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by: Jonathan Franzen  List Price: $37.20 Price: $25.19 You Save: $12.01 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Dewey Decimal Number: 813 EAN: 9780007142125 Edition: Abridged Format: Abridged, Audiobook ISBN: 0007142129 Label: HarperCollins Audio Manufacturer: HarperCollins Audio Number Of Items: 6 Publication Date: January 14, 2002 Publisher: HarperCollins Audio Studio: HarperCollins Audio Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East. All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye: Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo Product Description: After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children are all making catastrophes of their own lives. Enid however, has her heart set on one last family Christmas. Book Description: 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 anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - The CorrectionsBook Review submitted by: Stephen J. Hage, SteveH9697@aol.com This book falls into the "serious fiction" or "literary fiction" category which means it is not genre fiction. Its focus is on psychological depth and character rather than narrative and plot; and on that score it delivers with a capital D. The main characters are Alfred and Enid Lambert living in St. Jude, a nondescript Midwestern suburb. They're getting on in years and their children have moved out and on. ... Read More Rating: - I think I know themAs a Japanese living in US, I may have enjoyed this book differently than others. Franzen's characters remind me of some mid-westerners I know. They are so real and I feel as if I really knew them. Franzen has a rare talent with words. Wicked, magical, cynical, sad, and funny. However, he wouldn't give you conventional story line or ending. Neither would he give you lovable characters. If you don't enjoy this kind of book, don't give him one star or two stars. Just stop reading. Rating:  - Overhyped? Yes. A great book? YesYes, this book has been overhyped. But its still a worthwhile, eye-opening read. Franzen captures how individuals are evolving, constantly struggling, and striving for happiness, even when its unlikely or not even possible. Rating: - A Modern ClassicThis is the first novel I have read by this author. From the very beginning, his style captured my interest via wit and insight that would seem so obvious that no one would have thought to put it in words before. The theme of this novel isn't a "correction" but more akin to a loyalty found in family bonds that can be strained not just within one generation but from one to the next. The characters each have their own foibles, angst and overall despondency each of them painted on to a background ... Read More Rating:  - A seemingly unending stream of word vomitI can think of no other way to describe this thing. I really, really despised almost everything about The Corrections. I finished it solely so that I could write a horrible review and have it be valid. At no single point before the last 10 pages of this 566-page monster did I feel a shred of sympathy with any of the characters. There were several moments where I thought Franzen would have been better off writing dialogue-for-the-average-Joe instead of the trumped up and out of place ... Read More 
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