You know all those things that we never stop carrying inside us but we'd rather die than let them out into the world? Those dialogues we keep having with the little voices inside our heads that we refuse to admit even to ourselves that they exist? That's exactly what The Corrections is about. Jonathan Franzen writes about a typical american family that could be yours or mine since, nowadays, there isn't much difference between the american and the non-american families of the "western" world, thank Hollywood.

Apart from one or two parts in the book which felt a bit like a drag (just a bit, though), I can't really find anything wrong in Franzen's ability to build characters. All five of them seem like they don't belong in the pages of a book, but rather in a house down the road or a room down the hall, for that matter. In real life, our actions take a lot of work to make sense in terms of traumas and psychological explanations. In The Corrections, Franzen makes difficult matters look easy to explain. Easy but by no means cheap or without cost. And when the characters are so realistic, the cost is transferred directly to the reader.

This is pretty much why I loved it, although I think it's understandable why it has so many negative reviews.

Υ.Γ.: Ενώ δεν τη λες κακή τη μετάφραση σε γενικές γραμμές, με κάτι κόλπα του τύπου κλίση των ονομάτων (πχ της Τζούλιας) και εκφράσεις του στυλ "ένα μεγάλο τανκς", ο μετα��ραστής με έκανε να απορώ σε αρκετά σημεία.

I'm writing this review in response to Kate's review, which tore it up with a lot of intelligent points. I feel the need to respond because I loved this book, and even re-read it about a year ago.

One point Kate makes is that this book is full of rotten characters and some of them don't stand up off the page. (My mother's main complaint, too, was that the characters weren't nice.) I'd agree that there are a couple characters who are flimsy (mainly, SPOILER, the couple Denise has her thing with), but the argument about the rotten characters, perhaps it's a personal thing -- I just don't care. The rotten attributes of the people, I thought, didn't exist to make them rotten as much as to show the secret lives these characters were living, the flaws in need of "correction." (Correction is certainly a heavily played theme, but Franzen goes about it addressing so many different parts of personal and public life that I find it hard to hold this interlacing against the novel.) Hm, the way that last sentence is written seems to imply Franzen is formulaic, which I don't mean to say. I mean to say Franzen is a master at craft. And again on the "rotten characters" point -- maybe I'm a pessimist, but I think all people have ugly things inside. And I think this is what makes us human.

The main thing I love about this novel, the redeeming quality I would like to use as a shield, is the author's mastery of psychic distance and perspective. Using third person, Franzen manages to craft the interior drives, passions, and thoughts of Chip, Denise, and Gary with complete distinction. I really had the sense that these were three different people, and for an author to do that in different books, much less ONE book, is brilliance (think of all the oeuvres jammed with main characters who are all stale, redressed versions of one another). At the time I read it, I honestly felt the only time I'd seen different perspectives drawn so well was between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.

Another thing I like about this book is the arc. Again, craft, sure, but can't I care about the craft? Compared to books of similar lengths, this book has both the parabolic & the exponential. I remember that even though I had already read the part about (SPOILER AGAIN KINDA) the father's discovery on the work bench in the basement in the New Yorker first, when it showed up in the novel there was enough compression to make me weep.

Yetenekli ve duyarlı bir yazarmış Franzen. Herkes için garip bir muamma teşkil eden aileyi aile bireylerinin tek tek birbirleri ile olan ilişkileri ve kendi hayat tercihleri üzerinden harika bir şekilde anlatmış. Dil ustalığı kendisine hayran bırakırken bazı olaylar insanın burnunu sızlatıcak cinste ağırdı diyebilirim.

An Opportunity to Make A Few Corrections

I read “The Corrections” pre-Good Reads and originally rated it four stars.

I wanted to re-read (and review) it, before starting “Freedom”.

I originally dropped it a star because I thought there was something unsatisfying about the whole Lithuanian adventure.

Perhaps, when I re-read it, I wouldn’t object to it as much and I could improve my rating.

Having just finished it, I could probably add a half-star, but I’m not ready to give it five.

Second time around, the Vilnius section didn’t grate as much, partly because it was far shorter and more innocuous than I recalled.

However, the second reading helped me to work out what stopped it being a five star effort for me.

The First Draft

Franzen’s writing is easy to read.

He’s a skilful writer, he knows his chops.

His style is both fluent and fluid. You can dip in for a short session and suddenly find that you’ve read 50 to 70 pages pretty effortlessly.

He accumulates detail, but he points you confidently in a direction, even if you don’t know what your destination will be.

He seems to have put his prattishness behind him now, so it’s possible to appreciate his writing without peering darkly through the lens of the Oprah spectacle.

Because he writes in a realist manner, I think that whether or not you will enjoy his novel depends on whether you relate to his subject matter and his characters.

“The Corrections” is primarily concerned with the dynamics of a family.

I have never been a fan of family sagas, so I was initially apprehensive.

Also, when I first read it, I was over-exposed to film about dysfunctional families and the social problems they generate.

However, I don’t see the Lamberts as dysfunctional so much as typical of the thermodynamics that can be present in three relatively ambitious and driven generations in the 21st century.

I’d venture to say that they’re more normal than abnormal.

They don't commit any grievous social crimes, although they do a lot of emotional damage internally.


Punch Lines

Stylistically, the novel is written in the third person.

This allowed Franzen to drop the reader, like a fly on a wall, into a number of different homes and rooms in homes.

From this vantage point, we’re able to observe numerous family members, not only externally but internally as well.

The only negative thing I want to say about this is that, what Franzen dedicated 566 pages to, I think someone like Raymond Carver could have done in 166 pages.

When Carver writes, we ascertain his meaning and intent by inference from the skeletal facts and action on the page.

Franzen leaves little to inference. Everything is spelt out. Meticulously and elegantly, to give him due credit.

He doesn’t pull any punches, but equally he signals all of his punches along the way.

This is the one reservation I have about his style.

There is a sense in which he is a perceptive commentator and essayist, at the expense of being a truly great technical novelist.

Time and time again, I found that he layered detail and content on the page by telling us about it rather than creating the illusion that it was happening in front of our eyes and ears.

There is a lot of back story, and not enough front story.


Interior Design

There isn’t a lot of action, at least externally.

The action is largely interior and individual.

Little is revealed through the interaction of the characters.

Most of it is revealed by way of contemplation or recollection.

The personal tensions that are the focus of the plot end up being in your head, rather than in your face.

While I found it all interesting, I didn’t find it exciting.

I can therefore understand why a large proportion of general readers would find it either too intimidating to start or too boring to finish.

To this extent, you can understand why Franzen was concerned that, because of Oprah’s endorsement, many people would buy the book, without reading or enjoying it.

They weren’t really the readers that Franzen had in mind when he wrote it.

Perhaps, he would have written a different book if he wanted them to read it.

Instead, he wrote for an audience of readers a lot more like himself in temperament.

This isn’t meant to suggest that he was arrogant, only that he didn’t want to disappoint an audience he wasn’t trying to satisfy in the first place.

The Blue Chair

The patriarch of the Lambert family is Alfred, a retired railway engineer and part-time bio-tech inventor.

His wife, Enid, calls him Al. To his three children, he’s obviously “Dad”.

Yet, Franzen constantly refers to him as Alfred, even though he doesn’t come across as pretentious or affected in any way.

You get the impression that Alfred’s old-fashioned rigidity starts with his name and works down.

Whereas, in the hands of Carver, I’m pretty confident that he would have been an abbreviated Al or Fred or a contracted “Lambo” or a work-derived nickname.

We soon learn that Alfred has a great blue chair that takes pride of place.

It’s described as overstuffed and “vaguely gubernatorial”, but most importantly it “was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without Enid’s approval”.

It has great metaphorical potential, although uncharacteristically it doesn’t really get a mention after page nine, even though it features on the cover of some editions of the novel.

Still, it hints that, within the Lambert family, we have both a patriarch and a matriarch and occasionally the two don’t see eye to eye.

Their differences might be great or small, but they are embodied in the Blue Chair.

A Metaphor Explored

One of the reasons I rate “The Corrections” so highly is that it is an extended exploration of the “correction” metaphor.

Yet, at the same time, the ultimate reason I have dropped it a half- to a full-star is that it never strays very far from a disciplined, even mechanical, revelation of its significance.

I feel hypocritical about this, because one role of a reviewer or critic is to detect these metaphors and elaborate on them.

In the case of Franzen, the role is much easier to perform, because he leaves verbal sign posts or easter eggs the whole way through the text.

Without using Powerpoint, he tells you what he is going to say, he says it, and he reminds you that he has said it.

Normally, we would treat this as consummate communication.

In the case of a novel, it leaves nothing to the imagination, it leaves no mystery, it leaves little to be detected by the reader on their own.

It would be like a crime novel where you knew everything about the crime from the beginning (who, how, when, why), except where the criminal was hiding (where).

The Corrections

So, what do “the corrections” mean?

A correction implies that something is “wrong” or “broken” or isn't “working”, and therefore needs to be fixed or remedied or “corrected”.

Throughout the novel, there are references to physical objects that have been kept, even though they don’t work anymore or need to be fixed.

They have been retained, when someone else, some other family, might have “thrown them away” or got a replacement the moment it was determined to be useless or obsolete.

Alfred would once have had the "will to fix" them, but now he is tired and things go unfixed or uncorrected.

This might suggest that there has been a recent breakdown in Alfred's authority, but I don't get the impression that he has had much authority within the family for a long time.

In the last chapter, there is also a reference to the need for a correction of a “bubble” in an overheated economy.

Investors have blindly expected conditions and values to improve perpetually, but every now and again there must be a correction, a reality check where once there was a dividend cheque.

However, when the economic correction arrives, it is "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."

Ultimately, the metaphor most overtly concerns the state of the characters' relationships.

Indeed, the novel as a whole is Franzen's State of Relations Address.

In their own way, there have been life-long leakages of value in the family's internal relationships that need to be addressed.

Without being overtly dysfunctional, we can perpetuate relationships even though they are flawed or defective or unsatisfying.

It’s much easier to abandon a relationship (to sell down a non-performing or troublesome stock) when it doesn’t involve a family member.

It’s harder, if not impossible, to abandon or negate a parent/child or sibling to sibling relationship.

In a sexual relationship, you can get the thorn out of your foot.

In a family relationship, sometimes, you can’t get rid of the thorn without losing your foot.

Spousal relationships hover in between the two, depending on whether there are children involved.

Either way, within a family, you can't usually just walk away.

You have to "correct" the relationship or learn to live with the thorn in your foot.

A Chip Separated from the Old Block

When we’re first introduced to the term “correction”, we meet the middle child, Chip, the "alternative sibling" who has dropped out of the world of "conventional expectations", a would-be post-modernist academic, script writer and left-wing libertine.

He might be the “intelligent son”, the "intellectual son", but Chip is still a "comic fool", the protagonist in a farce of his own creation.

Chip forensically analyses his parents’ relationship and decides that his life will “correct” all of their personal failings.

Where they are passive, conservative and straight-laced, he will be active, radical and open-minded.

Franzen doesn’t suggest that this choice is intrinsically wrong, only that Chip makes a bit of a mess of it.

To this extent, the novel sees Chip correct himself and his relationship with his parents and siblings, he becomes "a steady son, a trustworthy brother".

The Straight Option

The oldest child, Gary, is a fund manager, experienced in the ways of business and investment.

He appears to be the successful child, but the visage conceals an unhappiness and dissatisfaction with a more conventional life, so much so that he probably suffers from depression.

Gary is the least resolved of the siblings in the novel.

At the end, he remains unreconciled with his parents and siblings, even if he has achieved a compromise of sorts in the conflict with his wife and children.

The Bent Option

The youngest child and only daughter, Denise, is in many ways the most interesting character.

Some have reacted adversely to her as a shrill harpy.

In Enid’s eyes, she has failed, because she hasn’t settled down, married the love of her life and had children.

Instead, she is a talented chef, uncertain about what she wants personally and sexually.

Denise remains open to different options, only she still hasn’t found what she’s looking for, largely because she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

Nevertheless, within the family, she is a major factor in the resolution and correction of the problems.

Families First

Franzen most identifies with the children (who are of a similar age), yet there is a sense in which he has the greatest sympathy for Alfred and Enid.

Both parents are children of an earlier generation that was given little choice in how it lived life and raised families.

The children, in contrast, have suffered from an excess of choice and the lack of a moral compass as they made their own choices.

Unfortunately, Alfred has the least opportunity to correct his own behavior, because he is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.

On the other hand, Enid, despite the failure of her dream to have one last perfect Christmas together, liberates herself and is able to correct (and resurrect) her own life at last, albeit alone.

She is reconciled with, at least, Chip and Denise, and there is a sense in which she will also make things happen with Gary and his family.

Families Last

The plot and its resolution don’t ultimately suggest that there is any perfect family.

Families consist of individuals who all have their own needs and expectations and who all push and pull in their own directions.

The thing is that different people have different expectations, and expectations create responsibilities and obligations and burdens.

If everybody performs their designated role, does their bit, pulls their weight, plays their part, then compliance, reliability and success in turn give rise to a family culture of reliance, confidence and trust.

If things don't "work out", there is a risk of disappointment, a risk of opting out, non-compliance, problems, mistakes, failure and "wrongness" that lead to coercion, anxiety, ostracisation, resentment, blame, guilt and the need to "endure" each other.

There is no such thing as a perfect family.

There can only be good families.

A good family is not one that can avoid mistakes and failure, but one that can embrace apologies and forgiveness as a timely response to disappointed expectations.

This is the heart of “The Corrections”.

There are no car chases, nobody gets shot, nobody goes to prison (or a correctional facility), nobody gets bankrupted, nobody O.D.’s, nobody gets pregnant, nobody even gets divorced.

Yet, somehow, Franzen manages to nail 21st century families and by doing so he nails 21st century society, because, since the beginning of time, families have been at the heart of society.

You cannot have a healthy society without healthy families.

It might be obvious, but it needs to be stated, even if at times Franzen states it too obviously.

I don't know why I read this again. I took it out of my bookshelf, felt the heft of it, opened it to page one, and fell in. I was totally hooked by the second paragraph, more specifically, when I got to the word "gerontocratic." What a perfect, perfect word for the meaning Franzen wanted there. This isn't beautiful writing, but it's perfect writing. The absolute attention to the meanings of these words, sentence by sentence, adds up to a perfect whole. It's not the work of a singular artist. It's the work of a singular artisan. It's not the guy who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's the guy who made the chapel. I know what I mean.

I read this first within a week of it being published. What a strange time, and a strange time especially to be reading a book about upper middle class American life. Here we are nearly 20 years later and still in the throes of working out that national trauma, and here we are again, as close to starting a war with the middle east now as we were back then. What's changed for me is that I have changed. I used to be so much like Chip that it was painful to read his story. Now I'm more like Enid. The level of humanity and reality Franzen breathed into these characters is remarkable, and I'm most amazed at his achievement in making Enid and Alfred so human, when he was so far from their age.

I'm grateful that this book is in the world, both for the pages inside its cover and for the cultural and historical touchpoint the novel represents.

Нямам нито време, нито желание да довърша тази книга.

Всичките нейни герои са досадни, част от тях са ми дори противни, а животът им е чиста мъка и лудост…

Дребнотемие и дребнавост at it’s finest.

Без мен!

Franzen’s writing is impeccable. Not only does his understanding of complex, familial relationships fascinate me, but his ability to capture these characters—all five of them, I might add—with such depth...I think that is what really drew me in as a reader. I mean, these are people who are so flawed emotionally and so utterly selfish inherently, and yet each of them has this capacity for loving one another even while recognizing their inability to stand each other for more than five minutes at a time: in a sense they are more human than most humans. And Franzen knows how to write a sentence, my God. All this book did was remind me why I love to read.

Honestly, I try to give five stars sparingly, but this one I fully endorse. I think what makes it better than Freedom is that I walked away from this with a knot in my stomach (I really felt something here!). Seven year-old Chip being left alone at the dinner table until it was late enough for him to fall asleep on his placemat bothered me. Juxtapose that with the tenderness Chip shows his dad toward the end of the novel, and you start to wonder whether this man was ever really the emotionally unavailable tyrant that you thought he was. Either way, this just serves as a huge reminder for me to appreciate the way things are now while my kids are still young, because it’s probably not always going to be this simple.

I didn't like The Corrections. I didn't like or care about any of the characters. Seems like I've been reading about the prototypical dysfunctional American family for decades. This one was humorless and boring. Probably because the characters lacked personality.
I know most people loved it or said they did, I've already heard all the arguments defending it.

Imagine owning a bonsai tree and snipping, cutting, making small corrections from the plant’s growth, guiding it and making it become what you want it to be.

Imagine an engineer with a sharpened pencil making schematics and rigidly following mathematical, precise principles, forming a design that fits a specific purpose and allows for only infinitesimal error.

But these ways of making corrections are not ways to deal with humans, this is not how people exist, there are no hard fast rules, no black and white lines that distinguish right and wrong.

Jonathon Franzen, in his 2001 publication The Corrections, describes for us the Lambert family. Growing up and together in the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude, the family consists of father and mother, Alfred and Enid, and there three children: Gary, Chip and Denise. If a family is a microcosm of a society, then Franzen has illustrated the strengths and weaknesses, the good the bad and the ugly of the Lamberts to be a reflection of Western culture’s wins and losses, and maybe more, to show that to win or to lose, ultimately, is a poor measure for who we are and how we live.

In casting his characters, Franzen has demonstrated his mastery of both the language and for a descriptive characterization power that is Dickensian. A literary progeny of John Barth, Richard Ford and Walker Percy Franzen is well suited for this ambitious, epic and thought provoking examination of our society as exhibited by the Lamberts.

Alfred is a retired railroad engineer who is by nature cold and aloof, and has been a domestic tyrant over Enid for the length of their marriage. The story finds him suffering from Parkinson’s and the early onset of dementia. Franzen shows us glimpses of the sad world he has inherited and the fruitless seclusion he has made for himself.

Enid is the hopelessly optimistic but haggard matriarch of the family and it is her desire to bring the family together for “one last Christmas” that forms the conflict and denouement of the narrative. Judgmental, paranoid, illusory, self-righteous and prone to self-aggrandizing hyperbole Enid is haunted by the family that she wanted but never attained. She poorly conceals her disappointment of her children and of her marriage.

Gary, the eldest son, is a successful Philadelphia banker and lives with his wife, Caroline, and their three children. Franzen has cast Gary in the role of villain, he and his wife epitomize all that is wrong and ugly with western civilization: narcissism, crass materialism, selfishness, elitism, banality, insincerity and a superficial ideal for the family that poorly conceals a pompous self interest. To Gary, and especially the deplorable Caroline, family is just the appearance, not the underlying love and affection.

Chip is a failed professor, and Denise a once successful restaurateur and both have stumbled because of underlying psychologically damaged self esteem manifested by sexually self-destructive behavior. Franzen illustrates their ups and downs, and ultimate redemption, through a dynamic exploration of the truly binding ties of family.

But to Franzen’s credit, and to the eventual cathartic resolution of the story, he also shows some good to them all. Alfred and Enid, for all their conceits and failings, love each other and their family, even to the point of deep sacrifice. Chip and Denise are able to look into themselves and carefully examine their filial relationships and come away with a sense of self worth and meaning. Even Gary (who Franzen has fun with, making him and Caroline almost caricatures of despicable self importance) truly loves his boys. Deftly using subtle Biblical / C.S. Lewis Narnia references, Franzen carefully reveals that for all of our outward failings, there may be some hope for us yet.

Darkly humorous, intelligent, delicious, painful, outrageous, sad, thought provoking, aggravating, overwhelming, compelling, restorative and ultimately hopeful, Franzen’s The Corrections is a very, very good read.

That’s right, Jonathan Franzen - yesterday on my lunch break I powered through and finally finished your 550-page ode to being an unsatisfied ex-Midwesterner.

For the most part, I’m glad I didn’t just quit reading it. It starts with a section on the parents, then does one on each of the kids before coming back to the parents and then jumping around a bit as they’re all home/trying to get home for one last Christmas together. I’m glad I finished it out for one reason - I actually did enjoy the section about the daughter, and, to a lesser degree, the Christmas section. I don’t know if they were actually good or if I was only enjoying myself because compared to the self-satisfied bullshit that makes up the other 85% of the book, having a story told in a somewhat straightforward manner was just a welcome change. That’s not to say that I need my stories to be straightforward - I might have enjoyed Chip’s pretension and the endless timeline jumping of his section, or even Gary’s unrelenting paranoia, Enid’s compulsive need for control, and Alfred’s unlucky combination of advancing dementia and incontinence.

Might have, had it not been for the fact that as Franzen writes these things, you can tell he’s completely chuffed that everyone reading it is going to eat it up. When Alfred is haunted by imaginary turds, it is difficult to tell where his dementia ends and Franzen overcomplicating his story begins, and it’s the same case with the failures of Chip and Gary - to what extent are they meant to be insufferable and self-important, and to what extent is his smugness at how wonderful and unconventional his story is bleeding into the story itself?

Denise’s section and the final section stand out because in these places, the story doesn’t overwhelm itself. We see characters interact and actually go somewhere with a story without spending dozens of pages bogged down in misguided introspection - in Denise’s case, I don’t know why it happens - maybe of all the Lamberts, she’s the most at peace with her failings. Maybe Franzen can’t project as much of himself onto a secret lesbian affair. Maybe here, he just wanted to tell the story.

When it comes to the final section, however, it’s very clear why I was able to stand it - by spending a few paragraphs or a few pages in each character’s point of view, rather than a hundred pages at a time, Franzen can���t get caught up in any one place. The switching, and the fact that the relatively short section must cover a specific series of events over a few days, allows for something resembling momentum to be kept, and keeps the last stretch of The Corrections from drowning in its own bullshit.

Overall grade: C-. Not without merit, but the bad far outweighs the good. [Maybe in a few decades I'll love it? I had the distinct impression that if I were a middle-aged ex-Midwestern man who hated my parents, instead of NONE OF THOSE THINGS, I'd actually get what all the critics on the back were raving about.]

We are not always aware of it, but we try to build our lives in such a way that we avoid the mistakes our parents made (or what we perceive to be their 'mistakes'). This appears to be a futile intention: even if we manage to walk a different path, this results ultimately in a series of other errors. The human condition, you know.
To me this looks like the red line in this novel 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, though he also plays with other contexts in which the word “correction” is relevant (a correction on the stock exchange for example).

Franzen focuses on an average family in the Midwest of the United States, the Lamberts. The five members of this member are so obsessed by "correcting" their lives, that they make a hell of their existence. It's not a pretty picture, these five miserable, unsuccessful people, but nevertheless it is the strongest part of this book. Especially the relation between the elderly parents Alfred and Enid is appallingly sketched (the couple reminded me of Archie and Edith in the US television series "all in the family", from the 70s, but that was comedy and satire, this is pure tragedy). Also the link Franzen makes with developments in American capitalism (predatory acquisitions that help people and businesses go to ruin, but make others - the handy ones - super rich) is interesting.

But there ends my praise, I fear. The five family members Franzen are desperately turning in circles, they do not get out of their obsessive correction-line, although the very cliché epilogue suggests some openings. This makes the story falter, and I even noticed some signs of boredom while reading the second part of the novel. And then there's this obsession of (mainly) American authors to demonstrate their writing skills, which results for example in overly scientific passages that really hinder the flow of the story. Franzen has something up his sleeve, that's clear, but with 'the Corrections' he has not yet convinced me.

Giriş

"Bozkırda sonbahar soğuğunun çılgınlığı içeri sızıyor. Kötü bir şeyler olacağını hissedebilirsiniz. Güneş soğumakta olan bir yıldız, önemsiz bir ışık kaynağı gibi alçalmış. Düzensizlik rüzgarları ardı ardına esiyor. Ağaçlar huzursuz ...

Sanırım Düzeltmenler Franzen ile yapılan ilk tanışma kitabı. Keza benim için de öyle.İlk satırlarıyla Franzen, okura ne kadar zekice ve edebi anlamda doyurucu bir evrenle karşılaşabileceğini yukarıdaki cümlelerle duyuruyor. Okuduğum anda kitabın ilk cümlelerinde huzursuzluk öncesi her şeyi metaforlar içinde genişleterek anlatan ağız sulandıran, kendimi bazı sayfaları defalarca tekrar tekrar yüksek sesle Franzen'in diyeceklerini duyabilmek için okuduğum müthiş bir kitap. Devamında, yazar yaşanılan yer kavramını, mekanların getirdiği her türlü sosyo-kültürel yapılanma içinden en salt küçük birime doğru müthiş bir projeksiyon tutarak bir aile teması kurguluyor. Aile dinamiklerini ve politikalarını birden fazla nesiller içinde mutasyona uğratıp, okuru paranoyak derecesine getirip huzursuzluk metaforlarını teker teker okura deneyimlettiriyor

Konu
En basit anlamda orta-batılı 5 yetişkin olan Lambertlerin berbatlaşan ilişkilerini okuyoruz. Franzen'in Amerikan toplumuna Foucaultvari şekilde tüm çıplaklığıyla internet dolandırıcılığında, biyoteknolojiye kadar kendi işlevselliğini kaybeden bir aileye aynaya tutuyor.

Sonuç

Öncelikle, Düzeltmeler sakin kafayla okunması gereken bir kitap. Bu nedenle eline kitabı alıp sürüklenmeyi umut eden okura çok fazla hitap edebilecek bir kitap değil. Franzen'in edebi şairselliği ve betimlerini bir yana bırakacak olursak, olay örgülerini kurgulayışında ritmik yapısı değişken. Bu durumda, kitabı ilk bitirdiğimde 4 mü olsa 5 mi olsa diye beni çok ikilemde bıraktı. Fakat, baştan sona kadar yazarın takınmış olduğu tutarlılık Franzen'e hayran bıraktı. Bunun yanında müthiş zekice bir kara mizah örneği sunması bazı kısımlarında gerçekten sıkılsam da, sıkılmış olduğum birçok kısmı unutmamı sağladı.

Özetle, Franzen Düzeltmeler'de insanlık trajedisini son derece modern bir bakış açısıyla otopsisini çok güzel çıkartıyor.

İyi okumalar,