Praise for The Corrections: 'Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture -- our culture. And he has done it with a sympathy and expansiveness that bends the edgy modern temper to a generous breadth of vision.' Don DeLillo 'Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords.' David Foster Wallace 'In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann's Buddenbrooks and DeLillo's White Noise. It is a major accomplishment.' Michael Cunningham 'A book which is funny, moving, generous, brutal and intelligent, and which poses the ultimate question, what life is for - and that is as much as anyone could ask.' Blake Morrison, GUARDIAN 'A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike & Roth. That's why there is so much excitement about it.' David Sexton, EVENING STANDARD 'A novel of outstanding sympathy, wit, moral intelligence and pathos, a family saga told with stylistic brio and psychological and political insight. No British novelist is currently writing at this pitch.' Jeremy Treglowen, FINANCIAL TIMES 'Impossible to dislike, an unpretentious page-turner.' Zadie Smith, GUARDIAN Books of the Year 'The Corrections is a wonderful book. Every page simmers with wit, close observation and intelligence. Franzen has delivered as wounding and thoughtful an indictment of contemporary existence as it is possible to make.' John Burnside, SCOTSMAN 'It was the book you had to read. And by 'you' I mean not just you, I mean also your father-in-law, your little sister. If you were an American, certainly, or for that matter any citizen of a first-world, late-capitalist nation, The Corrections had your number. How often does the spectrum of praise run from Pat Conroy to David Foster Wallace? It was a phenomenon that seemed to come out of nowhere. Franzen had written two previous novels, but in 10 years only a few provocative essays, and nothing to indicate that here would be the writer to tell us - if every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way - how the American family was unhappy. 'Which is not to suggest the book was bleak. It was merciless, it was skewering, the family at its heart full of bicker, betrayal, and many other varieties of familial sport; but the artist assembling and synthesising it all for the pleasure of the reader was possessed, thank God, of a voracious emotional intelligence, capable of mollifying all that was ugly and unlikable in his individual characters with empathy and humour. We might have forgotten, by the time the book landed, that a literary doorstopper of the first order of seriousness could also be unabashed entertainment. More likely Franzen simply knew that all comedy is deadly serious, and that the fraudulent online sale of post-Soviet Lithuania, for example, or a stolen salmon fillet sliding down the hero's underpants, was the low-brow fallout of a writer dividing the sadness of a declining family by the sadness of a declining culture. The book was a howl: against greed, against selfishness, against the axiom of American happiness, finally against the tyranny of family holidays. 'Told in the expansive tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy, fluent, uncompromising, accessible, expressive of an awesome amount of contemporary experience that remains all too familiar today, The Corrections continues to be the exemplary novel of postwar American family life.' Joshua Ferris
