Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Pros: Universal themes such as family, pain, celebration, success, divorce and failure

Cons: Long descriptions

The Bottom Line: An interesting book about an average, middle-class American family with all kinds of dirty laundry, fury, humor, division and unhappiness.

Review: If Jonathan Franzen's two previous novels brought him a lot of critical acclaim, without any doubt, The Corrections placed him on the literary map. In fact, he is the well-known and talented author of The Twenty-Seventh City" and...

Pros: Engaging, and skillfully constructed story with memorable characters.

Cons: Entirely too long, Franzen loves to listen to himself write.

The Bottom Line: A remarkably complex and dark novel that is at once a literary achievement to behold and an exhausting effort to read.

Review: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is so painstakingly detailed, so meticulously crafted, and absurdly complex that it almost defies analysis. The task of writing such a novel seems so daunting that he must not have known what he had gotten himself...

Pros: Smart, funny, literate, accessible

Cons: Uneven, exhausting, too self-conscious

The Bottom Line: Read it and weep: If we really left it to Beaver, is this how far the nuclear family has crumbled? Do the sons of the fathers really know best?

Review:
Let?s start with the fresh legend of The Corrections: author Jonathan Franzen wrote part of the Bible-sized novel while sitting in a room with soundproof walls and double-paned windows. Each day he arrived at the writing room, he would...

Pros: Extremely well-written, pages turn easily.

Cons: Cynical view of contemporary society.

The Bottom Line: In spite of a somewhat pessimistic view of the world, this novel is well-written and enjoyable.

Review: Jonathan Franzen s The Corrections is a skillfully conceived and adeptly written novel about a family, the Lambert s, who are navigating the new realities of modern society with mixed success. The patriarch and the matriarch, Alfred and Enid, still...

Pros: A moving, believable and engaging story of an interesting family

Cons: Doesn't give the reader the happy scooby-doo ending they might want

The Bottom Line: This is certainly a very worthy read. You do gain any new tools for living, or but you feel like you were told the full story, warts and all.

Review: It took me several days and much self coercion to get into this book. And what was especially disconcerting was that parts of it were excerpted in The New Yorker awhile ago, so I began to wonder if I had read it before. However, once I was into it,...