Upon a rereaading, I’m fascinated by how many things Franzen anticipated about the decade to come.

Gary the banker was an especially well-drawn character, and Enid’s compulsion about Christmas, cruises, and designer drugs felt directly taken from life.

In some ways, there’s a freshness to this novel that Freedom doesn’t have. However, the construction of Freedom is more artful and the book hangs together better.

I read The Corrections more slowly the second time through and enjoyed each section thoroughly.

What I think makes this book amazing is that is only about a rather ordinary family, a character portrait of a father at the end of his life, his wife and his three adult children. Yet it remains absolutely engrossing from beginning to end. Would we find our own families as fascinating if we were allowed into every nook and cranny of their lives, into their most secret thoughts? Franzen has flayed open each member of the Lambert family and shown us everything with no flinching, from insanity and death and wasted lives to failures of marriages, careers and love affairs—all the messy stuff that gets to the heart of what it means to be human. As Franzen sums it up: “The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid the price for the privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.”

Despite all that, I wouldn’t say that The Corrections is a downer. It mirrors life in that way, too: sometimes melancholy or depressing, some points of utter despair and other spikes of hope, but mostly just moving on.

This book is so depressing. The way the charecters interact, the little tradgedies of every life… and especially the end. I didn’t enjoy the book, and I’m not sold on all of the stylistic points, but it is very effective in making you squirm with annoyance and sorrow.

An interesting book to read, and definitely worth reading, although (strangely enough), I’m not sure I really “liked” it. The writing is beautifully crafted, and the characters are well-developed. Trouble is, almost none of them are actually likeable (this, for me, is usually a big stumbling block for me in terms of enjoying a novel. If there’s no one I can like, I’m usually not very happy). Somehow I managed to get through this, though – as one earlier reviewer said, the author shows both great contempt and great tenderness for his characters. That’s it exactly. I’ll give this one 7/10.

I know a ton of people loved this novel, but from the very beginning, I was distracted by the style of writing. It was so pompous, I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ll try again some other time.

“The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions.”

“If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hard-wired genetic stake in their welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents.”

A terrific portrayal of the patriarch, matriarch, and 3 grown children of an upwardly-mobile Midwestern family. I’ve never seen an author express so much contempt and yet so much tenderness for his characters – just as the characters have such contempt and tenderness for each other. Ridiculously perceptive.

I only read this because I found it for a buck at a yard sale … well, that and the fact that everyone I know who read it really liked it ;)

I didn’t think I’d be able to relate to it at all judging from the blurb and summary, but I was. Franzen did a terrific job with all his characters.

This is an amazingly written, very dark, insightful and, occasionally extremely funny look at a modern American family. “Tragedy rewritten as farce” as one character puts it. Highly recommended.

Awesome work of literature.

likely the best work of fiction i’ve read in the past five years. hilarious, absorbing and deeply moving. so skillfully written it hurts. recommended without reservation.

not sure what i think yet… is it mocking postmodernism or critiquing society? it’s a tough call for me so far

I get to count required reading for my popular lit class, because dammit, if it’s popular, and if Oprah likes it, it has to count for something.

Not my usual kind of thing, but I’m reading it because my dad gave it to me – he thought it was good, and so did Marg from my writers group. So…the only thing wrong with it thus far is that it’s too heavy to drag on the train to work every day!

OK, that’s it. I’ve given up…it’s just too long and has dragged on too long. I am about two thirds of the way through and it just keeps drivelling on with no end in sight. It is not often that I don’t finish something, but I have to consider myself beaten.