The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen (2001)
“A Midwestern family unravels across a continent, each member fleeing the same house and arriving at the same emptiness.”
At a Glance
Alfred and Enid Lambert are aging in their St. Jude home — he declining with Parkinson's and dementia, she desperate for one last Christmas with all three adult children. Gary, a Philadelphia banker, fights depression and his wife's campaign to declare him clinically unwell. Chip, a fired academic, flees to Lithuania to help a fraudster build a website for a corrupt government. Denise, a brilliant chef, loses her restaurant job after affairs with both her employer and his wife. All three children return for Christmas, but the reunion only confirms that the family cannot be corrected. Alfred enters a nursing home. Enid begins, tentatively, to live for herself.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Corrections revived the social novel as a form that could compete with postmodern experimentation for literary prestige. Published in September 2001 — days before 9/11 — it became the last great novel of the pre-terror American literary landscape, a comprehensive portrait of 1990s America that already intuited the instabilities about to erupt. It won the National Book Award, sold over three million copies, and established Franzen as the most prominent American novelist of his generation — a position cemented and contested by every subsequent book.
Diction Profile
High literary register with sustained satirical undertone — Latinate vocabulary, complex syntax, punctuated by devastating colloquial deflation
Moderate