Franzen shores up his Zeitgeist-heavy narrative with the indispensable masonry of a carefully crafted plot, exuberant yet plausible satire and, most of all, closely observed character … Franzen narrates The Corrections with a subdued, assured and compassionate touch. The result is an energetic, brooding, open-hearted and funny novel that addresses refreshingly big questions of love and loyalty in America's rapidly fragmenting, meaning-challenged domestic sphere … What happens to the Lamberts is ultimately less compelling than the simple fact of them, as rendered in Franzen's patient, wise descriptions of their petty trials, their epic self-deceptions and their astonishing, resilient need of one another.
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 … 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 … 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.
The Corrections turns on a single, definingly American question: Will Mom be able to get the whole family home for one last Christmas? Franzen tucks the more momentous questions into a branching system of subplots, starring each of the main characters in turn and making each one equally sympathetic … Franzen likes his fiction smart and larky, with glimpses of scary depths and a flirtatious, on-and-off relationship with realism...the success of David Foster Wallace's epic, minutely interconnected, ultimately unresolved Infinite Jest has made a novel like The Corrections – a far less dense and demanding read – seem part of a new mainstream, in which either teasing hints of formalism dress up the randomness or irruptions of randomness juice up the formalism.
It says much for Franzen's charm as a writer that his book should seem warm while it is in fact dark … The theme of family corrections has a fine suggestiveness about it, and Franzen shows himself an intelligent manipulator of suggestive patterns; indeed, at such times an artist … Franzen errs when he leaves this path and noses along the trail of his old documentary impulse, his old love of the social novel. Whenever he does so, his tone begins to crack, and Franzen the clever journalist, the pocket theorist, peers through...In general, his prose loves nothing so much as a chance to show off a little technical know-how … The Corrections is a big book, and the prose, in its long course, is likely to cross a few plains and flats. But as soon as one compares this language of smart commentary with the language of truth that also runs throughout this book, one is struck by the superfluousness of the former.
The Corrections is not a masterpiece; it is a second-rate work with first-rate moments and ambitions. And even more than a work of art, The Corrections is a significant cultural document … Franzen isn't afraid to try to inhabit the most diverse kinds of people, from heiresses to nurses to gangsters to Norwegian tourists. And he has to be one of the funniest novelists at work now … Franzen is unable to regulate the flow of the literal through his novel...The unexpected result of Franzen's literalness is that he associates the ‘real’ with whatever thought comes into his head. It is as if he refuses to surrender his authorial rights and disdains his imagined world. This novel's harsh tonal shifts, never justified by their context, are like the ringing of a cell phone throughout a concert.
The Corrections represents a giant leap for Jonathan Franzen – not only beyond his previous two novels, but beyond just about anybody else's … The book is wildly brilliant, funny, and wise, a rich feast of cultural analysis... Franzen's powers of description are exhaustive but unfailingly witty. His vision is at once enormous and minute, scanning the whole world but still attending with remarkable sympathy to the challenges of this one family … Despite its hooting comedy, The Corrections is ultimately the tragedy of people who believe that their minds, their very thoughts, are essentially chemical. Franzen diagnoses the empty horror of this notion with searing precision.
An ingenious update of the old-fashioned Anglo-American social novel: an ironic family chronicle, by turns comic and sober, that seeks to measure the strength and density of the moral weave enfolding its characters … Franzen is a connoisseur of reality in its infinite shadings. Throughout this book, some of his best prose comes when he’s describing moments and places in which nothing is happening … The Corrections is a novel full of information, almost in the manner of a mystery or a thriller: information about financial markets and nylon stockings and neurological disease and restaurant management and imaginary revanchist Lithuanian political parties...Our task, like that of the Lamberts — like that, arguably, of everybody in America — is to make the best of the information we have, always necessarily incomplete.
Jonathan Franzen is one genius of a wordsmith as well as a journeyman observer of the human condition...it buckles with such stylishness you have to give him points for trying even while you wade through crazy plot twists that you sense on the first read will never be connected … What makes The Corrections work is Franzen's sharp eye, attention to detail and, ultimately, his ability to let us see deeply into people who, at first take, don't appear to warrant a second glance. As he leads us through this family epic, however, Franzen peels away layers of protection until we're allowed to see the worthwhile person that the veneer of coping has covered so neatly. It's a good trick and a warming one and Franzen pulls it off with aplomb.
Despite a complex and involved plot, the driving force of the book is that simplest, most intricate of engines, the unhappy family … Franzen's dialogue between family members contains a barely restrained violence, comfortable chat suddenly turning barbed. In straight narration his powers of language are astonishing … He can run riffs on Lacan or the post-Cold War instability of the Baltic states, yet isn't above the pleasures of slapstick and low jokes (the names of some supporting characters are Pynchonesque bonbons: Fenton Creel, Dale Driblett, Eden Procuro). The Corrections is a wide-open performance showcasing the full range of his skills and his eclectic intelligence.
While The Corrections does indeed address a long list of Relevant Modern Topics, its brilliance lies not in the integration of those issues into the lives of well-crafted characters, but in the creation of those characters themselves … The narrative of The Corrections switches between the viewpoints of all five Lamberts, and Franzen’s most impressive feat is his translation of these five distinct personalities into a deeply realistic family dynamic ... The novel is marked in places by a post-modern self-awareness that approaches self-parody … Franzen is a novelist of immense talent; he is at his best when he abandons clever tricks, and gets over the sound of his own voice, and allows the reader to forget for a moment that there is a man behind the magic.
A tragicomic ensemble story about a combustible family, The Corrections has the absorbing treacheries of married life, the comic squalors of cruise-ship travel and the shenanigans of global capitalism. It also has language that builds in powerful, rolling strides. And it has characters, the separately unraveling Lamberts, who get very deeply under your skin … The Corrections does not ‘solve’ the mystery of family life, but it renders its mysteries with the fine filament and moral nuance they require.
The novel itself opens with a storm. ‘You could feel that something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder.’ In the gorgeous, cascading pages that follow, those gusts blow through the Lambert family. Illuminated by Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant prose, bill paying, grocery shopping, depression, Christmas holidays, a walk to the corner shop become subjects of breathless interest and, often, wild humor.
A symphonic exploration of family dynamics and social conflict and change ...Franzen analyzes these five characters in astonishingly convincing depth, juxtaposing their personal crises and failures against the siren songs of ‘corrections’ … A wide-angled view of contemporary America and its discontents that deserves comparison with Dos Passos’s U.S.A., if not with Tolstoy. One of the most impressive American novels of recent years.
