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The Corrections
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The Corrections (2001) (edit title/settings)

by Jonathan Franzen (Author) (edit contributors)

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After almost 50 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 are all making catastrophes of their own lives. Enid however, has her heart set on one last family Christmas.

Summary edit see section history

As the aging patriarch slips into dementia, a Midwestern family prepares to gather for ‘one last Christmas’ in the parents' small home town of ‘St. Jude’ (The patron Saint of lost causes). Familial pathos and melodrama is writ large.

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “Alfred took pleasure in the imagination of chopping his hand off with a hatchet: of letting the transgressing limb know how deeply he was angry with it, how little he love it if it insisted on disobeying him. It brought a kind of ecstasy to imagine the first deep bite of the hatchet's blade in the bone and muscle of his offending wrist; but along with the ecstasy, right beside it, was an inclination to weep for this hand that was his, that he loved and wished the best for, that he'd known all its life.”
  • ““Take it easy”. The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St Jude would dare tell him to take it easy. On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom ‘easygoing’ was a compliment…. ‘take it easy’ was the watchword of these super friendly young men, the token of their over familiarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.””
  • “Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts…. Gary wished that all further migration <could> be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.”
  • “The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.”
  • ““Then she moved to New York and embarked on the long process of sleeping with every dishonest, casually sadistic, terminally uncommitted really gorgeous guy in the borough of Manhattan””
  • ““”Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia…, and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy.””
  • ““Interesting how eager he’s been to be alone, how hatefully clear he’d made this to everyone around him; and how, having finally closeted himself, he sat hoping that someone would come and disturb him. He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.””
  • ““On the second day in St Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it.””
  • ““The disappointment on Enid’s face was disproportionately large. It was an ancient disappointment with the refusal of the world in general and her children in particular to participate in her preferred enchantments.””
  • ““This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.””
  • “It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful.”
  • “"Food and pussy, fella," said the leader of the turds <...> "is what it all comes down to. Everything else, and I say this in all modesty, is pure shit."”
  • “Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.”
  • “The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.”
  • “"''The implications are disturbing, but there's no stopping this powerful new technology.' That could be the motto for our age, don't you think?"”
  • “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 this price for its 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.”
  • “There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.”
  • “The Universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before?
    Highlighted by 335 Kindle customers
  • What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.
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  • But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life,
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  • Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
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  • The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.
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  • They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.
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  • What made correction possible also doomed it.
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  • They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.
    Highlighted by 157 Kindle customers
  • 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 this price for its 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.
    Highlighted by 154 Kindle customers
  • gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he’d been sleeping since lunch. He’d had his nap and there would be no local news until five o’clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.
    Highlighted by 29 Kindle customers
Show all 28 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

Table of Contents edit see section history

St. Jude
The Failure
The More He Thought About It, the Angrier He Got
At Sea
The Generator
One Last Christmas
The Corrections

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in TIME Magazine Top 100 English-Language Novels. (community list)
This is book 24 of 100 in Top 100 Books That Defined The Noughties (Telegraph). (authoritative list)
This is book 74 of 1286 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)
This is book 3 of 10 in TIME Magazine Best of the Decade. (community list)
This book is in New York Times Bestsellers (Current). (authoritative list)
This is book 46 of 70 in Oprah's Book Club. (authoritative list)
This is book 5 of 11 in Publishers Weekly Bestselling Novels In 2001. (authoritative list)
This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 70 of 145 in Whitcoulls Top 100 (2011). (authoritative list)
This book is in Oprah's Book Club Pick. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Jonathan Franzen (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. George Guidall (Narrator)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Country: USA
Publication Date: September 2001
ISBN: 0-374-12998-3
Page Count: 568

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PS3556.R352
  • Dewey: 813

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Adults

Adults themes and content.

Movie Connections edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Servants of the Map: Stories
  • Everything You Know
  • Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin
  • Swag
  • Last Orders
  • The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
  • The Human Stain
  • Rabbit at Rest

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

   
  • The Chronicles of Narnia

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history

   
  • Prince Caspian

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