The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century -- a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain on an affair with a married man -- or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
The author was profiled admiringly in THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, the novel chosen by Oprah. The audio team at Simon & Schuster presents this bestseller brilliantly. Dylan Baker acts deftly, playing every part--male and female, young and old--superbly. The sound is excellent; the abridgment leaves the narrative thread intact. Franzen is a NEW YORKER staffer, and this is a slice of life, albeit a thick slice, the pathology report on two generations of an American family. The text is studded with prose baubles. Two women working in a kitchen sound "like a large bee and a smaller bee trapped behind a window screen." This is serious fiction, meant to delineate our moral agonies. Expect to be transported, but don't expect to escape. B.H.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2002 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion. His fiction and nonfiction appear frequently in The New Yorker and Harper's, and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and The New Yorker. He lives in New York City.
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