Twenty-five years ago this week, on Sept. 4, 2001, The New York Times reviewed Jonathan Franzen’s novel “The Corrections,” calling it “funny and corrosive, portentous and affecting.” In an attention-getting 2024 Times survey, more than 500 influential readers said the novel more than held up, naming it one of the top five books of the 21st century.
Examining the lives of the Lambert family — solid citizens Alfred and Enid, and their jangly adult children Gary, Denise and Chip — “The Corrections” came out just before 9/11. (A book party was scheduled, and canceled, for Sept. 18.) Franzen himself became a figure of controversy, famously expressing discomfort about being picked for Oprah Winfrey’s influential book club; the invitation was rescinded.
With Franzen now well established as a writer of hefty social novels — a form not all that much in fashion — The Times’s staff book critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai used the anniversary to revisit the book. With prompts from Scott Heller, an editor at the Book Review, here they look back, and look ahead, to consider what lasting mark “The Corrections” has left.
Let’s begin with the obvious question: When and where did you first read the book?
JENNIFER SZALAI I can’t remember if it was in 2001, shortly after it came out, or in 2002, when the paperback came out. It was after 9/11 though.
DWIGHT GARNER I was working as an assigning editor at the Book Review and I had an advance copy. I read it on the train, successive cups of coffee on the seat next to me, commuting back and forth into New York City from Garrison, N.Y., where I lived at the time. Buzz had been building for months, but the experience of reading it exceeded my expectations. Michiko Kakutani reviewed it in the daily paper, but it was my job to find a reviewer for the Sunday book review. We gave it to David Gates, a tough cookie who’s one of the shrewdest critic/novelists alive. His review was terrific.
ALEXANDRA JACOBS Now seems the time to disclose that I did not really read the book in 2001, being too angry at Franzen for the Oprah flap — I just sort of absorbed bits and pieces of it from “the discourse.” Also, I was not at that moment a professional book critic, though I’d reviewed lots. So the first time I am reading and thinking about this book in more than just short jags is now, 25 years later.
SZALAI There was plenty of discourse — more discourse than pages in the (already very long) book. I realized this time around how much I’d forgotten.
JACOBS It took reading it in full to remember all the discourse about the Talking Turd, though perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself …
Was all that chatter par for the course?
GARNER It felt like something new — but writing this fresh and alive, paired with such ambition, always feels new to a certain extent. I mean, here’s this book that takes a Hallmark movie premise — mom wants everyone back home for Christmas — and spins it out until you feel it’s taken a chunk out of the American hide.
JACOBS The hype for Franzen and the hype for David Foster Wallace was like dueling electric guitars. They were the Great White Males, the biggest deals in Noveldom at that moment, and very good friends. I remember going to parties where each was the star attraction. Wallace was in a dark East Village nightclub and wasn’t really circulating; Franzen was in an airy apartment, and he just sort of loomed among the guests.
SZALAI Franzen also wrote that essay for Harper’s a few years before “The Corrections” was published, in which he bemoaned the decline of the big, social novel. It was like a finger pointed to the bleachers. People wanted to see if his next novel could hit it out of the park. I liked those parts of the book the least. What I loved was the specificity about the family.
GARNER “The Corrections” is a great book but it was never, somehow, a cool book. No one got hipster points for carrying it on the subway.
SZALAI It’s ironic, given that the novel includes so many asides about things being “cool” or “uncool”!
GARNER But Franzen also asks, Who’s left to be uncool? And he admires the qualities of some of the people back home in the Midwest who aren’t concerned with being of the moment.
Jen, you pointed out right at the start that you read the book after 9/11. Why is that important to make clear?
SZALAI Because the book is preoccupied with capturing the situation of the country at the moment. And the moment had obviously changed. The coda has something about how when the market correction came, it wasn’t all that disruptive, because stuff didn’t hit the U.S. all that hard anymore. And, well …
Franzen explicitly set out to write a big, social novel. And he was one-upped by actual events.
GARNER He caught themes like family breakdown, atomization, technological alienation, the end of privacy — there’s a sense of impending collapse that somehow 9/11 put paid to.
Is the book, then, a period piece, a chronicle of the Before Times?
JACOBS It’s so very smart and knowing. (In stretches, too smart and knowing). And it’s centered around something that never really changes, which is tensions in a family.
SZALAI I think what both of you pluck out is exactly right. The family stuff is so moving and beautifully done.
JACOBS It really is a novel of eldercare.
SZALAI Yes. Much of the political material felt stale to me. But eldercare is eternal. I had a new experience reading it now, having had actual experience with elderly parents.
GARNER I was surprised how fresh it felt upon rereading. We’re still living in the world it described, though everything has been cranked up to 11. The food writing is incredibly knowledgeable and funny. The scene with the kid who won’t eat his liver and is forced to stay at the table for hours is the best, most excruciating description of that kind of showdown (we all went though it) I’ve ever read.
JACOBS Horrible. And the way the parents blame each other for it afterward. That’s the kind of experience that forms a character. You see immediately why Chipper became not-so-chipper Chip.
You’ve all made a case for what “The Corrections” got right about American culture. What impact did it have on the American novel?
GARNER I’m not certain it did.
JACOBS I agree with Dwight. I think the events around the book — the post-Oprah backlash, most strikingly — had more impact on American literary culture than the book itself. No one was ever gonna make that mistake again. Including Franzen, who hugged it out with her in 2010 when he was promoting “Freedom” and appearing elegiacally on the cover of Time magazine.
SZALAI I also think that to write that kind of socially ambitious book, with any kind of confidence, you have to believe you have an understanding of the big picture, of what the United States is and where it stands in the world. Given everything that’s happened in the last 25 years, that’s harder to do.
GARNER This was a big, morally serious, realist novel that felt in some ways like a throwback. It was Updikean, and indeed Franzen was sometimes referred to as “the new Updike.” He never spawned a school of young Franzenlings in part because his is not an easy path to follow.
Why are we still talking about “The Corrections,” then?
JACOBS Besides 9/11, and that’s a big besides, it was one of the last big thumping novels before the disruptions of the internet. There are still big thumping novels, of course — Kiran Desai’s and Marlon James’s most recent books come immediately to mind — but the supposed “monoculture” has splintered forever, for better and worse, and so they thump differently. I remember reading in our own coverage that “Purity” sold far fewer copies than either “The Corrections” or “Freedom.” And I don’t think that’s a Franzen problem. He is big. It’s the best-seller lists that got small(er).
GARNER One reason we’re still talking about it is that people still read it. I seem to find battered copies of it everywhere I go. I like Alexandra’s use of the word “thumping.” That’s rare for such a serious novel. It’s a comfort novel for many people I know — most of them are women — who return to it every five years or so because they want to give themselves a treat.
SZALAI Yes, the way that novels land is different now. “Thumping” is accurate.
JACOBS Now it’s more like bumping. A bump in the night.
GARNER The novel has so many indelible lines. The arugula a character eats, “so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.” Or: “It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.”
Interesting that you mention women readers, as Franzen’s gender politics have not gone unnoticed.
GARNER Well, it easily passes the Bechdel test. And Enid, Denise and Robin are deeply complicated characters. We develop a real feeling for them.
JACOBS I noticed that the three substantial profiles of him in our pages were all written by women, though, so he’s doing something right! Personally I really enjoyed the sex scenes in “The Corrections” — “faintly urinary dumpling,” as Enid refers to Alfred’s penis, and all — and wondered what happened to the unapologetically libidinous hetero male author. I mean, I understand if he’s a little more timid these days. Maybe that itself was the ultimate Correction, for the sins of the fathers Updike, Mailer, Roth et al.
GARNER That’s a big and almost third-rail topic that needs further elucidation, for sure. One of the glories of Marlon James’s new novel is its utterly libidinous narrators. I don’t think a hetero male could have written anything like it.
JACOBS Now women are doing a lot of the sexting. I know several marriages that are on the blink because of Miranda July’s “All Fours.”
SZALAI Franzen’s petulant reaction when Oprah picked his novel for her book club was inadvertently revealing. He can sit down at his desk and imagine himself into the life of Enid or Denise. But his apparent distress when presented with a huge influx of women readers was reflected in his inability to pull off the social novel he wanted to write. He couldn’t quite grasp a changing landscape in all its fullness.
Speaking of distress: Is “The Corrections” a little ungenerous to the Midwest?
GARNER The Midwestern scenes matter to this novel. Franzen captures a certain Midwest stoicism, and the social glue of family obligations, and a certain cultural conservatism. You feel the economic anxieties around deindustrialization. There’s a good line about — though this can be true anyplace — values mattering more than style.
JACOBS St. Jude and the Midwest generally stand in here for an idealized but desiccating Old America. New York and Philly are New America — the food scene, the movies. And Lithuania is I suppose prophetically dystopic Future America, running out of sand and gravel … not sure.
SZALAI He captures what I’ve been told by Midwestern friends is “Midwestern nice.” Stoicism, yes; hidden resentments, too.
JACOBS I really struggled with the trip to Lithuania.
SZALAI I did too. It didn’t help that Franzen had never been there. The whole farce in Lithuania is a cheap plot device.
GARNER It’s a terrific New York novel (also a very good Philadelphia one). I can never walk into Fanelli’s (the Soho bar) without recalling that this is where Chip pulled the sluglike hunk of stolen Norwegian salmon out of his underpants. And there’s a great moment at the Strand, where poor Chip must sell all his beloved books on Marxism. He expects to get several hundred dollars for the boxes. The clerk mutters, “Sixty-five.”
Two other things I’d like to mention are how knowledgeable Franzen is about (of all things) finance, and how deeply he’s interested, in nearly all of his fiction, in shame.
Tell me more about shame.
GARNER Nearly all the characters have a sense of it. Chip, for example, has this “burning wish not to have done the things he’d done.” These characters are all on fire in this way. One of the medications dispensed in the novel — the title in part is a reference to them — short circuits the “morbid” shame factor.
SZALAI They’re all extremely self-conscious without being all that self-aware. Every one of them is constantly comparing what everyone else has and they don’t.
JACOBS I am so glad I didn’t have to review this. I would have failed miserably. And received multiple “Corrections.” Then sold my copy in shame at the Strand for peanuts on the declining American dollar.
GARNER It’s funny — the first edition of “The Corrections” arrived with a correction! There was an errata slip inserted. The publisher had accidentally printed two pages out of order.
How will we be talking about “The Corrections” 25 years from now?
JACOBS Let’s hope we’ll be talking and not just scanning each other’s QR codes.
GARNER That’s such a difficult question to answer. I’d like to say that yes, we will — but I’ve been floored by how rapidly so many “essential” writers of the second half of the last century have fallen utterly out of the discourse. They appear to be little read, little taught, little thought about.
SZALAI The culture has changed so much already that it’s impossible to say. I already feel like much of the novel, aside from the familial dramas of the Lamberts, is a period piece. Chip has to travel to Lithuania for the experience of being in a place where capital-H history is happening. Black Americans are relegated to the background, depicted as criminals or comic relief. Even in 2001, Franzen’s understanding of our social reality was pretty limited.
JACOBS Well, I hope I won’t be Alfred-level demented … that there will be a Corecktall for that. Or at least an Aslan so I don’t know what’s happening.
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