The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Summary
Alfred Lambert, retired railroad engineer, upright to the point of cruelty, is coming apart: Parkinson's disease and dementia are dismantling him limb by limb in a St Jude, Midwest house that his wife Enid keeps polished against the evidence. Enid's counterattack on entropy is a campaign, waged by phone and guilt across the eastern seaboard, for one last family Christmas, and the novel is the story of what that modest wish costs everyone involved.
The children are the book's three brilliant case studies in flight. Gary, a Philadelphia banker, is clinically depressed and militantly certain he is not, negotiating with a wife who uses the children as instruments in their marriage's cold war. Chip, fired from his college for an affair with a student, is rewriting an unproducible screenplay in Manhattan when a post Soviet Lithuanian kleptocrat offers him honest work: defrauding American investors online. Denise, the youngest, a chef at the crest of Philadelphia's restaurant boom, detonates her career through affairs with her investor and her investor's wife.
Franzen runs each life at full novelistic depth, then bends them all home for the Christmas that Enid wanted and Alfred's body vetoes, and the last movement, the correction of the title arriving in every sense at once, market, family, medication, is as moving as the satire was sharp.
Around five hundred and sixty pages.
Best for readers who want the big American family novel at the millennium, comic, cruel and finally forgiving, the book a whole decade of fiction had to argue with.
Historical Context & Significance
The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2001, was a Pulitzer finalist, and became one of the most talked about American novels of its decade partly through timing and partly through spectacle. Published on 1 September 2001, it read within weeks as the last portrait of the world before the towers fell, and critics have kept that frame around it. The spectacle was the Oprah affair: selected for the book club, Jonathan Franzen aired misgivings about the association, Winfrey withdrew the invitation, and the resulting argument about literary and mass culture ran for years; the two publicly reconciled in late 2010, when Winfrey chose Freedom for her club's final season and Franzen appeared on her show.
Time and the New York Times have both since ranked it among the century's best novels, and its sales passed into the millions.
Franzen had announced in a famous Harper's essay his ambition to restore the social novel; this was the demonstration, and Freedom and Crossroads have extended it. The book remains the reference point for every argument about what the mainstream literary novel can still do.