The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

I liked it. Not the be-all and end-all some hype would have you believe, but a book that frequently tries to hit home runs -- and often does. Pluses are Franzen's writing -- he has a sheer love of the word that comes across, if it's occasionally too much -- some of his offbeat plot points (one character chucks his life temporarily to go to Lithuania, which has decided to sell itself in a fraudulent Web caper), and empathy for the family at the heart of the story.

Minuses: sometimes meandering, he drops a few interesting balls he throws in the air (the father has invented something important, but that becomes moot by the end of the novel; there's a bit about '80s-style corporate conglomerating which is left by itself), and -- well -- it's too short. Franzen really needed about 800 pages to pull this off perfectly, and the book's only 570. The tapestry ends up a little threadbare.

But O, what a tapestry. At the heart of the story is a Midwestern family -- taciturn father, yearning mother, tight-assed well-off oldest son, ne'er-do-well professor middle son, uncertain youngest daughter. Father's developed Alzheimers, mother wants to get the family back in time for one last Christmas, children have their own laundry list of problems. It works as both a big look at the big world, and a humane look at a single family.

I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars, though that's using a mighty big yardstick. Given a lot of the attempted literature out there today, it's more like a 5 out of 5.