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3.74 AVERAGE
3.74 AVERAGE
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
i totally thought it would be over-rated, but it totally wasn't.
I'm about halfway through and I'm throwing in the towel. Shocked at how much i disliked this one. Every character is totally unlikeable, which is fine, but they're unlikeable and self-destructive in totally bizarre, unrealistic ways. This book reminds me a lot of Infinite Jest in that it's so obvious the author thinks he's a Very Important Author writing Very Important Fiction that nevertheless lacks a real emotional, human core. I really enjoy Frazen's later work as well as his essays; I'm kind of blown away that this is his most highly regarded book. Very disappointed with this one and I really did try to power through.
This book was fine. I feel like Franzen could have cut out about 150 pages, and it would've been so much better. There's no arguing that his writing is impeccable and lovely, but the amount of detail that he goes into feels pedantic and unnecessary. I enjoyed it, but there were parts were he was dragging on incessantly which made the book less enjoyable
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A miserable story about miserable people. I will never understand why books like this win awards.
I loved this book so much and it was all I could think about until I finished it. And not because the characters or the story are spectacular because they aren't. But what I loved was the way the story was being told to me. I am into Franzen. A lot.
A friend once told me that Jonathan Franzen has been quoted as saying he deliberately rips off influential late-century American authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth, but tries to make the prose less difficult, more easily consumed.*
Leaving aside for a moment the irony of that statement in light of his outrage over the Oprah thing, that is stupid. Those authors are not great because their writing is accessible when the complexity is removed.
It was when one of the main characters in The Corrections was talking to a hallucinated turd that I thought, I should just put this down and take a stab at Against the Day, or re-read Gravity's Rainbow where a (literal) shit scene can actually be hilarious and fascinating.
In addition to weak-pynchonian characters (human and fecal), this novel suffers from a lack of strict editing (too many peripheral characters, too many inconsequential sub-sub-subplots), from unsympathetic characters (I don't really know what the point is if everyone is horrible and always has and always will hate or be spiteful to everyone around them), from an inconsistent, sudden ending (last chapter: no one will ever change. epilogue: everyone changed and is now charitable of heart!), from an irritatingly-rendered main theme (we all try to CORRECT ourselves and one another but we are ultimately unable), and from its own determined effort to be Epic (even a glowing review I found of this book said Franzen might as well have called it "American (Something)"; he compares one of the settings to the rest of the country in the first paragraph, for god's sake).
The "misery of aging" theme was effective, and I appreciated the exploration of a marriage that was bad for no more complicated a reason than that the husband and wife weren't right for one another. Otherwise I had no use for Franzen and his truckloads of loathing.
* I wrote this review in 2007 and no longer recall being given this quote. It's been rightly pointed out since that I shouldn't have used it without a citation (and should have been skeptical about its authenticity). But this book still sucks.
Leaving aside for a moment the irony of that statement in light of his outrage over the Oprah thing, that is stupid. Those authors are not great because their writing is accessible when the complexity is removed.
It was when one of the main characters in The Corrections was talking to a hallucinated turd that I thought, I should just put this down and take a stab at Against the Day, or re-read Gravity's Rainbow where a (literal) shit scene can actually be hilarious and fascinating.
In addition to weak-pynchonian characters (human and fecal), this novel suffers from a lack of strict editing (too many peripheral characters, too many inconsequential sub-sub-subplots), from unsympathetic characters (I don't really know what the point is if everyone is horrible and always has and always will hate or be spiteful to everyone around them), from an inconsistent, sudden ending (last chapter: no one will ever change. epilogue: everyone changed and is now charitable of heart!), from an irritatingly-rendered main theme (we all try to CORRECT ourselves and one another but we are ultimately unable), and from its own determined effort to be Epic (even a glowing review I found of this book said Franzen might as well have called it "American (Something)"; he compares one of the settings to the rest of the country in the first paragraph, for god's sake).
The "misery of aging" theme was effective, and I appreciated the exploration of a marriage that was bad for no more complicated a reason than that the husband and wife weren't right for one another. Otherwise I had no use for Franzen and his truckloads of loathing.
* I wrote this review in 2007 and no longer recall being given this quote. It's been rightly pointed out since that I shouldn't have used it without a citation (and should have been skeptical about its authenticity). But this book still sucks.
Hard to decide on a rating for an incredibly written novel full of unsympathetic characters making ridiculous life choices that cause them nothing but shame and guilt. I did enjoy interwoven nature of the plot and the little twists and coincidences that were slipped in seemingly at random.
Despite sort of hating the first 200+ pages of this book (I found the characters unrelatable and the writing style annoyingly self-aware), I really got into this story by the last 100 pages. A rare case for finishing the book despite its difficult beginnings! By the end, I was in tears. Franzen, I guess I WILL read your other bestseller (Freedom) someday. But I need a little break in the meantime.