I struggled to get past the non-sentences. As my daughter put it, forgiving a novelist trying to be a poet. Then it got gross. Being an Oprah pick, I knew there would be irredeemable characters, but I couldn't even get past Chip's terrible decisions and the unnecessary description of his sex life. Just not for me.

Not since 100 Years of Solitude have I been so convinced that an author wrote a book to specifically piss me off.

I have no idea what to make of this. I was into it early, but after about page 200 I felt like I was having a mental breakdown; what the fuck was going on? Why are we spending 100 pages on this, 100 pages on that, all of which are bloated, pretentious and boring tangents.

But the book is so well written, it's maddening. The prose and descriptions flow effortlessly, as long as you're ok with going along for the ride. I got a very clear idea of who these characters were and why they were like that, I just didn't like any of them...nor was I supposed to. Is this satire? I have no clue - the final 100 pages are, frustratingly, really good. True moments of reflection, quiet and difficult family moments hit hard. The ending was very satisfying.

But still, fuck this book. I hated how there weren't any chapter breaks, I was frustrated at the structure, and most of all I am immensely annoyed that a beautifully written book is one of my least favorite ever.

Some parts are 5 stars, some made me want to give up reading for a few months. ( )

Le correzioni, che è stato il libro di maggio e giugno per LiberTiAmo (sono sempre puntuale, eh?), è uno dei romanzi più lenti che abbia letto nella mia vita. Non perché sia un brutto libro – tutt’altro – ma perché la storia impone una lettura lenta per lasciare che il suo messaggio arrivi a destinazione: dopo averlo finito, infatti, continuerà a vorticarvi in testa per giorni.

Questo perché Franzen ha scritto un corposo romanzo familiare che ci spinge a chiederci quanto l’educazione dei nostri genitori, soprattutto quella che, seppur in buonafede, era mirata a correggere comportamenti ritenuti inopportuni, possa aver influito sulle nostre vite e se sia possibile intervenire per evitarlo.

Per seicento pagine leggiamo di Gary, Chip e Denise e dei loro inutili tentativi di sfuggire alle correzioni familiari, tentativi che sfociano in autentici disastri. Neppure i genitori, Alfred ed Enid, sono da meno: anzi, è proprio il loro pessimo rapporto a gettare ombre sulla crescita dei figli.

Ho amato molto la capacità di Franzen di costruire dei personaggi così poliedrici da rendere quasi impossibile al lettore di schierarsi per l’uno o per l’altro: nel corso della storia,infatti, tutti quanti riescono a mettere in crisi l’idea che ci eravamo fatti di loro, rimescolando le carte e tratteggiando una situazione familiare piena di desideri frustrati, affetti mancati e gelosie sapientemente costruite dove i confini tra vittima e carnefice sono molto sfocati... ( )

I doubt that I would have thought as highly of this book when I was younger but now, having dealt with my own parents' aging and declining health, I had much more interest in and empathy for all the members of the Lambert family. ( )

A positive impression despite innumerable faults

The phenomenon of the persistent positive impression is something I call The Carver Effect (After Raymond Carver, whom I continue to admire despite significant reservations regarding most all his stories. (Inverse of The Borges Effect, whose author still leaves a middling impression despite my enjoying, to a certain extent, many of his works. (Though my favorite remains The Aleph, perhaps the least Borges of Borges in that it contains at least a residue of human interest.)))

Franzen's characters have a tendency to fall flat. Their situations read contrived. The spoof of inflated campus-adjacent post-docs and empty-hole bourgeois is roll-my-eyes bad. His women don't have non-Bechdel problems. Their inner lives, though effortfully described, remain prurient sketches. The paterfamilias possesses an improper prosody, "Better not to leave here than to have to come back." (This, we no longer have to assume, is a direct quotation from Franzen's actual father, affixed to the last page of the novel in incongruity with (revolt against) the surrounding prose.)

Yet, Franzen displays a studied way of describing things as if he has actually seen them. About once or twice a paragraph one encounters something clever, or so intimately characterized one almost has the impression the reader's own life has been captured on the page (similar to certain, not-infrequent moments in Nabokov). "Corpuscular" impressions of the "crepuscular." The maniacal game of kicking packages up the stairs. Circling 'M's in the New York Times. The pan-fried liver warped so that it won't sit flat on a plate. "Buttery" alkali metals. The instinctual photo-taking of one's spouse later revealed, in a moment of reverse-anagnorisis, (analogous to a certain powerful scene in To the Lighthouse i.e. the dramatic irony is that characters know something we do not) such that the instinctual taking of photographs read as "sign of intimacy" is revealed to be motivated by the construction of a "body of evidence" against her - as evidence one was already in pain.

"He saw nothing but the principles [principals] at stake." [my reading]

"He's sowing salt in the field of the financially unrighteous."

"Without ever figuring out that this excruciating perpendicular stroke was actively suppressing orgasm."

( )