Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in. Add a library card to your account to borrow titles, place holds, and add titles to your wish list. Have a card? Add it now to start borrowing from the collection. The library card you previously added can't be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card.
If you receive an error message, please contact your library for help. Error loading page. Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again. The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser.
Learn more here. You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase. Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.
Add a library card to your account to borrow titles, place holds, and add titles to your wish list. Have a card? Add it now to start borrowing from the collection. The library card you previously added can't be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card. Your session has expired.
Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in.
Add a library card to your account to borrow titles, place holds, and add titles to your wish list. Have a card? Add it now to start borrowing from the collection. The library card you previously added can't be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card. If you receive an error message, please contact your library for help. Error loading page. Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Yeah, it was well written. The depth of the characters and the storyline maybe just a hair short of phenomenal. Why do I bother with fiction? I feel gui My first Franzen. I feel guilty, as if I should be learning something instead. Is the desire to read this type of fiction some sort of voyeuristic fetish? Peek into some fictional character's life and say, "Hell, I've got it good! Do I, as a reader, get anything out of it at all, beyond perhaps some mindless entertainment?
Do I have to? In The Corrections, Franzen absolutely nails not literally each member of a dysfunctional average!??! Mom borders on neurotic. Dad is demented. Kids all screwed up in their own way. The following excerpt: "He'd had the sense moments earlier that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being depressed. He would forefit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease, he would never again win an arguement.
And real. Somehow Franzen manages to put the "fun" in dysfunctional. Far from "mindless", The Corrections tunes you in to each family member and their flaws.
In reading, you may recognize yourself in one of the characters, stop and think, "oh no! I'm that jerk! That bitch is just like my sister! You work with them. God forbid, you are related to them! But it is real. All the imperfections, the misunderstandings, the yearning, the love, the hate It IS about being a human being. And it is done very damn well. This is NOT my last Franzen.
View all 21 comments. Sep 25, Paul Bryant rated it it was amazing Shelves: novels. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. Hmm, well, maybe. I can't think Hugh Selby had very friendly thoughts when he wrote his brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn , it reads like he wants to shove all of us into a landfill site and have done with the human race. But quite often that's a good attitude for a writer to have. Some books you walk around and poke sticks at, they're designed that way; some books you take your machete and hack into the meat and the filth and the hell with any bystanders getting splattered, they shouldn't be bystanding so close if their fine suits mean that much to them.
Some books you can have round for tea with mama. So I disagree with rule 1. Garrison Keillor musta got a real fat wad for Lake Wobegon then. Likewise Dickens. I'm not sure what this rule really means. Maybe it's just like a tie with a drawing of a fish on it. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page. Okay JF okay. Deep breaths - put your head between your legs. You do this, you say that. That's just wrong.
Only one book gets away with that, which is An American Tragedy by Theodore Drieser, which is quite brilliant. But after that one - no second person! You is fired! E Annie Proulx - look away now! Naw, I think I see what he's getting at but naw. If you marshall your research well, you create a world, you're doing good. Who was that woman who lived in a box in England and wrote about Alaska?
I reviewed it too - my memory is going down the drain. Ah yes, The Tenderness of Wolves. Anyway, that was pretty good. So no to rule 5. Sounds like bollocky bollocks to me. Does this actually mean anything? Ah, grasshopper, you have much to learn. Come on, JF, you're a great writer, don't bullshit us. Also wrong because these days employers can firewall all porn and gambling and social networking sites.
But here, they don't think of Goodreads as a social networking site, so shhhh, don't tell them! He's galumphing again. The Corrections has one really naff section, where it turns into a stupid farce about post-Soviet Lithuania and gangsters and stuff, really bad.
Otherwise I thought it was tough, tender, relentless even, but sadly, full of interesting verbs. Fail yourself, Jonathan. View all 47 comments. Jan 30, Brian rated it liked it.
People and books grow apart just like people and people grow apart. Some books, like people, have a character flaw. Yours, however, is an author flaw. Thus, the breakup. Across the library there are now two whole shelves of Vollmann, growing to three. Those three stars are really three. So trust me, this is the best thing for both of us. Before leaving the Goodwill I browsed amongst their book selection and saw 27 of your identical twins here.
View all 45 comments. Not only does his understanding of complex, familial relationships fascinate me, but his ability to capture these characters—all five of them, I might add—with such depth I think that is what really drew me in as a reader.
I mean, these are people who are so flawed emotionally and so utterly selfish inherently, and yet each of them has this capacity for loving one another even while recognizing their inability to stand each other for more than five minutes at a time: in a sense they are more human than most humans.
And Franzen knows how to write a sentence, my God. All this book did was remind me why I love to read. Honestly, I try to give five stars sparingly, but this one I fully endorse.
I think what makes it better than Freedom is that I walked away from this with a knot in my stomach I really felt something here! Seven year-old Chip being left alone at the dinner table until it was late enough for him to fall asleep on his placemat bothered me.
Juxtapose that with the tenderness Chip shows his dad toward the end of the novel, and you start to wonder whether this man was ever really the emotionally unavailable tyrant that you thought he was. View all 14 comments. Jun 10, Howard rated it it was ok Shelves: family-dysfunction , family , reviewed , fiction , national-book-award.
The critics loved The Corrections. Published in , it won the National Book Award for fiction for that year and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize a year later. It also won or was nominated for a number of other prestigious literary prizes. Oprah not only chose it for her book club but went so far as to pr The critics loved The Corrections. Consequently, when he voiced his feelings in several interviews Oprah withdrew her invitation to have him as a guest on her show And the dust cover of my hardback copy does not feature her stamp of approval, which had been embossed on earlier copies of the book.
Of course, the publicity engendered by the tempest in a teapot may have had as much of a positive impact on sales as his appearance on her show would have had. So how is it that I would give such a heralded book two out of five stars? There was not a single person that I could pull for — not one. View all 57 comments. Shelves: fiction , borrowed , post A friend once told me that Jonathan Franzen has been quoted as saying he deliberately rips off influential late-century American authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth, but tries to make the prose less difficult, more easily consumed.
Those authors are not great because their writing is accessible when the complexity is removed. It was when one of the main characters in The Corr A friend once told me that Jonathan Franzen has been quoted as saying he deliberately rips off influential late-century American authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth, but tries to make the prose less difficult, more easily consumed.
It was when one of the main characters in The Corrections was talking to a hallucinated turd that I thought, I should just put this down and take a stab at Against the Day , or re-read Gravity's Rainbow where a literal shit scene can actually be hilarious and fascinating.
In addition to weak-pynchonian characters human and fecal , this novel suffers from a lack of strict editing too many peripheral characters, too many inconsequential sub-sub-subplots , from unsympathetic characters I don't really know what the point is if everyone is horrible and always has and always will hate or be spiteful to everyone around them , from an inconsistent, sudden ending last chapter: no one will ever change.
The "misery of aging" theme was effective, and I appreciated the exploration of a marriage that was bad for no more complicated a reason than that the husband and wife weren't right for one another.
Otherwise I had no use for Franzen and his truckloads of loathing. It's been rightly pointed out since that I shouldn't have used it without a citation and should have been skeptical about its authenticity. But this book still sucks. View all 15 comments. Aug 16, Lyn rated it really liked it. Imagine an engineer with a sharpened pencil making schematics and rigidly following mathematical, precise principles, forming a design that fits a specific purpose and allows for only infinitesimal error.
But these ways of making corrections are not ways to deal with humans, this is not how people exist, there are no hard fast rules, no black and white lines that distinguish right and wrong.
Jonathon Franzen, in his publication The Corrections, describes for us the Lambert family. Growing up and together in the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude, the family consists of father and mother, Alfred and Enid, and there three children: Gary, Chip and Denise. In casting his characters, Franzen has demonstrated his mastery of both the language and for a descriptive characterization power that is Dickensian.
A literary progeny of John Barth, Richard Ford and Walker Percy Franzen is well suited for this ambitious, epic and thought provoking examination of our society as exhibited by the Lamberts. Alfred is a retired railroad engineer who is by nature cold and aloof, and has been a domestic tyrant over Enid for the length of their marriage.
Franzen shows us glimpses of the sad world he has inherited and the fruitless seclusion he has made for himself. Judgmental, paranoid, illusory, self-righteous and prone to self-aggrandizing hyperbole Enid is haunted by the family that she wanted but never attained. She poorly conceals her disappointment of her children and of her marriage. Gary, the eldest son, is a successful Philadelphia banker and lives with his wife, Caroline, and their three children.
Franzen has cast Gary in the role of villain, he and his wife epitomize all that is wrong and ugly with western civilization: narcissism, crass materialism, selfishness, elitism, banality, insincerity and a superficial ideal for the family that poorly conceals a pompous self interest. To Gary, and especially the deplorable Caroline, family is just the appearance, not the underlying love and affection.
Chip is a failed professor, and Denise a once successful restaurateur and both have stumbled because of underlying psychologically damaged self esteem manifested by sexually self-destructive behavior. Franzen illustrates their ups and downs, and ultimate redemption, through a dynamic exploration of the truly binding ties of family.
Alfred and Enid, for all their conceits and failings, love each other and their family, even to the point of deep sacrifice. Chip and Denise are able to look into themselves and carefully examine their filial relationships and come away with a sense of self worth and meaning. Even Gary who Franzen has fun with, making him and Caroline almost caricatures of despicable self importance truly loves his boys.
Lewis Narnia references, Franzen carefully reveals that for all of our outward failings, there may be some hope for us yet.
View all 6 comments. Jun 16, Fabian rated it it was amazing. The much appreciated "The Corrections" is a prime example of what can occur if all you do is describe members of a family it is not even all that dysfunctional--which is why the pathos is all too real.
These are fully-fleshed creations and the mother's only wish, that they all convene for one last Christmas dinner at their original nest, is also the reader's. One cannot help but root for them all to make it! Will the father survive his Parkinson's in 1 piece? Will Gary Son 1 change for the better, be less of the older sibling, and therefore less of an asshole?
Will Chip leave Lithuania just as civil unrest hits, in time for all five Lamberts to come together? Will the mother beat her new addiction to pills, let go of her husband? Will Denise embrace something other than lame work? These people have very interesting points of view, have deviated briefly from their prime roost, sure. But once they come together in the climax that comes too soon some pages after all the character development!
It hurts to realize that, as an older sibling, I am a Gary. Sep 09, Kelly rated it it was amazing Shelves: worlds-lost-dead-and-dying , 21st-century , fiction , wits-and-fools , owned , theonewithacrushontheprofessor , po-mo. The opening vignette was a deep dive into the subterranean conflicts of a middle class home in Middle America.
Petty squabbles about money abound the gun introduced the first act is a five thousand dollar check that drives the action , intergenerational embarrassment and sadness are the foundation of most of the action, and sexuality twists itself upwards through every crack it can find.
And you know what, it is that. Those books are certainly in its lineage. Once its got its feet under it, trust me, you do not want to miss this tea party. This book is Tolstoyan in its ambitions, and Dickensian in its scope. The constant stream of its psychological examinations suggests the heights of modernist fancy, but episodes of amazingly straightforward vulgarity and uncomfortably direct descriptions peppered throughout the narrative reminds us that this book was written in a country that was about to produce the Jersey Shore and insist that grandmothers become aware who Paris Hilton is.
I need all the literary labels my education has exposed me to to make sense of it. The farther I got into this book, the more I penetrated into the heart of what makes this particular family tick, the more enthralling it became. The narrative reminded me of that Charlize Theron Dior commercial where she walks through the long, Versailles like hallway and strips off her couture as she goes. Only in this version, her makeup and her jewels would have gone as well, and her famous Turn Plain and Slightly Overweight for Oscar character from that movie would appear at the end.
Despite the long and in depth trips inside the heads of each family members, in my view, the book is ultimately arranged to be an examination of the psyche of the Great American Male after all, the father of the family, Alfred. Alfred the engineer. Alfred the emotionally distant husband and father. Alfred the upright and uptight symbol of all that is Good and Right. Chip, the first child to appear, gives us what appears to be the real lay of the land at the start. His chosen persona is the biggest douchebag you could possibly imagine, of the sad college professor in a leather jacket variety.
Complete with earring and Derrida tome attached to his hip but of course. Every sentence about him is just gross, and gets grosser. Chip lives in gross. Its his identity and his philosophy as a teacher to reveal the grossness of society and corporate culture to the youngsters he teaches.
But even that is much too time-honored a position gross professors being the one thing each generation seems to produce enough of, no problem.
Chip has to descend even further to pretending that he lives that life while in actuality living another one that depends even more on falsity. In a post-communist state. With men living in the ruins of the sort of oppression he claims to fight. But only on the surface. For all his douchebaggery, for all his poses and his view spoiler [ sleeping with students hide spoiler ] Chip is the embodiment of the Future. He is so alien to his father, but his intelligence is such big part of his identity just smart enough to figure out all those big, effete words and sound like he knows what he means , and that very alien-ness seems like such a logical progression to the future that, for Alfred, he is the son he feels like he can rely on as a guide to a time he doesn't know.
He can show him things and know that shock will not overwhelm him. For different reasons, yes. And the degree to which Alfred admits this is much less. But these two guys are in the same foxhole, however they want to dress it up.
Gary, the second son, is the next child, is apparently the Good Son. The son who stayed on the straight and narrow. His sexuality is not in question. He had children, boys even, and grilled in the back. He stayed faithful to his wife if for fascinatingly sick reasons and tried to make his parents happy by coming home for the holidays. Their sex lives are disturbingly full of it, but their public life is not. Unsurprisingly then, inevitably, our time with him is consumed by a revenge quest for his father.
But because this is twentieth century America, on the verge of a twenty-first century of virtual lives and desk jobs, and not fifteenth century France, that revenge quest has to take place in the nebulous world of the corporate jungle. If his story is the most obvious of all, it is touching for all that, because it would have been the easiest to solve very early on.
Then Denise, the sole daughter of the family, is the last of the family to reveal herself. The choice is the most deliberate and necessary of them all. She appears many times earlier in the novel, but always as a projection of another member of the family- her mother or her two brothers.
Our first trip inside of her head is an entirely different story. More importantly, she is the character with the most choices to make. She is a woman standing at a fascinating cusp of history for the options of American women.
We are introduced to a woman of apparently complete, decisive decision. She rolls her eyes at her brothers and kicks ass at work. She takes care of her parents and offers more kindness than anyone else we encounter. We see how this carries through for years afterwards into her adult life as she doubles down on the thing she knew she never should have done in the first place and understand exactly why.
The more honesty we encounter, the more guilt, the more self-doubt comes up the surface.
0コメント