Les corrections

**Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction**

**Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award**

**An American Library Association Notable Book**

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, _The Corrections_ , is a great work of art and

a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic,

deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to

Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen

brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and

Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the

modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting,

do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With _The

Corrections_ , Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American

society and the American soul.

Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it

to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing

his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his

Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his

days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More

and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.

Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary,

a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to

force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle

child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a

professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be

pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay.

Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage

only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married

man--or so Gary hints.

Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family

Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise

that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys

are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred

enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and

long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the

corrections that each desperately needs.