The Corrections

The Corrections is Jonathan Franzen's 2001 novel, the National Book Award winner that established Franzen as one of the major American literary novelists of his generation. Alfred Lambert, a retired Midwestern engineer, is slipping into Parkinson's-related dementia in St. Jude, the fictional Midwestern city where he and his wife Enid have lived for fifty years. Enid is trying to bring their three adult children (Gary, a depressed financial executive in Philadelphia; Chip, a fired English professor in New York; and Denise, a successful Philadelphia chef) home for what she suspects will be Alfred's last Christmas. The novel is the long failing engineering project of getting that Christmas to happen.

Franzen's prose is the structural genius of the novel. The shifting third-person interior chapters (each Lambert child gets a major section, plus an Alfred-and-Enid section, plus framing chapters around the Christmas dinner) build a five-hundred-page family novel that earns the comparisons to The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain that some early reviewers reached for. The Chip Lambert chapters set in late-1990s Lithuania (Chip writes a screenplay for a Lithuanian businessman running a stock-market scam) are some of the strongest comic prose any American novelist has written about the post-Soviet 1990s. The Denise restaurant chapters are some of the most careful kitchen-procedural prose in American literary fiction.

Recommended as required twenty-first century American literary fiction reading, as the right Franzen entry point, and as one of the canonical American family novels of the contemporary era. Read Freedom (2010) next. The Dylan Baker audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.