The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

I stayed up late to finish this book and when I'd done, I regretted doing so because the book disturbed me so much that I couldn't sleep for another hour. Alfred and Enid Lambert are a retired couple who live in St Jude in the midwest, and all of their three children live miles away. Enid is focused on getting the entire family together for one last Christmas in St Jude. Unfortunately, the rest of the family is non too cooperative. Each member of the family is too consumed by their own personal problems to really care about what Enid wants. Alfred, her huband, is sinking deeper into dementia. Gary, her elder son, is fighting depression and the steadfast refusal of his wife to even consider spending Christmas in St Jude. Chip, her younger son, just lost his job and doesn't even stay to entertain them when they come to visit him. Finally, Denise, who is a disappointment to her mother for having cheated her of her wonderful wedding plans for Denise by marrying young without informing her and then being divorced a few years later. The book follows each character in this family, gets into their head and shows us the people they are now and how they got that way. It exposes the flaws in each person mercilessly and the dynamics of the relationships between these family members. The manipulations between husbands and wives, the playing off of each child against the other, the disappointments of the parents for the underachievements of their children, the cycle of guilt and resentment of the child for the parent. Franzen exposes everything that is horrible about ourselves and our relationships with other people, our selfishness, our pettiness, our spite, our racist attitudes, our propensity to hurt the people with love, our materialistic and empty lifestyles. He holds a mirror to our character flaws, exposing things about ourselves that we would rather not see. This book was much more disturbing to me than any horror story, because I could see a little bit of myself in each of these characters and it appalled me. I think that this is a powerful story about family, about the people that matter in our lives and I think that this is miles better than any of the myriad of self-help books. The one quibble I would have is that, in his ruthlessness in exposing the truth about these people, and one suspects, about ordinary people like you and me, he only looked at the bad and did not consider the good. I think, the book could have been balanced by a little more compassion for the characters, but then, perhaps the message would have been less powerful then.