Corrections [Hardcover]

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 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas. In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does. Unlike his previous works, The 27th City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), which tackled St. Louis and Boston, respectively, this one skips from city to city (New York; St. Jude; Philadelphia; Vilnius, Lithuania) as it follows the delamination of the Lambert family Alfred, once a rigid disciplinarian, flounders against Parkinson's-induced dementia; Enid, his loyal and embittered wife, lusts for the perfect Midwestern Christmas; Denise, their daughter, launches the hippest restaurant in Philly; and Gary, their oldest son, grapples with depression, while Chip, his brother, attempts to shore his eroding self-confidence by joining forces with a self-mocking, Eastern-Bloc politician. As in his other novels, Franzen blends these personal dramas with expert technical cartwheels and savage commentary on larger social issues, such as the imbecility of laissez-faire parenting and the farcical nature of U.S.-Third World relations. The result is a book made of equal parts fury and humor, one that takes a dry-eyed look at our culture, at our pains and insecurities, while offering hope that, occasionally at least, we can reach some kind of understanding. This is, simply, a masterpiece. Agent, Susan Golomb. (Sept.)Forecast: Franzen has always been a writer's writer and his previous novels have earned critical admiration, but his sales haven't yet reached the level of, say, Don DeLillo at his hottest. Still, if the ancillary rights sales and the buzz at BEA are any indication, The Corrections should be his breakout book. Its varied subject matter will endear it to a genre-crossing section of fans (both David Foster Wallace and Michael Cunningham contributed rave blurbs) and FSG's publicity campaign will guarantee plenty of press. QPB main, BOMC alternate. Foreign rights sold in the U.K., Denmark, Holland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Spain. Nine-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Here's a family that will never be mistaken for the Royal Tennenbaums. Meet the Lamberts: Dad is a retired railroad man who is slipping into dementia; Mom is still trying to believe in the rosiest possible marriage and family life; and their grown children are each living out a catastrophe. The youngest son is failing miserably as a sort of screenwriter in Lithuania, the daughter is a chef of some accomplishment who can't seem to keep out of bed with just about anyone, and the oldest son is yelling at and withholding affection from his family just as his father did before him. The family home is in St. Jude (aptly named for the patron saint of hopeless causes). Enid, the wife and mother, wants the whole family together for one last Christmas before her husband, Alfred, slips beyond reach. Getting them all under the same roof even for a few hours is a massive undertaking. Franzen is a keen observer of the way the world works, and it is a tribute to his skill as a novelist that the listener remains interested in the craziness of these lives. Reader Dylan Baker brings these quirky characters to life. Recommended for fiction collections in public libraries. - Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

*Starred Review* Ferociously detailed, gratifyingly mind-expanding, and daringly complex and unhurried, New Yorker writer Franzen's third and best-yet novel aligns the spectacular dysfunctions of one Midwest family with the explosive malfunctions of society-at-large. Alfred's simple values were in perfect accord with the iron orderliness of the railroad he so zealously served, but he is now discovering the miseries and entropy of Parkinson's disease. His wife, Enid, who has filled every cupboard and closet in their seemingly perfect house with riotous clutter in an unconscious response to her hunger for deeper experience, refuses to accept the severity of Alfred's affliction. Gary, the most uptight and bossiest of their unmoored adult offspring, is so undermined by his ruthlessly strategic wife that he barely avoids a nervous breakdown. Chip loses a plum academic job after being seduced and betrayed by a student, then nearly loses his life in Lithuania after perpetuating some profoundly cynical Internet fraud. And Denise detonates her career as a trendy chef by having an affair with her boss' wife. Heir in scope and spirit to the great nineteenth-century novelists, Franzen is also kin to Stanley Elkin with his caustic humor, satiric imagination, and free-flowing empathy as he mocks the absurdity and brutality of consumer culture. At once miniaturistic and panoramic, Franzen's prodigious comedic saga renders family life on an epic scale and captures the decadence of the dot-com era. Each cleverly choreographed fiasco stands as a correction to the delusions that precipitated it, and each step back from the brink of catastrophe becomes a move toward hope, integrity, and love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

". . . The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment." -- Michael Cunningham

"As clever as those of the brainy postmodernists ... but infinitely more accessible... [Franzen] dazzles the reader with ... affecting human characters." -- Emily Eakin, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

"Between postmodern chic and plain old-fashioned storytelling ... What Mr. Franzen does -- brilliantly -- is ... to get at emotional truth." -- Adam Begley, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

"Funny and deeply sad . . . The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords." -- David Foster Wallace

"Harrowing and hysterical, THE CORRECTIONS is the novel of the year." -- FORTUNE

"Hype be damned--this novel is a wisecracking, eloquent, heart-breaking beauty." -- Will Blythe, ELLE

"Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture . . ." -- Don DeLillo

"Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections is the brightest, boldest, and most ambitious novel I've read in many years." -- Pat Conroy

"The best American novel published to date this year." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"[Will THE CORRECTIONS] become that rare thing, a literary work that everybody's reading? A lot of people are saying yes." -- TIME --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

"...the next great American author." -The Globe & Mail

"It is, quite simply, a masterpiece." -Publishers Weekly

THE CORRECTIONS is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century-a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.

After almost fifty 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 have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, THE CORRECTIONS brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

". . . large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords." (David Foster Wallace)

"A literary masterpiece . . . thrilling, heartening, and inspiring about seeing life revealed so accurately, so transparently -- and finally, so forgivingly . . . Dazzling." (Francine Prose, O magazine)

"It creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world . . . it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read." (David Gates, The New York Times Book Review)

"An energetic, brooding, open-hearted and funny novel." (Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post)

"The Corrections . . . renders its mysteries with the fine filament and moral nuance they require . . ." (Richard Lacayo, Time)

"By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting, The Corrections . . . shows us two generations of an American family struggling . . ." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

"[THE CORRECTIONS is] Franzen's most autobiographical novel, his most engrossing (do not be surprised to find yourself trying to read it all in one sitting), and, stylistically, his most lyrical. In its gorgeous, sweeping scope and the sympathy of its tone, it owes more to Tolstoy than to Pynchon, but ultimately the novel offers up pleasures that are utterly Franzenian; a sense of exhilaration permeates THE CORRECTIONS, which is, in part, the exhilaration of a writer who has broken free of his masters." -Joanna Rakoff, POETS & WRITERS

"Franzen is a wizard, endlessly inventive in his thematic connections and scene setting . . . THE CORRECTIONS is a wide-open performance showcasing the full range of his skills and his eclectic intelligence." -Stewart O'Nan, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

"What this man writes is true, and what is true indicts us. THE CORRECTIONS transcends its many wonderful moments to become that rarest thing, a contemporary novel that will endure." -Sven Birkerts, ESQUIRE --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award for Fiction for The Corrections in 2001, and is the author oftwo other critically acclaimed novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion. His fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in The New Yorker and Harper’s. Jonathan Franzen lives in New York City.

T H E M A D N E S S of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You
could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in
the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees
restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things
coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened
on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks
rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered
in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer,
the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a
paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had
cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love
seat.
Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic
suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in
which he’d been sleeping since lunch. He’d had his nap and there would
be no local news until five o’clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in
which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-
Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Al-
fred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was
like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send
schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing
for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of
“bell ringing” but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you
stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a
granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones;
ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background ex-
cept at certain early-morning hours when one or other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that
the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was
not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower wax-
ing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness
was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood.
Then Enid and Alfred, she on her knees in the dining room opening
drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table —
each felt near to exploding with anxiety.
The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer
autumn colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid
was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by
the manufacturer)lay months and even years in the past: that these
hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars
(potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket
that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin
PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even close . The dates were histori-
cal . The alarm bell had been ringing for years .
She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the
drawer. She was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail
some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and
had shouted, “Enid! Enid!” so loudly that he couldn’t hear her shouting
back, “Al, I’m getting it!” He’d continued to shout her name, coming
closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon
Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and be-
cause there were aspects of the Axon situation that Enid knew about
and hoped that Alfred didn’t, she ‘d quickly stashed the letter some-
where within . Fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from
the basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment,
“There ’s somebody at the door!”and she’d fairly screamed, “the mailman!
The mailman!” and he’d shaken his head at the complexity of it all.
Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn’t have
to wonder, every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she
might, she couldn’t get him interested in life. When she encouraged
him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she’d lost her
mind. When she asked whether there wasn’t some yard work he could
do, he said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of
her friends all had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby
Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his
hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she
were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was
that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? He’d been repainting the
love seat since Labor Day. She seemed to recall that the last time he’d
painted the furniture he’d done the love seat in two hours. Now he
went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she
ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he’d painted of
the love seat was the legs. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

The author was profiled admiringly in THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, the novel chosen by Oprah. The audio team at Simon & Schuster presents this bestseller brilliantly. Dylan Baker acts deftly, playing every part--male and female, young and old--superbly. The sound is excellent; the abridgment leaves the narrative thread intact. Franzen is a NEW YORKER staffer, and this is a slice of life, albeit a thick slice, the pathology report on two generations of an American family. The text is studded with prose baubles. Two women working in a kitchen sound "like a large bee and a smaller bee trapped behind a window screen." This is serious fiction, meant to delineate our moral agonies. Expect to be transported, but don't expect to escape. B.H.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.