Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the National Book Award for FictionNominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award
An American Library Association Notable Book
Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.
Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.
Winner of the National Book Award
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
Pulitzer Prize Nominee
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
American Library Association Notable Book
The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new centurya 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 manor 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.
Winner of the National Book Award
"Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole cultureour culture. And he has done it with sympathy and expansiveness that bend the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision."Don DeLillo
"Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords."David Foster Wallace
"Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole cultureour culture. And he has done it with sympathy and expansiveness that bend the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision."Don DeLillo
"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
"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
"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
"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
"The novel of the year."Fortune
"We were rocking: I only put the book down again when my life needed tending to . . . I can't scrape together much outrage when I'm basically having a good time . . . If you don't end up liking each one of Franzen's people, you probably just don't like people . . . It's often the microfelicities that keep you barreling through The Corrections toward its larger satisfactions. Wordplay worthy of Nabokov . . . Tiny, revelatory gestures . . . Magically precise images . . . Knowing one-liners . . . Franzen writes with convincing authority about the minutiae of railroads, clothing, medicine, economics, industry, cuisine, and Eastern European politics, and he knows just when to push his conceits over the top . . . But he also knows his way around more intimate territory . . . 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. But I guess that is everything we want in a novel -- except, when it's rocking along, for it never to be over."The New York Times Book Review
"Franzen is a wizard, endlessly inventive in his thematic connections and scene setting . . . The Corrections is a wide-open performance showcasing the full range of his skills and his eclectic intelligence . . . [It] recalls no novel so much as John Cheever's The Wapshot Scandal. The Corrections is just as funny and sad and smart as that mast
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
Review
"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)
Review
"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
Review
"By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting....cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way toward the millennium." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Franzen is a writer with old-fashioned virtues: he loves witty wordplay; his command of detail in an enormous range of interests is unassailable; he has a painter's eye for depth and contrast; and he creates characters whose emotions reach us even when they are hidden from the people feeling them." New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice, Best Books of 2001
Review
"The Corrections is a lumpy, strange, singular work, very much of this moment even as it harks back to a kind of American novel long deemed extinct. Its portrayal of American family life sometimes seems cruel and unforgiving, yet the sheer amplitude of its vision implies a kind of sympathy, or at least understanding." Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com (read the entire Salon review)
Synopsis
#1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
"A spellbinding novel" (People) from the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections is a comic, tragic epic of worlds colliding: an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions, a new world of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.
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 that, despite certain alarming indicators, 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.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for FictionNominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award
An American Library Association Notable Book
Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.
Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.
Synopsis
A comic, tragic masterpiece of an American family breaking down in an age of easy fixes, Franzen's third novel brings an old-time America into wild collision with the era of home surveillance and New Economy speculation. Winner of the National Book Award.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for FictionAfter 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.
About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of Freedom, selected for Oprahs Book Club, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, and two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In 1996, he was named one of Grantas Best of Young American Novelists. The Corrections won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.
Reading Group Guide
1. Consider the atmosphere of suburban St. Jude (named for the patron saint of hopeless causes) in comparison to the more sophisticated surroundings of Philadelphia and New York. Why has the Lamberts neighborhood evolved into a gerontocratic refuge? “What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it” (p. 178). What negative and positive qualities are attributed to the Midwest? How are the characters shaped by the cities or towns they live in?
2. What is the significance of “one last Christmas”? Is Enids obsession with the holidays predictable for a mother of her generation or is it, as Gary fears, “a symptom of a larger malaise” (p. 148)?
3. Why does it take so long for the Lamberts to acknowledge the seriousness of Alfreds illness? Is Als deteriorating mental health solely a result of Parkinsons disease? How are his physical deterioration and mental decline linked? “Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devils logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his bodys refusal to obey him” (p. 67). Why are these ailments especially humiliating for Alfred?
4. Novels written in the nineteenth century often have plots with many characters and story lines. Novels from the 1980s and 1990s often have spare plots with minimalist characters. What is the books relation to these two models? Which elements of the books style seem especially modern and which more traditional?
5. What role does corporate America play in this story? Consider the Midland Pacific takeover, Als connections with the Axon Corporation, and Brians dealings with the W—— Corporation. What are the lessons of Chips Consuming Narratives class? Are they accurate and relevant? How should we view Melissas critique of them (pp. 42-44)?
6. What is the source of Gary and Carolines marital problems? Whose version of the truth do you believe? Why does Gary feel so alienated from Caleb and Aaron? What draws him to Jonah? Compare this family with the glimpses we have of the young Lamberts. In what ways is Gary different, as a father, from Alfred?
7. What is your impression of Enid and Alfreds marriage? Which version of their marriage do you believe—Enids image of Al as a pessimistic brooder or Als image of Enid as an unrealistic optimist? In what ways do Enids capacity for hope and Alfreds low expectations manifest themselves? How do their temperamental differences play out in the course of the narrative?
8. “The family was the houses soul” (p. 269). Analyze the symbolism of the Lambert home in St. Jude. How does its meaning change over the years? Consider Enids stockpiles of expired coupons and Als catalog of compulsive repairs. Compare this home with the other domestic spaces in the book. How have the Lambert children reacted to the clutter and careful economy of the house they grew up in?
9. How would you define the members of the Lambert family based on their traits? Which are shared traits and which are specific to an individual? How would these characters describe themselves? If “who a person was was what a person wanted” (p. 539), who are the Lamberts?
10. Discuss the alliances that formed in the Lambert family after the children left home. What occurrences might account for Denises loyalty to Al and for Chip and Garys sympathy for Enid? How do these alliances shift during the course of the novel?
11. Why does Denise choose to lose her virginity to Don Armour? Which qualities of her co- worker simultaneously attract and repel her? Why does Al sacrifice his job for Denises privacy?
12. What is the significance of the title The Corrections? How does the idea of “corrections” play out during the course of the story? What does “What made correction possible also doomed it” (p. 281) mean?
13. Why is Denise drawn to both Robin and Brian? How attractive are they as characters? How does Denises attraction to Robin initially manifest itself? Why is she unable to make a life with Robin?
14. What is revealed about the dynamics of the young Lambert family during the liver dinner? When Al finds Chip asleep at the dinner table, what upsets him more: concern for his son or disgust with Enid? Do we know the source of Enids neglect? “There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband” (p. 263). To what extent are the books children shaped by their upbringing, and to what extent is their character predetermined?
15. How do technology and consumerism infiltrate the lives of the characters? Are cell phones and the spy gadgets that Caleb craves symptoms of a problem in our society? How does consumerism relate to the problem of what Gary calls anhedonia—”a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts” (p. 165)?
16. What do Chips relationships with women reveal about his character? How does his attitude toward women change over the course of the novel? Considering the details of his earlier relationships, does it seem probable that his marriage to Alison Schulman will survive? How did his time in Lithuania prepare Chip to deal with Alfreds decline and death?
17. Why does Denise tell Chip not to pay back the money she has lent him? What does the use of the word “forgive” suggest in Denises plea to her brother?
18. How would you describe Franzens narrative style? How deeply does he sympathize with his characters? Does the tone of the novel change? Examine the evolution of Enids character, from housewife to the liberated woman at the end of the novel who feels that “nothing could kill her hope now” (p. 568). Is there evidence that her liberation is not entirely a good thing?
19. How does the issue of class play out during the course of the novel? In what different ways does class drive Enids behavior on the cruise and propel Denises decision to sleep with Don Armour? How does concern over class status affect Gary and Caroline or Brian and Robin?
20. Is Alfreds death the key to Enids happiness? How does the quality of her life change once Al is hospitalized? What reaction do his children have to his death? Are we meant to believe that their fathers death is the catalyst for their “corrections”? For how much of the unhappiness in the Lambert household was Al responsible?
21. Are elements of the Lambert family universal characteristics of the American family? How do the world in general and family life in particular change during the half century that the novel spans? In what ways is life better now than when the Lambert children were young? In what ways is it worse?
22. Which character has undergone the most fundamental change? Is the change positive or negative? Have any of the characters evolved enough for their “corrections” to endure? Are these corrections deliberate, or are they the result of outside occurrences that force the characters to change?
23. Discuss the different moral codes members of the Lambert family adhere to. Consider Enids fear of her childrens “immorality,” Garys obsession with Carolines dishonesty, Alfreds refusal to engage in insider trading, Denises rage at Gary for having betrayed the sibling code of honor, and Chips animus against the W—— Corporation and big business in general. Which of these judgments seem most valid? Does the book favor one moral view over another?
24. How does Americas long-standing fascination with the notion of progress manifest itself in the story of each character? How does the novel, in its entirety, stand in relation to the American ideas of self-improvement as well as social and technological progress?