Life is but a Series of Corrections
My review on Amazon
The Lamberts are an American family dealing with the universal themes of aging and its indignities, capitalism and its diseases, sexuality and its complications, success and its burdens, depression and its loneliness, family and its expectations and love and its disappointments.
The characters are intense, raw and very very real. To the sensitive reader, the Lamberts are sad and harsh and disappointing. To the critical reader, they are all of that and much more. Whatever they are or however they're perceived, the Lamberts are one midwestern family you won't soon forget.
Jonathan Franzen writes beautiful prose. He pushes words beyond their boundaries to draw interesting images of human experiences. You'll definitely appreciate his writing when you read the book a second time.
The book, to me, is about life as a series of successive corrections: mental corrections, attitude corrections, language corrections, behavioral corrections, emotional corrections, moral corrections and economics corrections. It's the endles cycle of making choices, regretting them and correcting them with new choices that you end up regretting and so forth; It's a cycle that's become synonymous with "growth" and "living."
The complicated and achingly familiar lives of the Lamberts typify that cycle.
I saw a little bit of myself in the Lamberts: in Alfred's sternness, Enid's hopefulness, Chip's uselessness, Gary's madness, and Denise's humanness. Their combined failures and triumphs are epic yet common and their individualism is sincere. The Lamberts are reflections of people we know, including ourselves. Jonathan Franzen did a great job giving each character a distinctive voice and a palpable dysfunction.
When I first read this book six years ago, I thought it was highbrow literature at its best, although I thought the writing at times ostentatious and needlessly protracted. When I picked up the book again this Holiday Season (since the story culminates with a family Christmas get-together,) I fell in love with Franzen's unusual writing style and the fleshed out auxiliary characters whom I neglected to appreciate on my first reading. I really enjoyed reading The Corrections this time around. Although the story is unapologetically raw and deeply sad, it makes a great Christmas read.
I'm looking forward to the new Jonathan Franzen work of fiction and to the theatrical treatment of this story due for release in 2011.
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