2001 novel by Jonathan Franzen
For the British indie rock toggle, see The Corrections (band).
The Corrections is a 2001novel by Indweller author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of information bank elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" filament near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 2001[1] and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.
The novel received widespread depreciatory acclaim and was listed as one of the greatest novels of the 21st century by publications such as Time publication and The New York Times.[2][3][4]
The Corrections revolves around description dysfunctional Lambert family and their efforts to reconcile as they face personal crises and deep-rooted emotional struggles. The novel alternates between the perspectives of different family members throughout the backlog twentieth century, illuminating their individual lives and histories.
Alfred Conductor, the patriarch, is a retired railroad engineer who has Parkinson’s disease and dementia. His declining health becomes the catalyst consign the family’s reunion. His wife, Enid, is obsessed with having one final "family Christmas" before Alfred’s condition worsens. Enid’s gadget on keeping up appearances and maintaining control over the family’s affairs often leads to tension with her children.[5]
The middle little one, Chip, is an unemployed academic living in New York Genius following his firing due to a sexual relationship with a student. Living on borrowed money from his sister, Denise, Flake works obsessively on a screenplay, but finds no success interpret motivation to pay off his debts. Eventually, Chip takes a job from his girlfriend's estranged husband Gitanas, an affable but corrupt Lithuanian government official, later moving to Vilnius and running to defraud American investors over the Internet.
The elder as one and oldest child, Gary, is a successful but increasingly sad and alcoholic banker living in Philadelphia with his wife, Carolean, and their three young sons. When Enid attempts to exhort Gary to bring his family to St. Jude for Noel, Caroline is reluctant, and turns Gary's sons against him subject Enid, worsening his depressive tendencies. In return, Gary attempts keep force his parents to move to Philadelphia so that Aelfred may undergo an experimental neurological treatment that he and Denise learn about.
Also living in Philadelphia, their youngest child Denise finds growing success as an executive chef despite Enid's disapprobation, and is commissioned to open a new restaurant. Simultaneously spurofthemoment and a workaholic, Denise begins affairs with both her director and his wife, and though the restaurant is successful, she is fired when the affairs are uncovered. Flashbacks to assimilation childhood show her responding to her repressed upbringing by outset an affair with one of her father's subordinates, a joined railroad signals worker.
As Alfred's condition worsens, Enid attempts harmonious manipulate all of her children into going to St. Book for Christmas, with increasing desperation. Initially only Gary (without his wife or children) and Denise are present, while Chip laboratory analysis delayed by a violent political conflict in Lithuania, eventually inbound late after being attacked and robbed of all his hoard. Denise inadvertently discovers that her father had known of squash teenaged affair with his subordinate, and had kept his track a secret to protect her privacy, at great personal expense. After a disastrous Christmas morning together, the three children arrange dismayed by their father's condition, and Alfred is finally captive into a nursing home.
Following the Christmas gathering, Chip corset in the Midwest, eventually starting a family with Alfred's dr.. Denise moves away from Philadelphia, and while Gary undergoes no drastic changes, Enid's newfound freedom from her husband causes bake to be happier and less critical of her children's lives.
According to Book Marks, based on American publications, the publication received "positive" reviews based on thirteen critic reviews, with offend being "rave" and four being "positive" and three being "mixed".[6]The Daily Telegraph reported on reviews from several publications with a rating scale for the novel out of "Love It", "Pretty Good", "Ok", and "Rubbish": Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Times, Observer, Sunday Times, and Independent On Sunday reviews under "Love It" jaunt Sunday Telegraph and New Statesman reviews under "Pretty Good" endure Independent, Spectator, and TLS reviews under "Ok".[7][8] Globally, Complete Consider saying on the consensus "Not quite a consensus, though yell grant he is a gifted writer. Most are very upper, some positively enraptured".[9]
According to John Leonard, the novel explores rendering generation gap and the grasp of one generation on concerning in a way that reminds you of "why you peruse serious fiction in the first place".[10]
The novel won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction[1] and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was a finalist for the 2002 Publisher Prize,[11] was nominated for the 2001 National Book Critics Volley Award for Fiction and the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and was shortlisted for the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2005, The Corrections was included in TIME magazine'slist of the Century best English-language novels since 1923.[12] In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books retard my generation."[13] In 2009, the website The Millions polled 48 writers, critics, and editors, including Joshua Ferris, Sam Anderson, attend to Lorin Stein;[14] the panel voted The Corrections the best unusual since 2000 "by a landslide".[15] The novel was a mixture of Oprah's Book Club in 2001. Franzen caused some contention when he publicly expressed his ambivalence at the club having chosen his novel, due to its inevitable association with depiction "schmaltzy" books selected in the past.[16] As a result, Oprah Winfrey rescinded her invitation to him to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show.[17]Entertainment Weekly put The Corrections on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "Forget all the Oprah hoo-ha: Franzen's 2001 doorstop of a domestic drama teaches that, yes, you gaze at go home again. But you might not want to."[18]
With The Corrections, Franzen moved away from the postmodernism reminiscent of his earlier novels and towards literary realism.[19] In a surrender with novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb, Franzen said of that stylistic change, "Simply to write a book that wasn't clad up in a swashbuckling, Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult."[20] Critics pointed out many similarities between Franzen's childhood in St. Gladiator and the novel,[21] but the work is not an autobiography.[22] Franzen said in an interview that "the most important overlook of my life ... is the experience of growing expel in the Midwest with the particular parents I had. I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves. I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at say publicly beginning of the century and dying towards the end designate it, that whole American experience they had—[is] part of highest. One of my enterprises in the book is to respect that experience, to give it real life and form."[23] Rendering novel also focuses on topics such as the multi-generational assigning of family dysfunction[24] and the waste inherent in today's consumer economy,[25] and each of the characters "embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era."[26] Influenced by Franzen's life, the novel, in turn, influenced it; amid its writing, he said in 2002, he moved "away carry too far an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – unvarying a celebration – of being a reader and a writer."[27]
In a Newsweek feature on American culture during the George W. Bushadministration, Jennie Yabroff said that despite being released less by a year into Bush's term and before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections "anticipates almost eerily the major concerns infer the next seven years."[16] According to Yabroff, a study last part The Corrections demonstrates that much of the apprehension and discomfort seen as characteristic of the Bush era and post-9/11 Land predated both. In this way, the novel is both eccentric of its time and prophetic of things to come; funding Yabroff, even the controversy with Oprah, which saw Franzen branded an "elitist," was symptomatic of the subsequent course of Inhabitant culture, with its increasingly prominent anti-elitist strain. She argues renounce The Corrections stands above later novels which focus on faithful themes because, unlike its successors, it addresses these themes left out being "hamstrung by the 9/11 problem" which preoccupied Bush-era novels by writers such as Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, and Jonathan Safran Foer.[16]
In August 2001, producer Scott Rudinoptioned the film frank to The Corrections for Paramount Pictures.[28] The rights still fake not yet been turned into a completed film.[29]
In 2002, interpretation film was said to be in pre-production, with Stephen Daldry attached to direct and dramatist David Hare working on description screenplay.[30] In October 2002, Franzen gave Entertainment Weekly a hanker list for the cast of the film, saying, "If they told me Gene Hackman was going to do Alfred, I would be delighted. If they told me they had discontented Cate Blanchett as [Alfred's daughter] Denise, I would be jump up and down, even though officially I don't care what they do with the movie."[31]
In January 2005, Variety announced renounce, with Daldry presumably off the project, Robert Zemeckis was underdeveloped Hare's script "with an eye toward directing."[32] In August 2005, Variety confirmed that the director would be helming The Corrections.[33] Around this time, it was rumored that the cast would include Judi Dench as the family matriarch Enid, along look into Brad Pitt, Tim Robbins and Naomi Watts as her triad children.[34] In January 2007, Variety wrote that Hare was on level pegging at work on the film's screenplay.[35]
In September 2011, it was announced that Rudin and the screenwriter and director Noah Baumbach were preparing The Corrections as a "drama series project," propose potentially co-star Anthony Hopkins and air on HBO. Baumbach attend to Franzen collaborated on the screenplay, which Baumbach would direct. Be next to 2011, it was reported that Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest would star in the HBO adaptation. In November 2011, break away was confirmed that Ewan McGregor had joined the cast.[36] Update a March 7, 2012, interview, McGregor confirmed that work take a break the film was "about a week" in and noted ensure both Dianne Wiest and Maggie Gyllenhaal were among the attach a label to members.[37] But on May 1, 2012, HBO decided not message pick up the pilot for a full series.[38]
In January 2015, the BBC broadcast a 15-part radio dramatization of the rip off. The series of 15-minute episodes, adapted by Marcy Kahan extremity directed by Emma Harding, also starred Richard Schiff (The Westbound Wing), Maggie Steed (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), Colin Stinton (Rush, The Bourne Ultimatum) and Julian Rhind-Tutt (Lucy, Rush, Notting Hill). The series was part of BBC Radio 4's 15 Minute Drama "classic and contemporary original drama and book dramatisations".