The Corrections

The Corrections is a novel by the American writer Jonathan Franzen, published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It won the National Book Award in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.

The book is built around the Lambert family. Alfred is a retired engineer from a stern Protestant tradition, a remote father who is now losing his memory and his independence, and Enid is the wife who has spent her married life managing his silences and who wants the family gathered once more. Their children have scattered: Gary, with a wife and children and a suspicion that his own family is manoeuvring against him; Chip, who lost an academic job and is in another country; and Denise, a chef whose professional success hides a set of decisions she has not admitted to. The novel moves through the second half of the twentieth century, following each of them in turn, and it uses their private accounts of the same childhood to show how differently a family remembers itself.

Franzen sets the family's problems against the economic and social changes of the period, including the pharmaceutical industry, the collapse of the technology market and the expansion of the suburbs, and the book is widely read as a portrait of the United States at the end of the century.