The Corrections
The Lambert family is falling apart, and so is the 20th century. Franzen's 2001 novel revived the social novel in America at a moment when critics had declared it dead. Each family member gets their own register of failure. Won the National Book Award, landed on the cover of TIME, ignited a public argument about literary ambition that still hasn't ended.
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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
