The Corrections

⚖The case for it

Alfred’s Parkinson’s is the material readers say stays with them, the hallucination passages in particular, a mind coming apart rendered from inside it. Five rotating viewpoints get you far enough into the Lamberts that readers end up proprietary about them: “I know the Lamberts, I am intimate with them.” The satire is funny and painful in the same sentence, and Franzen never softens anyone to make them easier company. Chip’s Lithuanian scheme is where the pressure lifts and the book turns farce. Readers call it “the supreme novel about dysfunctional families,” and warn that it “may remind you how angry family members make you.” Everything converges on the Christmas Enid has spent the novel arranging.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Not one of the five Lamberts is anyone you would want an evening with, and readers put it as “neurotic whiners, stretching from Midwest to Northeast for 653 pages.” Some admit they kept going because “the more miserable their lives got, the more enjoyment I took.” The Lithuania plot lands as “a stupid farce about post-Soviet Lithuania and gangsters,” thinner than the domestic material around it and glib about the country itself. Women readers keep returning to the same objection: “I hated especially how he wrote women.” The sentences, clause piled on clause through dashes and semicolons, strike detractors as “a seemingly unending stream of word vomit.”

— the honest librarian

12h

honest hours

17

sittings