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By Jonathan Franzen
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2001
Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family
akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded
academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad,
bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.
All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping
into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn
wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure
by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot
water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled
minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye:
Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the
Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged
to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of
cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely
civilized in perpetuity.
Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map.
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