The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the antigravity New Economy. With The Corrections , Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul. Enid Lambert is terribly anxious about her husband Alfred's increasing episodes of forgetfulness. There's nothing she can do about it because Alfred has become increasingly convinced that his problems aren't medical but rather spiritual in nature.