The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Trey Strecker

Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 568 pp. $26.00

For Jonathan Franzen, a writer who has been lambasted by Oprah’s minions as too highbrow, too artsy, it must be ironic that the central event of his new novel is a traditional Christmas dinner at home. As The Corrections painstakingly unpacks the lives of Alfred and Enid Lambert and their grown children, Franzen introduces an elemental conflict between the authoritarian railroad man, buckling under Parkinson’s-induced dementia, and his wife’s sentimental “prairie optimism.” While the eldest son denies his clinical depression and strives to create a conventional life that will make his overbearing parents proud, his sister, an up-and-coming chef at a trendy Philadelphia restaurant, loses herself in affairs with her boss and his wife. Chip, the favorite son, flees academe after he sleeps with a student, fools around with an absurd screenplay calculated to expose his former lover, and disappears in Lithuania. Franzen brings a postironic sincerity and compassion to his Midwestern King Lear. As the Lambert children return to the patriarchal den, Chip wonders, “When had it happened that his parents had become the children who went to bed early and called down for help from the top of the stairs?” The grown children confront the task of charting a life that separates them from their parents’ generation at the same time that they must accept the difficult responsibilities of caregivers. Yet as the Lamberts’ tale of familial dysfunction turns inward, Franzen’s narrative radiates outward, brilliantly weaving a web between the local and the global, the individual and the big picture. An entertaining read that demands our empathy and understanding, The Corrections is a great American novel for our time. It is the rare book that engages the heart and the head. [Trey Strecker]