by Theresa Yuan
Staff Writer

Six-Word Summary: Dysfunctional Family Faces Christmas Dinner, Dementia

Jonathan Franzen is 51 years old, and he’s already been tagged as the next Great American Novelist. His latest novel Freedom is generating a lot of buzz, but during this sugar-cookies and winter-frost time of year, The Corrections (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $16.00), his ambitious novel about a dysfunctional family gathered for Christmas, becomes all the more relevant.

The Corrections is an intensive, under-the-microscope study of elderly couple Enid and Alfred Lambert and their three estranged children. It is written with such high-powered language that even the mediocre becomes interesting under Franzen’s pen.

The book opens in St. Jude, a town in the Midwest, where Enid uses a potent combination of obligation, guilt, and familial nostalgia to demand a family reunion. But her brood has run in various opposite directions away from home.

Oldest son Gary has his own family to worry about in addition to that vague whiff of depression in the air.

Chip, as the second oldest son, is dodging regular parental visits and has finally managed to find a job – in Lithuania, halfway across the world.

The youngest Lambert daughter, Denise, found success as a chef but is rumored to be involved with her employer. The truth is far more complicated.

As for Enid and Alfred, their days are spent in the strangely stressful solitude of retirement. Enid longs for excitement; she’s planned a cruise and that final family dinner. Alfred spends all day in the basement amongst strange crickets and a pervading smell of urine. And there’s also the little issue of Alfred slowly sinking into dementia.

Franzen’s five main characters are each flawed but in familiar ways. Enid’s pettiness and her selfishness are often revealed, but without any condemnation. Her Pleasurelines Cruise is one long delusional trip. Enid dines with sophisticated European tourists, then dodges back to her Level 2 cabin where her husband is vomiting and wetting his pants. Enid is never punished for her flaws. Nor is she praised.

Similarly, Chip continues to let down the family by avoiding get-togethers (even when they take place in his apartment). But the Lamberts nevertheless eagerly await his arrival from Lithuania on Christmas Eve.

Franzen’s lens focuses on every character without judgment, much like parents accept their children’s shortcomings and vice versa.

The Correction‘s best feature, apart from its storyline, is its intricate writing style. Here’s a book not afraid of sentences too long and too cerebral to be comprehended by the reader. Franzen consistently deviates from normal sentence structure when emotion overtakes a character or a point must be made. “You just sit. In the sun. And relax, relax, relax,” says Enid, thinking of her cruise.

Still, unrealistic scenarios are uncomfortably numerous in The Corrections. How likely is it that Chip’s former lover’s formerly missing husband Gitanas suddenly comes back on the scene to offer Chip a job in Lithuania? How realistic is Gary’s wife Caroline, who seems willing to “split up over a trip to St. Jude”, as Gary exclaims incredulously one night? And what about an otherwise bizarre scene where Chip, fearing his parents’ wrath at his otherwise sloppy lifestyle, shoplifts a large fish?

If The Correction‘s selling point is everyday people in ordinary situations, character exaggerations and too-perfect coincidences don’t need to pepper the pages.

Deviations from reality aside, The Corrections is an immensely mesmerizing family story written with skill. So much is said in the single sentence “But Enid refused, on principle, to give him $4.96”; to read The Corrections is to see first-hand Franzen’s love affair with words.

This holiday season, The Corrections could be the perfect gift for that favorite idiosyncratic sibling. Or it could be a great book to read yourself, perhaps on a long plane ride home to your own family get-togethers this month. Either way, Franzen’s portrait of a family is so spot-on, you’ll be surprised to see some of your own clan in every page.