The Corrections - Softcover

Franzen, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007144415 ISBN 13: 9780007144419

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2002

Synopsis

The winner of THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, the New York Times No.1 Bestseller and the worldwide literary sensation, The Corrections has established itself as a truly great American novel.

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 healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it announces Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

About this title

Review:

Critically lauded and an Oprah Book Club choice, Jonathan Franzen's third novel The Corrections is already a huge success in the US, and it's none too difficult to see why. Whereas his earlier novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and StrongMotion could be seen as single-issue works (on inner city decay and abortion respectively), the long-awaited The Corrections is far more grandiose in its ambition and its scale.

Framed by matriarch Enid Lambert's attempts to gather her three grown children back home for Christmas, The Corrections examines their lives: Enid's husband Alfred, sinking into dementia, her sons banker Gary and writer Chip (now in Lithuania) and daughter Denise, a chef, busily re-evaluating her sexual identity.

With these characters, Franzen gives himself plenty of room to examine the foibles, fears, hopes, anxieties and neuroses of 21st-century American life and the mad Lithuanian subplot provides some real laughs. But most striking and surprising about The Corrections is its reassuring normality. Despite all its well-signposted dysfunction, this remains at heart a big sprawling family saga, with all the security that implies. The book closes with Enid noting "that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they'd been in her youth" during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now, "disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States". It's a line Franzen couldn't have written after 11 September, 2001--and, perhaps because of its now forgotten confidence, The Corrections is a book that readers will take to their hearts.--Alan Stewart

Review:

·'Jonathan Franzen has written a remarkable novel about the family in the modern world, and in the world that has just left us. It pulls off its ambition with rare success – with wit and sympathy and without obtrusive writerly self-consciousness. You believe in the people inside it, their lives and their fate. A wonderful, illuminating book.'
Ian Jack, editor of Granta

· 'Full of understatement and overreaction, irony and anger, anthropology and surrealism, glut and glee The Corrections is the whole package...You will laugh, wince, groan weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place.'
New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0007144415
• ISBN 13: 9780007144419
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 672