The Corrections is a large, ambitious, often darkly funny novel about an American family coming apart just as the country itself is entering a period of enormous economic and cultural change. Published in 2001, it made Jonathan Franzen one of the most important American novelists of his generation and became one of the defining family novels of contemporary American literature.
At its center are Alfred and Enid Lambert, an aging Midwestern couple, and their three adult children: Gary, Chip, and Denise. Each has achieved a version of the American dream—or thinks he or she has—and each is deeply unhappy.
The title is deliberately ironic.
Everyone in the novel wants to correct something.
Alfred and Enid want to correct their marriage, their children, their finances, their health and their social position. Gary wants to correct his depression and make his family conform to his idea of success. Chip wants to correct his failed career and become financially respectable. Denise wants to correct her personal life and discover what kind of life she actually wants.
But Franzen's great insight is that people cannot simply correct themselves. Their problems are intertwined with their families, their personalities, their economic circumstances and the larger society around them.
The title also has a financial meaning: the novel takes place partly in a world of complicated investments and financial schemes. The word therefore connects personal failure with America's increasingly financialized economy.
Alfred is probably the most memorable character.
He is an aging railroad engineer, rigid, demanding, emotionally repressed and increasingly afflicted by Parkinson's disease and dementia. He has spent his life believing in discipline, thrift, hard work and self-control.
He is also, gradually, losing control of his own body.
That contradiction gives the character much of his tragic power.
Alfred cannot accept dependence. His body becomes something he can no longer command, while his wife and children become increasingly responsible for him.
Franzen doesn't make Alfred simply a bad father. He shows us how a person's virtues can become destructive when carried too far.
His discipline becomes rigidity.
His independence becomes cruelty.
His self-control becomes emotional imprisonment.
Yet there are moments when we understand the frightened human being beneath the authoritarian exterior.
Enid is superficially the opposite of Alfred.
She is sociable, optimistic and obsessed with appearances. She wants the family to be happy, prosperous and respectable.
But Enid's cheerfulness is itself a kind of denial.
She constantly believes that if everyone would simply make the right choices, the family could become normal again.
Her great project is to get all three children home for Christmas.
That sounds innocent. It becomes almost absurdly difficult.
Enid's desire to bring everyone together is simultaneously loving and controlling.
She wants her children to be happy, but she also wants their happiness to confirm that she and Alfred succeeded as parents.
Gary is the most conventional of the three children.
He has a successful career, a wife and children, and a prosperous suburban existence.
But he is deeply depressed.
His tragedy is that he has everything that American society tells him should make him happy—and therefore has no acceptable explanation for why he isn't.
Franzen uses Gary to examine modern depression and the tyranny of happiness.
Gary's wife, Caroline, believes he is mentally ill. Gary believes she is manipulating him. Their marriage becomes a grotesque struggle over who gets to define reality.
The result is both comic and painful.
Chip is the family's great failure.
He was once a promising academic and has destroyed his career through inappropriate behavior with a student. He is intelligent, charming, self-pitying and chronically incapable of making responsible decisions.
Chip is perhaps Franzen's funniest character.
He continually invents elaborate explanations for why his failures aren't really his fault.
Yet Chip isn't simply a comic loser. His intelligence has become almost an obstacle to living. He can understand everything except himself.
His eventual involvement in a dubious economic venture in Lithuania brings the novel's personal story into contact with the increasingly globalized and financialized world.
Denise is the most independent and, arguably, the most psychologically interesting child.
She is a gifted chef who has difficulty establishing a stable personal life.
Unlike Gary and Chip, she doesn't particularly want to become what her parents expect.
Her sexuality, career and relationships become ways of exploring the question:
What does an adult actually owe to his or her family?
Denise also demonstrates one of Franzen's recurring interests: the conflict between freedom and responsibility.
It may surprise people who haven't read it that The Corrections is frequently hilarious.
Franzen has an extraordinary talent for exposing the absurdity hidden inside ordinary behavior.
People lie to themselves.
They pretend to care about things they don't care about.
They spend enormous amounts of money trying to become happier.
They attend family gatherings while silently fantasizing about escaping.
They give one another advice that reveals more about themselves than about the person they're advising.
The comedy is often uncomfortable because we recognize ourselves in it.
The proposed family Christmas is the novel's great organizing device.
Enid wants everyone home.
But by this point the family members have become sufficiently alienated that simply getting them into the same house becomes a monumental undertaking.
This resembles the structure of many great family novels: everyone returns home, and the return exposes everything that ordinary distance has concealed.
The Christmas dinner therefore becomes almost a theatrical experiment:
Can a family that has become psychologically fragmented still pretend to be a family?
Franzen's answer is complicated.
They cannot go back to what they were.
But they cannot completely escape one another either.
One of the novel's greatest achievements is that the Lambert family is also a portrait of America.
The novel moves from the old Midwestern virtues of:
thrift
work
discipline
marriage
property
family obligation
toward a newer world characterized by:
consumerism
pharmaceuticals
investment schemes
global markets
advertising
individualism
therapy
endless personal choice
Alfred belongs to the old order.
His children belong to the new one.
Neither world is presented as wholly satisfactory.
That is important.
Franzen isn't simply saying the old America was good and the new America is bad.
He shows that the older system produced repression and unhappiness, while the newer one produces fragmentation, anxiety and endless self-invention.
Money is everywhere in The Corrections.
But Franzen isn't merely writing about rich and poor.
He's interested in what money does to people's understanding of themselves.
People increasingly think of themselves as investments.
Careers become investments.
Children become investments.
Marriage becomes an investment.
Health becomes an investment.
Even happiness becomes something that can supposedly be purchased.
The financial story involving Chip and the Baltic economy is particularly important because it expands the novel from a Midwestern family drama into a story about the new global economy.
Yes—and no.
At roughly 560 pages, The Corrections is considerably longer than it needs to be.
Some episodes are brilliantly constructed but feel detachable from the main story. Franzen sometimes seems unable to resist exploring an interesting social phenomenon once he has discovered it.
But the excess is also part of the novel's character.
It wants to be a whole society inside a family story.
The length allows Franzen to move among several different psychological worlds and gradually reveal that apparently separate problems are connected.
Still, a reader who prefers tight plotting may find the middle sections slow.
Franzen writes in a remarkably controlled third-person style.
One of his greatest techniques is free indirect discourse: we enter a character's mind without being explicitly told that we have done so.
The narrator may describe the world in language that subtly adopts the character's prejudices and obsessions.
This creates an interesting effect.
We laugh at Gary, Chip or Enid—but for a moment we also see the world exactly as they see it.
Then Franzen quietly reveals the distortion.
That is one reason the characters feel so psychologically real.
The novel refuses easy moral judgments.
Alfred is difficult—but he is also suffering.
Enid is suffocating—but she genuinely loves her children.
Gary is self-absorbed—but his depression is real.
Chip is irresponsible—but he is also genuinely intelligent and wounded.
Denise makes questionable choices—but she is perhaps the family member most honestly trying to live her own life.
Franzen understands something important about families:
People don't usually hurt one another because they don't love one another. They often hurt one another because love becomes mixed with expectation, resentment, fear and the need for control.
The deepest "correction" in the novel is not fixing a particular mistake.
It is the fantasy that life can be fixed.
The characters repeatedly imagine:
If only I could change this one thing, everything else would fall into place.
But there is always another problem.
The novel ultimately suggests that adulthood requires something more difficult than correction:
acceptance.
Not passive acceptance, but recognition of the limits of one's ability to control other people and circumstances.
The Alfred sections are especially powerful because Franzen treats aging without sentimentality.
Alfred's declining body changes the family hierarchy.
The father who once commanded everyone increasingly needs everyone.
That reversal is humiliating for him and exhausting for them.
The novel recognizes something uncomfortable about aging:
dependence can expose the emotional weaknesses that independence allowed us to hide.
This makes Alfred's story considerably more than a subplot about illness. It becomes a meditation on dignity, autonomy and the loss of control.
Family psychology.
The novel's understanding of parents and adult children remains excellent.
Consumer culture.
Franzen anticipated many contemporary obsessions with lifestyle, status and buying solutions to emotional problems.
Depression and anxiety.
Gary's inability to understand why he is unhappy despite having every material advantage feels very contemporary.
Aging parents.
Alfred and Enid's dependence on their children is one of the novel's most enduring themes.
Some of the early-2000s technology, financial machinery and cultural references now feel distinctly period-specific.
The novel also occasionally feels like a book written at the beginning of the 21st century trying very hard to encompass everything happening in America at once.
The Corrections is not a perfect novel.
It is sometimes too long, occasionally too clever, and Franzen can be merciless toward his characters in ways that some readers find exhausting.
But its ambition is extraordinary.
It is simultaneously:
a family novel
a social satire
a comedy
a tragedy
a novel about aging
a novel about money
a novel about marriage
a novel about depression
and a portrait of America at the beginning of the 21st century.
Its greatest achievement is that the social criticism never completely overwhelms the human story.
Ultimately, The Corrections isn't really about correcting anything.
It is about the painful realization that your parents cannot become the parents you wish they had been, your children cannot become the children you imagined, and you cannot become an entirely different person simply by deciding to do so.
And yet people keep trying.
That is what makes the novel both funny and sad—and why, more than two decades after its publication, it remains one of the major American novels of its period.
Rating: 4½ / 5
Best for: readers who enjoy psychologically complex family novels such as Middlemarch, The Marriage Plot, The Bonfire of the Vanities, or The Nest—but who don't mind a long, sprawling book.
My verdict: A major novel, and probably Franzen's most complete achievement.