The Corrections - Softcover

·'Jonathan Franzen has written a remarkable novel about the family in the modern world, and in the world that has just left us. It pulls off its ambition with rare success – with wit and sympathy and without obtrusive writerly self-consciousness. You believe in the people inside it, their lives and their fate. A wonderful, illuminating book.'
Ian Jack, editor of Granta

· 'Full of understatement and overreaction, irony and anger, anthropology and surrealism, glut and glee The Corrections is the whole package...You will laugh, wince, groan weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place.'
New York Review of Books

The winner of THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, the New York Times No.1 Bestseller and the worldwide literary sensation, The Corrections has established itself as a truly great American novel.

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 of 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 healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it announces Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.