Announced September 24, 2001
About the Book
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 that, despite clear signs to the contrary, 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 over 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: to bring her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Stretching from the Midwest at mid-century 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 and deeply humane, it confirms that Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and American soul.
About The Author
Jonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981, he studied at the Freie Universitt in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In addition to winning a Whiting Writers' Award in 1988 and the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, he has been named one of "Twenty Writers for the 21st Century" by The New Yorker and one of the "Best Young American Novelists" by Granta.
Mr. Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (FSG, 1988) and Strong Motion (FSG, 1992) and is a frequent contributor to Harper's and The New Yorker (where portions of The Corrections have appeared). He lives in New York City.
Get more resources on The Corrections, an Oprah's Book Club selection.
View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
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 that, despite clear signs to the contrary, 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 over 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: to bring her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Stretching from the Midwest at mid-century 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 and deeply humane, it confirms that Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and American soul.
About The AuthorJonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981, he studied at the Freie Universitt in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In addition to winning a Whiting Writers' Award in 1988 and the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, he has been named one of "Twenty Writers for the 21st Century" by The New Yorker and one of the "Best Young American Novelists" by Granta.
Mr. Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (FSG, 1988) and Strong Motion (FSG, 1992) and is a frequent contributor to Harper's and The New Yorker (where portions of The Corrections have appeared). He lives in New York City.
Get more resources on The Corrections, an Oprah's Book Club selection.View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Published 09/24/2001
