Book Club Guide

The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen · 2001 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The family as a site of love, resentment and irresolvable debt
The body's decline and the mind's resistance
The gap between the America of aspiration and the America of reality

About this book

The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.

Published in 2001, The Corrections won the National Book Award and became a cultural flashpoint about the state of American literary fiction. Franzen worked on it for nine years.

Discussion questions

The Lambert family is held together by obligation more than affection. How does Franzen present family love — as real, as performance, or as something that can be both?
Alfred Lambert's Parkinson's disease is the novel's central physical fact. How does Franzen use the father's deterioration to drive the emotional and thematic argument?
Each of the three adult children has a different strategy for avoiding the family. What does each strategy reveal about their character — and about the different forms that middle-class escape takes?
The novel has a satirical portrait of contemporary America — dot-com culture, pharmaco-therapy, market logic. Does this social commentary enhance or distract from the family story?
The Corrections was enormously controversial — partly for Franzen's public statements about literary fiction and its audience. Does knowing this context affect how you read the novel?