it's touching to find it here. Not just dazzle — warmth." GQ magazine

"What we're asking is whether Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will become that rare thing, a literary work that everybody's reading? A lot of people are saying yes." Time

Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, and the essay collection How to Be Alone. He has been named one of the Granta 20 Best Novelists under 40 and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's. He lives in New York City.