The Corrections

I read this a million years ago, when it was new, but my ambivalent experience with “Freedom” left me wanting to refresh my memory–am I not a Franzen fan, or just not a “Freedom” fan?

Upon re-reading, it became clear that my problem was “Freedom,” not Franzen (my, isn't this is an alliterative review). “The Corrections” was everything I wanted it to be–zany, painfully precise in its portraits of the characters (I swear I will stop with the alliteration), but compassionate towards all their inelegant fumblings.

Anyway, who doesn't love a good family drama (said the psychologist)?

I admired more than enjoyed this book. It's very well-written, but underneath the impressive style are a story and characters that I didn't like very much. I thought that it spent too much time in flashback, which gives it the feeling that the current storyline is constantly stalled; I was always waiting for it to get back to what's happening now.

The author is
excellent at copying a paint-by-numbers picture onto another piece of paper
and painting in each part the right color. None of the numbers show. But
when you look at the picture, you know somehow that it was taken from
somewhere, that it wasn't drawn from the heart.

Does that make any sense?

I cam to page 71 of 568 when I realized that life indeed is too short to read bad books.

Yes, I find this a bad book.

“The novel won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was nominated for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and was shortlisted for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In 2005, The Corrections was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels.
In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel “one of the three great books of my generation.”
In 2009, website The Millions polled 48 writers, critics, and editors, including Joshua Ferris, Sam Anderson, and Lorin Stein. The panel voted The Corrections the best novel of the first decade of the millennium “by a landslide”.”
Wikipedia: The Corrections

“Alfred Lambert, the patriarch of a seemingly normal family living in the fictional town of St. Jude, suffers from Parkinson's disease and dementia. Enid, his longsuffering wife, suffers from Alfred's controlling, rigid behavior and her own embarrassment at what she perceives as her family's shortcomings. Their children all live in the Northeast. Gary, the eldest Lambert son, is a successful banker whose personal and family life is controlled by his beloved wife, a gifted manipulator and reader of pop-psychology books. Chip, the middle child, is a former academic whose disastrous affair with a student loses him a tenure-track job and lands him in the employ of a Lithuanian crime boss. Denise, the youngest of the family, is successful in her career as a chef but loses her job just at the peak of her career after interlocking romances with her boss and her boss's wife.

The separate plot-lines converge on Christmas morning back in St. Jude, when each child is forced to make a decision about what kind of responsibility to assume in helping their mother deal with their father's accelerating physical and mental decline.”

“Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. And the nights were getting cold now.”

& that whole thing between Denise and Don Armour.

“Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.”