Plot summary
The Corrections revolves around the dysfunctional Lambert family and their efforts to reconcile as they face personal crises and deep-rooted emotional struggles. The novel alternates between the perspectives of different family members throughout the late twentieth century, illuminating their individual lives and histories.
Alfred Lambert, the patriarch, is a retired railroad engineer who has Parkinson’s disease and dementia. His declining health becomes the catalyst for the family’s reunion. His wife, Enid, is obsessed with having one final "family Christmas" before Alfred’s condition worsens. Enid’s fixation on keeping up appearances and maintaining control over the family’s affairs often leads to tension with her children. [5]
The middle child, Chip, is an unemployed academic living in New York City following his firing due to a sexual relationship with a student. Living on borrowed money from his sister, Denise, Chip works obsessively on a screenplay, but finds no success or motivation to pay off his debts. Eventually, Chip takes a job from his girlfriend's estranged husband Gitanas, an affable but corrupt Lithuanian government official, later moving to Vilnius and working to defraud American investors over the Internet.
The elder son and oldest child, Gary, is a successful but increasingly depressive and alcoholic banker living in Philadelphia with his wife, Caroline, and their three young sons. When Enid attempts to persuade Gary to bring his family to St. Jude for Christmas, Caroline is reluctant, and turns Gary's sons against him and Enid, worsening his depressive tendencies. In return, Gary attempts to force his parents to move to Philadelphia so that Alfred may undergo an experimental neurological treatment that he and Denise learn about.
Also living in Philadelphia, their youngest child Denise finds growing success as an executive chef despite Enid's disapproval, and is commissioned to open a new restaurant. Simultaneously impulsive and a workaholic, Denise begins affairs with both her boss and his wife, and though the restaurant is successful, she is fired when the affairs are uncovered. Flashbacks to her childhood show her responding to her repressed upbringing by beginning an affair with one of her father's subordinates, a married railroad signals worker.
As Alfred's condition worsens, Enid attempts to manipulate all of her children into going to St. Jude for Christmas, with increasing desperation. Initially only Gary (without his wife or children) and Denise are present, while Chip is delayed by a violent political conflict in Lithuania, eventually arriving late after being attacked and robbed of all his savings. Denise inadvertently discovers that her father had known of her teenaged affair with his subordinate, and had kept his knowledge a secret to protect her privacy, at great personal cost. After a disastrous Christmas morning together, the three children are dismayed by their father's condition, and Alfred is finally moved into a nursing home.
Following the Christmas gathering, Chip stays in the Midwest, eventually starting a family with Alfred's doctor. Denise moves away from Philadelphia, and while Gary undergoes no drastic changes, Enid's newfound freedom from her husband causes her to be happier and less critical of her children's lives.
Reception
Critical Reviews
According to Book Marks, based on American publications, the book received a "positive" consensus, derived from thirteen critic reviews: six "rave," four "positive," and three "mixed." [6]
The Daily Telegraph compiled reviews from multiple publications using a rating scale: "Love It," "Pretty Good," "Ok," and "Rubbish." Reviews from The Guardian , The Times , The Observer , The Sunday Times , and The Independent On Sunday categorized the novel under "Love It." The Sunday Telegraph and New Statesman rated it "Pretty Good," while The Independent , The Spectator , and Times Literary Supplement classified it as "Ok." [7] [8]
Globally, Complete Review noted a lack of consensus, summarizing that "all grant [Franzen] is a gifted writer. Most are very enthusiastic, some positively enraptured." [9]
Critic John Leonard praised the novel’s exploration of the generation gap and intergenerational dynamics, stating it reminds readers "why you read serious fiction in the first place." [10]
Awards and Recognition
The Corrections won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction, [1] the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, [11] as well as the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award.
In 2005, The Corrections was included in TIME magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. [12]
In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis called it "one of the three great books of my generation." [13] In 2009, the website The Millions polled 48 writers, critics, and editors, including Joshua Ferris, Sam Anderson, and Lorin Stein; [14] the panel voted The Corrections the best novel since 2000 "by a landslide." [15]
The novel was selected for Oprah's Book Club in 2001. However, Franzen publicly expressed ambivalence about the selection, criticizing its association with what he viewed as "schmaltzy" books. As a result, Oprah Winfrey rescinded his invitation to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show . [16]
Entertainment Weekly included The Corrections in its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, stating, "Forget all the Oprah hoo-ha: Franzen's 2001 doorstop of a domestic drama teaches that, yes, you can go home again. But you might not want to." [17]
Style and interpretations
With The Corrections, Franzen transitioned from the postmodernism of his earlier novels toward literary realism. [18] In an interview with novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb , Franzen reflected on this stylistic shift, stating, "Simply to write a book that wasn't dressed up in a swashbuckling, Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult." [19]
Critics have noted strong parallels between Franzen's childhood in St. Louis and the novel’s setting. [20] However, Franzen has emphasized that the work is not autobiographical. [21] He explained in an interview that "the most important experience of my life ... is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had. I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves. I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it, that whole American experience they had—[is] part of me. One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience, to give it real life and form." [22]
The novel explores themes such as the multi-generational transmission of family dysfunction [23] and the excesses of modern consumerism. [24] Each of the characters "embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era." [25]
Franzen has acknowledged that writing The Corrections influenced his own perspective. He noted in 2002 that the process led him "away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer." [26]
In a Newsweek feature on American culture during the George W. Bush administration, Jennie Yabroff observed that despite being released less than a year into Bush's presidency and before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections "anticipates almost eerily the major concerns of the next seven years." [27] She argued that the novel reflects an underlying apprehension and disquiet that characterized post-9/11 America, suggesting that these anxieties predated the attacks. Yabroff also posited that the controversy with Oprah, which led to Franzen being labeled an "elitist," foreshadowed a rising anti-intellectual strain in American culture. According to her, The Corrections stands apart from later works on similar themes because, unlike its successors, it does not become "hamstrung by the 9/11 problem" that preoccupied Bush-era novels by authors such as Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, and Jonathan Safran Foer. [27]
Adaptations
Film
In August 2001, producer Scott Rudin optioned the film rights to The Corrections for Paramount Pictures. [28] The rights still have not yet been turned into a completed film. [29]
In 2002, the film was said to be in pre-production, with Stephen Daldry attached to direct and dramatist David Hare working on the screenplay. [30] In October 2002, Franzen gave Entertainment Weekly a wish list for the cast of the film, saying, "If they told me Gene Hackman was going to do Alfred, I would be delighted. If they told me they had cast Cate Blanchett as [Alfred's daughter] Denise, I would be jumping up and down, even though officially I don't care what they do with the movie." [31]
In January 2005, Variety announced that, with Daldry presumably off the project, Robert Zemeckis was developing Hare's script "with an eye toward directing." [32] In August 2005, Variety confirmed that the director would be helming The Corrections. [33] Around this time, it was rumored that the cast would include Judi Dench as the family matriarch Enid, along with Brad Pitt, Tim Robbins and Naomi Watts as her three children. [34] In January 2007, Variety wrote that Hare was still at work on the film's screenplay. [35]
In September 2011, it was announced that Rudin and the screenwriter and director Noah Baumbach were preparing The Corrections as a "drama series project," to potentially co-star Anthony Hopkins and air on HBO. Baumbach and Franzen collaborated on the screenplay, which Baumbach would direct. In 2011, it was reported that Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest would star in the HBO adaptation. In November 2011, it was confirmed that Ewan McGregor had joined the cast. [36] In a March 7, 2012, interview, McGregor confirmed that work on the film was "about a week" in and noted that both Dianne Wiest and Maggie Gyllenhaal were among the cast members. [37] But on May 1, 2012, HBO decided not to pick up the pilot for a full series. [38]
