Short description
From the author of 'Freedom', a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes.
Long description
From the author of 'Freedom', a richly realistic and darkly hilarious masterpiece about a family breakdown in an age of easy fixes. After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity, and their children have long since fled for the catastrophes of their own lives. As Alfred's condition worsens and the Lamberts are forced to face their secrets and failures, Enid sets her heart on one last family Christmas. Bringing the old world of civic virtue and sexual inhibition into violent collision with the era of hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare and globalised greed, 'The Corrections' confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of the most brilliant interpreters of the American soul.
Review
'A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question: what life is for? And that is as much as anyone could ask.' Blake Morrison, Guardian 'Intelligent, compellingly readable, funny and above all generous spirited, it is a rare thing, a modern novel with both head and heart.' Daily Mail 'Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture.' Don DeLillo 'Impossible to dislike, an unpretentious page-turner.' Zadie Smith 'A major accomplishment.' Michael Cunningham 'For anyone who has ever found themselves guiltily yearning for an Anne Tyler while in the middle of an Updike or Wolfe. The Lamberts are utterly believable, and once they have all told their stories you can't help but sympathise with them. Be prepared to be moved.' Independent on Sunday 'Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike and Roth.' Evening Standard 'A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch.' Financial Times 'A genuine masterpiece, the first great American novel of the twenty-first century!A wisecracking, eloquent, heartbreaking beauty.' Elle ' The Corrections is a wonderful book. Every page simmers with wit, close observation and intelligence. Franzen has delivered as wounding and thoughtful an indictment of contemporary existence as it is possible to make.' John Burnside, Scotsman 'Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures that great fiction affords.' David Foster Wallace
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