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![The Corrections by [Jonathan Franzen]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51alb+Dr-ZL._SY346_.jpg)
The Corrections Kindle Edition
Jonathan Franzen (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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From the author of ‘Freedom’, a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes.
After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity, and their children have long since fled for the catastrophes of their own lives. As Alfred’s condition worsens and the Lamberts are forced to face their secrets and failures, Enid sets her heart on one last family Christmas.
Bringing the old world of civic virtue and sexual inhibition into violent collision with the era of hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare and globalised greed, ‘The Corrections’ confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of the American soul.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication date21 September 2010
- File size1647 KB
Product description
Review
‘A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question: what is life for? And that is as much as anyone could ask' Guardian
‘Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture’ Don DeLillo
'Impossible to dislike, an unpretentious page-turner' Zadie Smith
'Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike and Roth.' Evening Standard
‘A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch’ Financial Times
--This text refers to the paperback edition.About the Author
From the Back Cover
'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 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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Product details
- ASIN : B0043VDEE6
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; New Ed edition (21 September 2010)
- Language : English
- File size : 1647 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 580 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 18,020 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 25 in Classic Action & Adventure (Books)
- 161 in Women's Adventure Fiction (Books)
- 166 in Fiction Classics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels--Purity, Freedom, The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion--and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away, How to Be Alone, and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Customer reviews
Top reviews from Australia
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The characters are mostly of the 'unlikeable' type and if you want a hero you won't find one. It's not part of Mr Franzen's master plan.
However, it is undeniable that Mr. Franzen is a great writer. Whatever you may think of him as a man or his views, as an author you have to admire his craft and sharp intellect – that alone deserves 3 stars. Every single page has something about it. It spoke to me on some level, whether I agreed or not.
His psychological assault makes it seem as though he is expertly taking apart and putting together the most complex inner workings of an antique clock, but he is doing it with human relationships and the human mind.
I found the book sad, sometimes funny, but often disturbing.
Am I glad that I read it?
YES!
Is it lacking something?
YES, but I am not quite sure what it is. Hence the 4 stars
Sergiu Pobereznic (author)
Also the minutiae of detail in telling about some things, to me, was overkill.
Still, I finished it.. and actually, didn't want to put it down the past couple of days.. so it can't have been all that bad.
Top reviews from other countries

Each time I looked at % complete it was so low I would become miserable. On a positive note though, this had become a challenge! I was not going to read anything else until I finished it and then I could legitimately slag off this tedium of words.
In a horrendous twist to my fate, in the last 30% I actually started to enjoy it a little. Whilst not actually liking any of the characters, I became at least vaguely interested in what happened to them which was a sizemic shift.
On reflection, there are benefits to this book: 1) helped me to sleep 2) given me a reason for a party now its over 🤗3) saved me money on other books as it is took 50 times longer to read than any other ‘normal’ book (see reason 1) 4) inspired me to write a rare review (so I hope this is of use!)
Good luck if you choose this path!

A social commentary on the times we live in, as well as giving us some biting satire there are a lot of themes that are taken in in this story in which we follow members of one family. Here then we meet the Lambert family with both parents still alive, although the father Alfred has Parkinson’s and dementia and is married to long suffering Enid. Their three children are all grown up and do not live in the same State as their parents, let alone within easy reach of the same town. Here we have Gary, the eldest, followed by Chip, and lastly the youngest, Denise.
This story takes in the decline of America’s heavy industrial past as it comes to changing to services, hi-tec and other sectors, whilst also showing how a dysfunctional family setting can then be transferred to children, and thus the families that they then have. The family members really do have hang-ups and none of them can seem to stay happy for any amount of time, although this does gradually change as the story reaches its climax. Certainly, mirroring the fears and anxieties of America both then and indeed now, to a certain extent this also highlights those that we are also feeling in this country and elsewhere. Also, we see the problems that Eastern European countries faced trying to come to terms with new economic models.
As the main family members try to come to terms with what and who they are this does jump about a bit, not only between characters, but also time periods, as it goes backwards and forwards from present to past. Thoughtful, but also quite humorous on the whole this is intelligently written and does bring up a lot of topics, and could indeed be a good choice for book groups.

First of all author has a bad writing style.
Sentences are long, clumsy, or tasteless.
Secondly, story is unclear, plot is not engaging, tasteless.
The odd thing about Jonathan Franzen is that while it is fun to read his dialogues,
(That was also the case in his other novel "Freedom") his narration style is disengaging, boring, difficult to follow.

