“In his new novel, The Corrections, Mr. Franzen has brought a family and its problems center stage to try to write a sort of American ”Buddenbrooks.’ In doing so he has harnessed his penchant for social criticism and subordinated it to his natural storytelling instincts, while at the same time, shucking off the influence of other writers to find an idiosyncratic voice of his own. Though often self-indulgent and long-winded, the novel leaves the reader with both a devastating family portrait and a harrowing portrait of America in the late 1990’s — an America deep in the grip of that decade’s money madness and sick with envy, resentment, greed, acquisitiveness and self-delusion, an America committed to the quick-fix solution and determined to try to medicate its problems away.
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“In his portraits of the Lamberts, Mr. Franzen exercises his copious talents for satire, coolly excavating their vanities, hypocrisy and self-deceptions … While he is eviscerating the Lamberts’ pretensions — and by extension, the culture they represent — Mr. Franzen also manages to make palpable the familial geometry of their problems.
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“Clearly Mr. Franzen’s novel would have benefited enormously from a strict editing job. There are lengthy digressions about Lambert friends and acquaintances, which serve no purpose but to provide the author with a wider array of social types to send up; and there are passages where the omniscient narrator’s voice gratuitously intrudes to tell us exactly what we are witnessing.
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“All in all, however, The Corrections remains a remarkably poised performance, the narrative held together by myriad meticulously observed details and tiny leitmotifs that create a mosaiclike picture of America in the waning years of the 20th century … By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting, The Corrections not only shows us two generations of an American family struggling to make sense of their lives, but also cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way toward the millennium.”
