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The Lambert family isn't doing well. Alfred has Parkinson's disease and a bad case of alienation from his wife, Enid. Gary is a banker with a heart of steel. Chip is in New York City trying to find himself, but losing the battle. And Denise is stuck in a destructive affair with a married man. Enid is hoping to get away with Alfred for a long-postponed cruise, but as things start to spiral out of control the Lamberts must examine where they are, where they have been, and what exactly it means to be a family in the latter half of the 20th century.

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.

"If it can be said that it unwittingly enacts a fine argument against the viability of a certain kind of social novel, it must also be said that it purposively makes a fine case for the vivacity of another kind of book, the novel of character....We are doomed because humans always flow over their targets; their souls are gratuitous and busy, congested with aspiration and desire. This is the dark theme of Franzen's novel, this is its truest touch. All the rest is "social news" and may be turned off, as it deserves." James Wood

"If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas. In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does....As in his other novels, Franzen blends...personal dramas with expert technical cartwheels and savage commentary on larger social issues, such as the imbecility of laissez-faire parenting and the farcical nature of U.S.-Third World relations. The result is a book made of equal parts fury and humor, one that takes a dry-eyed look at our culture, at our pains and insecurities, while offering hope that, occasionally at least, we can reach some kind of understanding. This is, simply, a masterpiece."

"Ferociously detailed, gratifyingly mind-expanding, and daringly complex and unhurried, New Yorker writer Franzen's third and best-yet novel aligns the spectacular dysfunctions of one Midwest family with the explosive malfunctions of society-at-large....Heir in scope and spirit to the great nineteenth-century novelists, Franzen is also kin to Stanley Elkin with his caustic humor, satiric imagination, and free-flowing empathy as he mocks the absurdity and brutality of consumer culture. At once miniaturistic and panoramic, Franzen's prodigious comedic saga renders family life on an epic scale and captures the decadence of the dot-com era. Each cleverly choreographed fiasco stands as a correction to the delusions that precipitated it, and each step back from the brink of catastrophe becomes a move toward hope, integrity, and love."

"If you don't end up liking each one of Franzen's people, you probably just don't like people. And by the way, assuming the book really does speak to our condition, it doesn't pretend to know more about it than we do....No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as The Corrections seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read. But I guess that is everything we want in a novel — except, when it's rocking along, for it never to be over." David Gates

"Though often self-indulgent and long-winded, the novel leaves the reader with both a devastating family portrait and a harrowing portrait of America in the late 1990's....Clearly Mr. Franzen's novel would have benefited enormously from a strict editing job....An air of self-importance hovers over some of the novel's more melodramatic scenes, and the unsavory antics of the Lamberts often exude a self-conscious whiff of sociological import. All in all, however, The Corrections remains a remarkably poised performance....And while the story line is propelled by several suspenseful questions...the real tension...stems from the characters' emotional dramas....By turns funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting, The Corrections not only shows us two generations of an American family struggling to make sense of their lives, but also cracks open a window on a sullen country lurching its way toward the millennium." Michiko Kakutani

"...THE CORRECTIONS...recalls no novel so much as John Cheever's THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL. THE CORRECTIONS is just as funny and sad and smart as that masterpiece, and Franzen, like Cheever, reminds us of the timelessness of human folly."
-- Stewart O'Nan

"If Franzen's handling of the book's difficult narrative balance between satire and realism is not always graceful, the Lambert family itself is prodigiously alive in either setting. By the midway point of THE CORRECTIONS I had stopped regarding its members as fictional characters and thought of them as people I knew--awkward, difficult and self-destructive people, to be sure. I wondered what trouble they were getting into when I wasn't around, and what would become of them after I left their world."
-- Andrew O'Hehir

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 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 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.