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    The Corrections
    The Corrections
    The Corrections
    Audiobook (abridged)9 hours

    The Corrections

    Written by Jonathan Franzen

    Narrated by Dylan Baker

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 on 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 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 1, 2001
    ISBN9780743545280
    The Corrections
    Author

    Jonathan Franzen

    Jonathan Franzen’s work includes four novels (The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, Freedom), two collections of essays (Farther Away, How To Be Alone), a memoir (The Discomfort Zone), and, most recently, The Kraus Project. He is recognised as one of the best American writers of our age and has won many awards. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

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    Reviews for The Corrections

    3.5/5

    208 ratings184 reviews

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    • 5/5
      There has been so much puffery associated with Franzen that I almost decided to give this book a pass. I am very glad that i changed my mind. The book was sometimes painful to read because i am at the time in my life when I have a parent in a complicated end of life situation. The book was just plain good--well written, characters I came to care about, and a story line I could easily relate to.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Brilliantly written, but I didn't really enjoy reading it.

    • 4/5
      annoying, like ants
    • 1/5
      Couldn't get into it. To paraphrase Emperor Joseph II, there were "too many words." However, I am going to try it again in a month or so.
    • 4/5
      Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2001. I wanted to read this book ever since reading the review of it in the New York Times Review of Books. Aside from finding fault with the first few pages of the book, the reviewer couldn't lavish enough praise on it. Well, that was just the start of the publicity for this book. Oprah selected it for her book club --- and Jonathan Franzen got even more publicity when he said he didn't want to be a part of Oprah's book club! He views himself as a ``high art'' author. And then it wins the National Book Award for fiction. Well, I read the book on the Thanksgiving trip to St. Louis, and I wasn't disappointed. The book holds up to its publicity. Franzen has a wicked sense of humor, and the book reads as a delicious black comedy at parts. His writing style is a joy to read. And his characterization and depiction of petty family cruelty is dead-on. This is one of the best works of modern fiction I have read in a while.
    • 4/5
      This book, like others that I've read, was pretty heavily hyped by the media and airport bookstores and amazon.com. However, unlike some others that I've read, I understand why this one so attracted people. Alternately painful and painfully funny, over-the-top and real at the same time, an interesting writing style that does take some getting used to but flows wonderfully well once you're inside. Everyone in this book is neurotic, or depressed, or crazy, and you don't really like any of them even as you sympathize with all of them, and even those smaller parts who seem relatively "normal" seem all the weirder for their normalness, like if you spent more time with them, they'd let slip that they're just as crazy about everyone else... and you shake your head and thank goodness that you're not like that, but then you look at it, and you are - everyone is - and that's the point, I think. There were some elements and recurring non-plot details that kept coming up that seemed somewhat random, and it was occasionally kind of hard to follow where the story was going after the author took a sharp left, but I enjoyed it, and enjoyed it for being a different sort of book than I've been reading.
    • 5/5
      From a depressed dysfunctional family myself, i just loved it
    • 1/5
      I don't care that the critics praised this book, I didn't care for it. I did not find it as amusing as some...actually not at all. Sneaking a cold fish inside your pants, and as you attempt to leave you encounter someone you know and can't escape quick enough, while the fish is still in your pants...is like an episode of a bad comedy that is trying too hard to be funny. This book tries to hard to be something. I found it annoying.
    • 4/5
      I think maybe that I wanted to like this more than I actually did like it. I will concede that it's not a very approachable book. The characters are almost aggressively unlikable and tonally, the book struggles to occupy some sort of middle ground between social satire and farce.

      As a Midwesterner, I have to admit that parts of the book did ring true, and there were occasional glimpses of myself and my family in the Lamberts, but these flashes of recognition, rather than drawing me into the book, proved to be repellent, making me feel bad, but without exposing some hidden truth.

      Frankly, I just don't know what to take away from this. That people are fundamentally flawed? That the American family is an engine secretly driven by shame, fear, and resentment? That our relationships with our parents are anchors, perpetually dragging us down and destroying our self-esteem and self-worth? That life is little more than a joke, with a punchline where we end up helpless and alone in a nursing home?

      If any of that was actually what Franzen was shooting for, I'm unimpressed, as none of that is particularly original or terribly insightful. And if he was really trying to get at something else, I'll willingly confess to having missed it. And if there is no point, if this is just a story ... well, I don't for a second buy that.

      But still, after all this, it's a four-star book for me. Despite it's penchant for silliness (the punny or too-apt names, for example, or Alfred's hallucinations, or Chip's adventures in Lithuania), The Corrections manages to be funny, and oftentimes, true to life. That Franzen seems to feel a deep-seated disgust for his characters and the American dream he's so desperate to skewer is a distraction, but each of the Lambert's is a perfectly-realized character. The story meanders, but remains compelling.
    • 5/5
      Amazing book! I loved it. Franzen seems like a dick though.
    • 1/5
      Much has been said and written about this book, so I will keep my review short. People either love this book or hate it. I am definitely in the latter group. There is some absolutely beautiful writing in this book, phrases where I completely 'got' what Franzen was describing. More than once, I felt that rare click when something was written so perfectly that it seemed to be a cosmic truth.That being said, the problem with this book is that there is not a single likable character. Not one. If I were to look at this as simply a writing exercise with a focus on structure, plotlines, and pacing, then this would be a different review. But I read a book for the story, not for technical expertise. It is hard to spend so much time and effort on a book when there is no one in its pages that you can root for or care about. All of these characters are miserable and as far as I can see, they ought to be. I kept reading, hoping that just one person would have one redeemable characteristic, but it never materialized.
    • 4/5
      Second read gave me a fuller sense of what F. was up to and why Oprah picking him might have been so very annoying. Invariably, the audience would have concentrated on the story of the Midwestern sister and brothers and their parents, while he wanted us steered towards the more DeLillo elements: mind controlling drugs, IPO's, Internet and e-Bay purchased former Eastern Bloc countries. A smart, funny book but maybe not as smart as Frazen thought it was....
    • 2/5
      Interesting and extensive character development. Realistic and believable characters. But maybe a bit too painful in the reality that it portrays, but I couldn't finish it.
    • 5/5
      Amazing! If plot is what you care about most, you'll hate it. If reading unbelievably crafted writing is your thing - read it. Simply, about a family trying to get together for a last X-mas dinner, but on a deeper level, it really is THE best study of THE white American family I will ever read.
    • 4/5
      Franzen does a very bold thing in this book - he shows you the unlikeable underbelly of his characters first. That makes it an easy book to put down, dislike, shrug off. But as I persevered (after all, it was for a book discussion), the characters got more and more real and therefore knowable and therefore if not lovable, recognizable, and in some ways pitiable. In one sense the book is a discourse on the falsity, the trap of the 'American dream' as a standard of how one's life should go. Assumptions, other people's real and imagined opinions, the absence of expressed love all create a soul-destroying life for the parents and children of this story, a story of an unhappy marriage and the unhappy children it produced, the story of an era where it was only permissible to be remarkable in approved ways.Enid and Alfred are mismatched in the most intimate parts of their life together; Alfred falls apart from Parkinsons and dementia; the seemingly stable lives of their children come apart in self-destructive acts.But the book isn't called 'The Corrections' for nothing. Everyone is making course corrections, or trying to, from the first pages, and as I came to be involved with their sometimes awful, sometimes funny plights, I wanted them to find a course correction that would work.Several people in my book group were reading this for the second time, and they all found they enjoyed it more for having read it before. A sign of quality, surely
    • 5/5
      Not for the faint of heart. It took 50 to 100 pages of this book to grab me. (Some of my book club members didn't make it 100 pages.) However, I am sure that parts of this book will stay with me for years. This is the story of a dysfunctional family, whose choices perpetuate themselves in their adult lives, and probably beyond. It has its humerous moments, (actually absurd) but they are far outweighed by sadness.
    • 4/5
      Franzen is another of those clever young writers. Here an aging couple wants to get their 3 adult children together for "one last Christmas." That's really the extent of the plot, except that we get filled in on the rambling back story of each character's life story. It's always engaging & perceptive, but the author has little empathy for his characters; he sneers at all of them. That's a fatal flaw for my reading experience.
    • 2/5
      There's a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on the Keynsham album called "Look at me, I'm Wonderful". I assume Franzen was humming it most of the time he was scribbling this stuff. Richard Ford does modern America SO MUCH BETTER.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful characters! I have really enjoyed reading this book.
    • 4/5
      The Corrections is the story of the Lambert family - wife, Enid, husband Alfred, and their three adult children, Gary, Denise and Chip. The family is going through a crisis as Alfred's mental and physical health swiftly declines due to Parkinson's disease. In a last ditch effort to hold her dysfunctional family together, Enid makes a request that the family spend one last Christmas together. In the beginning of the book, none of the characters is likable and the family dynamics are bizarre and strained. But as the story unfolds, each of the lives of the various family members is described from childhood to the present and all of them become, not quite lovable, but at least understandable - and very human.

      I was hesitant to read this book. Franzen's latest, Freedom, was not one of my favorites, in spite of all the praise and awards it has received. But more importantly, the similarities between the Lambert's and my family are very strong. There are 3 adult children in my family, and my father has been struggling with Parkinson's these past 4 years. I would absolutely DENY that our family is dysfunctional...but we do have our personality quirks and some of our interactions are a little strange. But aren't all families a bit quirky and strange? What I loved about this book was the ever present sarcasm and humor, surrounding, at it's heart, a sad story. I also enjoyed the stories told through Enid and Alfred's eyes. Old people never see themselves as old, and I found it encouraging and hopeful to realize that there is a young person inside all of us.
    • 3/5
      Parts of this book were very good and parts of it almost made me quit several times. The interaction between Enid, Alfred, Gary, Chip, and Denise was written perfectly. Some of the other characters weren't interesting at all and some seemed completely pointless. Actually, it was a very depressing story and made me feel convinced more than ever that there's no such thing as a "normal" family. Enid was my favorite hands down. She was so funny.
    • 1/5
      Like many others, I have no idea why this book was so popular...unless people needed a new doorstop. I had finally wound my way to the last 1/4 of the book when I gave up. I didn't care a toss about anyone. At that point I wasn't even hoping that something dramatic would happen. I just wanted to put everyone out of their misery...and mine.A definite two thumbs down.
    • 4/5
      I see what all the hoopla over Franzen is about now. This is the most darkly funny novel I've read in years. It seemed like every other page made me wince and laugh out loud in sympathetic embarrassed horror. The lens of Franzen's writing leaves no flaw of his characters undisclosed, but explains those flaws so sympathetically that you can't help but understand. The ending didn't quite hit the right note for me, but the bulk of the novel is simply amazing.
    • 1/5
      I cannot believe how much I hated this book. I've never in my life thrown a book across the room, but I wanted to with this one. I kept waiting for some sort of catharsis, for at least one of these despicable people to turn into someone I could at least respect. Instead, they got even worse. Ugh. I wish I had the hours back I spent reading this book.
    • 3/5
      A normal Midwestern couple raise three annoying children who resent them for being normal and hardworking. The children all turn out to be disappointments while the elderly couple back home soldier on, dealing with declining health and wealth. Gee, think I idenified more with the parents than the children?
    • 3/5
      Normally when I start writing a review, I at least know if I enjoyed the book. The Corrections has me bemused however, as I think I enjoyed it, whilst taking a dislike to how Jonathan Franzen mischievously described the families emerging problems in a way that constantly makes you think: "Is this happening in my family?" "I think I'm ok, but now I've read this, I might need to get my head examined, just in case...". And so on.

      Bear with the slow start, would be my advice, as I found it worth the long read.
    • 1/5
      I can't finish this book. I got about 60 pages in and I can't make myself read anymore. The characters are unappealing, the story is probably there somewhere but there's so much exposition that doesn't seem relevant that I can't really find it. As for the writing... why do people think Franzen is so great? Between the ridiculously running on sentences, strange sentence structures and simply awkward utterances, it's the writing more than anything else that makes me not want to keep reading. Rather that accessible I find his writing pretentious and obnoxious.
    • 5/5
      (Reviewed June 8, 2009)The second I finished this book I started to miss the characters, despite their many neuroses. Or perhaps because of them. This really is a book that swallows you whole and fills you to the brim with undoctored humanity. It can be painful, but it's completely worth it.
    • 5/5
      I avoided this one for a while, mainly because of the whole Oprah book club thing (Franzen?s snub of Oprah put an end to her first book club). I?m glad I read it. I love semi-comical ?family dynamic? novels and this book is both very funny and very well written.
    • 4/5
      I'm kind of in awe of this book. There's so much detail. Each character's pathetic station in life is explored completely, giving a full picture of exactly how they got to be where (and who) they are. There's also plenty of detail on the housing and economic boom of the 1990s and the culture of Lithuania thrown in to frame the story.It actually got to be a little overwhelming because none of the characters was particularly likable, and really, almost nothing good happens to any of them throughout the whole novel, and all of their misfortune is of their own making. They're self-absorbed and self-serving and conniving and frustrating...but they're so realistic and compelling that it was hard to put the book down. I read the whole thing in two days.I also thought the narrative structure was interesting. Each section would start in one direction, and then meander off on a tangent into the past to detail each of the kids' relationship with their parents and how they got from there to here. It sounds jarring, but it really flowed pretty well.Franzen has some things to say in this book about familial relationships, both parent-child and inter-sibling, if you will. I thought the role the parents' personalities played in shaping their children's lives was a little overemphasized, but that was what the book was about, so I get it. And having now read both this and Freedom, I have to wonder if Franzen will ever feature any characters that are mentally healthy and well-adjusted. Or if he perhaps thinks that everyone is broken in some way, which could probably be argued. At any rate, characters who are whole obviously aren't something he's cared to explore to this point, but I think it would set up a heck of a contrast with his other characters, if nothing else.