The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

Editions

Review

THE novel for the 21st Century, ‘The Corrections’ is bleakly and blackly funny, a large-scale mix of the comic and the tragic.  It focuses on an American Midwestern family – the aging parents, Enid and Albert Lambert, and their grown-up children, Gary, Chip and Denise.

In prose which is astonishingly vivid, Franzen lets – no, forces – us to share the lives and problems of each character.  Episodes range from hilarious to maniacal to embarrassing to desolate – and somehow evoke the sense of this family’s decay and of the whole country’s decline.

The plot includes a cruise on a Scandinavian cruise ship with a Søren Kierkegaard dining-room; a teenager who puts the family kitchen under camera surveillance; and an internet scheme to entice the gullible to ‘buy into’ Lithuania.

From the first sentence (‘The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.  You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.’) the reader knows he is in the hands of a great novelist, the book commands attention and is rewarded with a Dickensian wealth of detail, plot, characterisation and compassion… for even the most miserable examples of humankind. - review by Karen Wadman