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Summary
The Correctionsis a grandly entertaining novel for the new century -- a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain on an affair with a married man -- or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today,The Correctionsbrings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Summary
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife that he is not clinically depressed. Enid has set her heart on bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas. In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does. Unlike his previous works, The 27th City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), which tackled St. Louis and Boston, respectively, this one skips from city to city (New York; St. Jude; Philadelphia; Vilnius, Lithuania) as it follows the delamination of the Lambert family Alfred, once a rigid disciplinarian, flounders against Parkinson's-induced dementia; Enid, his loyal and embittered wife, lusts for the perfect Midwestern Christmas; Denise, their daughter, launches the hippest restaurant in Philly; and Gary, their oldest son, grapples with depression, while Chip, his brother, attempts to shore his eroding self-confidence by joining forces with a self-mocking, Eastern-Bloc politician. As in his other novels, Franzen blends these personal dramas with expert technical cartwheels and savage commentary on larger social issues, such as the imbecility of laissez-faire parenting and the farcical nature of U.S.-Third World relations. The result is a book made of equal parts fury and humor, one that takes a dry-eyed look at our culture, at our pains and insecurities, while offering hope that, occasionally at least, we can reach some kind of understanding. This is, simply, a masterpiece. Agent, Susan Golomb. (Sept.)Forecast: Franzen has always been a writer's writer and his previous novels have earned critical admiration, but his sales haven't yet reached the level of, say, Don DeLillo at his hottest. Still, if the ancillary rights sales and the buzz at BEA are any indication, The Corrections should be his breakout book. Its varied subject matter will endear it to a genre-crossing section of fans (both David Foster Wallace and Michael Cunningham contributed rave blurbs) and FSG's publicity campaign will guarantee plenty of press. QPB main, BOMC alternate. Foreign rights sold in the U.K., Denmark, Holland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Spain. Nine-city author tour.(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
My despair about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists' colony in up- state New York, to write the last two chapters of my second book. My wife and I had recently separated, and I was leading a life of self-enforced solitude in New York, working long days in a small white room, packing up 10 years' worth of communal property, and taking night- time walks on avenues where Russian, Hindi, Korean and Spanish were spoken in equal measure. Even deep in my Queens neighbourhood, however, news could reach me through my TV set and my New York Times subscription. The country was preparing for war ecstatically, with rhetoric supplied by George Bush: "Vital issues of principle are at stake." In Bush's 89% approval rating, as in the near-total absence of public scepticism about the war, the United States seemed to me hopelessly unmoored from reality - dreaming of glory in the massacre of faceless Iraqis, dreaming of infinite oil for hour-long commutes, dreaming of exemption from the rules of history. And so I, too, was dreaming of escape. I wanted to hide from America. But when I got to Yaddo and realised it was no haven - the Times arrived daily, and my fellow colonists kept talking about Patriot missiles and yellow ribbons - I began to think that what I really needed was a monastery. Then, one afternoon, in Yaddo's little library, I picked up and read Paula Fox's short novel Desperate Characters . "She was going to get away with everything!" is the hope that seizes the novel's main character, Sophie Bentwood, a childless Brooklynite who's unhappily married to a conservative lawyer. Sophie used to translate French novels; now she's so depressed that she can hardly even read them. She wants to get away with reading Goncourt and eating omelettes aux fines herbes on a street where derelicts lie sprawled in their own vomit and in a country that's fighting a dirty war in Vietnam. She wants to be spared the pain of confronting a future beyond her life with Otto. She wants to keep dreaming. With its equation of a crumbling marriage with a crumbling social order, Desperate Characters spoke directly to the ambiguities I was experiencing that January. Was it a great thing or a horrible thing that my marriage was coming apart? And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side - that Fox's book had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf - felt akin to an instance of religious grace. Yet even while I was being saved as a reader by Desperate Characters, I was succumbing, as a novelist, to despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social. A quarter- century only broadened and confirmed the sense of cultural crisis that Fox was registering. But what now feels like the locus of that crisis - the banal ascendancy of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse - is nowhere to be seen in the novel. Communication for the Bentwoods meant books, a telephone and letters. Portents didn't stream uninterruptedly through a cable converter or a modem; they were only dimly glimpsed, on the margins of existence. An ink bottle, which now seems impossi bly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970. In a winter when every house in the nation was haunted by the ghostly tele-presences of Peter Arnett in Baghdad and Tom Brokaw in Saudi Arabia, I was tempted to think that if a contemporary Otto Bentwood were breaking down, he would kick in the screen of his bedroom TV. But this would have missed the point. Bentwood, if he existed in the 1990s, would not break down, because the world would no longer even bear on him. As an unashamed elitist, an avatar of the printed word and a genuinely solitary man, he belongs to a species so endangered as to be all but irrelevant in an age of electronic democracy. For centuries, ink in the form of printed novels has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives. What Sophie and Otto were glimpsing, in the vatic black mess on their bedroom wall, was the disintegration of the very notion of a literary character. Small wonder they were desperate. It was still the 1960s, and they had no idea what had hit them. When I got out of college, in 1981, I hadn't heard the news about the social novel's death. I didn't know that Philip Roth had long ago performed the autopsy, describing "American reality" as a thing that "stupefies . . . sickens . . . infuriates, and finally . . . is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents . . ." I was in love with literature and with a woman to whom I'd been attracted in part because she was a brilliant reader. I had lots of models for the kind of uncompromising novel I wanted to write. I even had a model for an uncompromising novel that had found a big audience: Catch-22 . Joseph Heller had figured out a way of outdoing the actuality, employing the illogic of modern warfare as a metaphor for the more general denaturing of American reality. That no challenging novel since Catch-22 had affected the culture anywhere near as deeply, just as no issue since the Vietnam War had galvanised so many alienated young Americans, was easily overlooked. In college, my head had been turned by Marxism, and I believed that "monopoly capitalism" (as we called it) abounded with "negative moments" (as we called them) that a novelist could trick Americans into confronting if only he could package his subversive bombs in a sufficiently seductive narrative. I began my first book as a 22-year-old dreaming of changing the world. I finished it six years older. The one tiny world- historical hope I still clung to was to appear on KMOX Radio, "the Voice of St Louis," whose long, thoughtful author interviews I'd grown up listening to in my mother's kitchen. My novel, The Twenty-Seventh City , was about the innocence of a mid-western city - about the poignancy of St Louis's municipal ambitions in an age of apathy and distraction - and I looked forward to 45 minutes with one of KMOX's afternoon talk-show hosts, whom I imagined teasing out of me the latent themes in the book. To the angry callers demanding to know why I hated St Louis, I would explain, in the brave voice of someone who had lost his innocence, that what looked to them like hate was in fact tough love. It wasn't until The Twenty-Seventh City was published, in 1988, that I discovered how innocent I still was. The media's obsessive interest in my youthfulness surprised me. So did the money. Boosted by the optimism of publishers who imagined that an essentially dark, contrarian entertainment might somehow sell a zillion copies, I made enough to fund the writing of my next book. But the biggest surprise - the true measure of how little I'd heeded my own warning in The Twenty-Seventh City - was the failure of my culturally engaged novel to engage with the culture. I'd intended to provoke; what I got instead was 60 reviews in a vacuum. My appearance on KMOX was indicative. The announcer was a journeyman with a whisky sunburn and a heartrending comb-over who clearly hadn't read past chapter two. Beneath his boom mike he brushed at the novel's pages as though he hoped to absorb the plot transdermally. He asked me the questions that everybody asked me: How did it feel to get such good reviews? (It felt great, I said.) Was the novel autobiographical? (It was not, I said.) How did it feel to be a local kid returning to St Louis on a fancy book tour? It felt obscurely disappointing. But I didn't say this. I'd already realised that the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren't simply fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to a culture. The ambitious young fiction writer can't help noting that, in a recent USA Today survey of 24 hours in the life of American culture, there were 21 references to television, eight to film, seven to popular music, four to radio, and one to fiction ( The Bridges of Madison County ). The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce, has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen King. These are honourable writers; but no one doubts it was the size of their contracts that won them covers. The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority, and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it. The literary America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city's remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay and women's communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males. Postgraduate creative-writing programmes offered housing and workfare to the underemployed; a few crackpot city-loving artists continued to hole up in old warehouses; and visiting readers could still pay weekend visits to certain well- policed cultural monuments - the temple of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike, the Faulkner House, the Wharton Museum and Mark Twain Park. By the early 1990s, I was as depressed as the inner city of fiction. My second novel, Strong Motion , was a long, complicated story about a mid-western family in a world of moral upheaval, and this time, instead of sending my bombs in a Jiffy-Pak mailer of irony and understatement, as I had with The Twenty-Seventh City , I'd come out throwing rhetorical Molotov cocktails. But the result was the same: another report card with As and Bs from the reviewers. Meanwhile, my wife and I had reunited in Philadelphia. For two years we'd bounced around in three time zones, trying to find a pleasant, inexpensive place in which we didn't feel like strangers. Finally, after exhaustive deliberation, we'd rented a too expensive house in yet another depressed city. That we then proceeded to be miserable seemed to confirm beyond all doubt that there was no place in the world for fiction writers. In Philadelphia I began to make un-helpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I'd read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live, and perceiving in the three-digit product not so much an intimation of mortality (though the news on that front wasn't cheering) as a measure of the incom patibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life. All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologised for having stopped. A young acquaintance who had been an English major, when I asked her what she was reading, replied: "You mean linear reading? Like when you read a book from start to finish?" There's never been much love lost be-tween literature and the market. The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it's an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely re-usable, and, worst of all, unimprovable. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American political economy had set about consolidating its gains, enlarging its markets, securing its profits, and demoralising its few remaining critics. In 1993, I saw signs of the consolidation everywhere. I saw it in the swollen minivans and broadbeamed trucks that had replaced the automobile as the suburban vehicle of choice - these Rangers and Land Cruisers and Voyagers that were the true spoils of a war waged to keep American petrol cheaper than dirt, a war that had played like a 1,000-hour infomercial for high technology, a consumer's war dispensed through commercial television. I saw CNN holding hostage the travellers in airport lounges and the shoppers in supermarket checkout lines. Even as I was sanctifying the reading of literature, however, I was becoming so depressed that I could do little after dinner but flop in front of the TV. I could always find something delicious: M*A*S*H , Cheers , Homicide . Naturally, the more TV I watched, the worse I felt. If you're a novelist and even you don't feel like reading, how can you expect anybody else to read your books? I believed I ought to be reading, as I believed I ought to be writing a third novel. And not just any third novel. It had long been a prejudice of mine that putting a novel's characters in a dynamic social setting enriched the story that was being told; that the glory of the genre consisted of its spanning the expanse between private experience and public context. And what more vital context could there be than television's short-circuiting of that expanse? In the 19th century, when Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another's work, the novel was the pre-eminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today. The big, obvious reason for the decline of the social novel is that modern technologies do a much better job of social instruction. Television, radio and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In Cold Blood , has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly. Few serious novelists can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass of expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like ER and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity. The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens, would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensibilities. Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists. The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading. I'm able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feelings of fear and estrangement into my construction of her. If I knew her only through a video of Desperate Characters (Shirley MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the surficiality of film, and by MacLaine's star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better. Knowing MacLaine a little better, however, is what the country mainly wants. We live in a tyranny of the literal. To justify their claim on our attention, the organs of mass culture and information are compelled to offer something "new" on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. Although good novelists don't deliberately seek out trends, many of them feel a responsibility to pay attention to contemporary issues, and they now confront a culture in which almost all the issues are burned out almost all the time. Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage. The American writer today faces a cultural totalitarianism analogous to the political totalitarianism with which two generations of eastern-bloc writers had to contend. To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine. . . However sick with foreboding you feel inside, it's best to radiate confidence and to hope that it's infectious. When a writer says publicly that the novel is doomed, it's a sure bet his new book isn't going well; in terms of his reputation, it's like bleeding in shark-infested waters. Even harder to admit is depression. It's not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and self- delusion of the brave new McWorld. And these insights are the sole legacy of the social novelist who desires to represent the world not simply in its detail but in its essence, to shine light on the morally blind eye of the virtual whirlwind, and who believes that human beings deserve better than the future of attractively priced electronic panderings that is even now being conspired for them. Instead of saying I am depressed , you want to say I am right As you increasingly feel, as a novelist, that you are one of the last remaining repositories of depressive realism and of the radical critique of the therapeutic society that it represents, the burden of news-bringing that is placed on your art becomes overwhelming. You ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books? I can't pretend the mainstream will listen to the news I have to bring. I can't pretend I'm subverting anything, because any reader capable of decoding my subversive messages does not need to hear them. I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? Sophie Bentwood, for instance, has "candidate for Prozac" written all over her. No matter how gorgeous and comic her torments are, and no matter how profoundly human she appears in light of those torments, a reader who loves her can't help wondering whether perhaps treatment by a mental health- care provider wouldn't be the best course all round. By the spring of 1994 I was a socially isolated individual whose desperate wish was mainly to make some money. After my wife and I separated for the last time, I took a job teaching undergraduate fiction-writing at a small liberal arts college, and I loved the work. I was heartened by the skill and ambition of my students. Unfortunately, there's evidence that young writers today feel imprisoned by their ethnic or gender identities - discouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture in which television has conditioned us to accept only the literal testimony of the Self. And the problem is aggravated when fiction writers take refuge in university creative-writing programmes. Any given issue of the typical small literary magazine reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: "My Interesting Childhood," "My Interesting Life in a College Town," and "My Interesting Year Abroad". As a reader, I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience. Even though social reportage is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental by- product, I still like a novel that's alive and multivalent like a city. Publishing is now a subsidiary of Hollywood, and the blockbuster novel is a mass-marketable commodity, a portable substitute for TV. The persistence of a market for literary fiction exerts a useful discipline on writers, reminding us of our duty to entertain. But most novelists feel some level of discomfort with marketing the innately private experience of reading by means of a public persona - on book tours, on radio talk shows, on Barnes & Noble shopping bags and coffee mugs. The writer for whom the printed word is paramount is, ipso facto, an untelevisable personality, and it's instructive to recall how many of America's critically esteemed older novelists have chosen, in a country where publicity is otherwise sought like the Grail, to guard their privacy. Salinger, Roth, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Anne Tyler, Thomas Pynchon and Denis Johnson all give few or no interviews, do little if any teaching or touring, and in some cases decline even to be photographed. For a long time, I took a hard line on letting my work speak for itself. Not that I was exactly bombarded with invitations; but I refused to review for the Times, to write about writing, to go to parties. To speak extra- novelistically in an age of personalities seemed to me a betrayal; it implied a lack of faith in fiction's adequacy as communication and self-expression and so helped, I believed, to accelerate the public flight from the imagined to the literal. Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud. Silence in the 1990s seemed only to guarantee that I would be alone. And eventually it dawned on me that the despair I felt about the novel was less the result of my obsolescence than of my isolation. Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it. Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community of print requires solitude, after all. But the estrangement becomes much more profound, urgent and dangerous when that virtual community is no longer densely populated and heavily trafficked; when the saving continuity of literature itself is under electronic and academic assault; when your alienation becomes generic rather than individual, and the price of silence seems no longer to be obscurity but outright oblivion. In the past, when the life of letters was synonymous with culture, solitude was possible the way it was in cities where you could always, day and night, find the comfort of crowds outside your door. In a suburban age, when the rising waters of electronic culture have made each reader and each writer an island, it may be that we need to be more active in assuring ourselves that a community still exists. I used to distrust creative-writing departments for what seemed to me their artificial safety, just as I distrusted book clubs for treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socialising. As I grope for my own sense of community, I distrust both a little less now. I see the authority of the novel in the 19th and early 20th centuries as an accident of history - of having no competitors. Now the distance between author and reader is shrinking. Instead of Olympian figures speaking to the masses below, we have matching diasporas. Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever- increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness. This is an edited extract from " Why bother?", one of a collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen published by Fourth Estate, price pounds 16.99, on October 7. To order How to be Alone for pounds 14.99 plus p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-Franzen.1 When I got out of college, in 1981, I hadn't heard the news about the social novel's death. I didn't know that Philip Roth had long ago performed the autopsy, describing "American reality" as a thing that "stupefies . . . sickens . . . infuriates, and finally . . . is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents . . ." I was in love with literature and with a woman to whom I'd been attracted in part because she was a brilliant reader. I had lots of models for the kind of uncompromising novel I wanted to write. I even had a model for an uncompromising novel that had found a big audience: Catch-22 . Joseph Heller had figured out a way of outdoing the actuality, employing the illogic of modern warfare as a metaphor for the more general denaturing of American reality. That no challenging novel since Catch-22 had affected the culture anywhere near as deeply, just as no issue since the Vietnam War had galvanised so many alienated young Americans, was easily overlooked. In college, my head had been turned by Marxism, and I believed that "monopoly capitalism" (as we called it) abounded with "negative moments" (as we called them) that a novelist could trick Americans into confronting if only he could package his subversive bombs in a sufficiently seductive narrative. In the 19th century, when Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another's work, the novel was the pre-eminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today. The big, obvious reason for the decline of the social novel is that modern technologies do a much better job of social instruction. Television, radio and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In Cold Blood , has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly. Few serious novelists can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass of expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like ER and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity. The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens, would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensibilities. Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists. Unfortunately, there's evidence that young writers today feel imprisoned by their ethnic or gender identities - discouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture in which television has conditioned us to accept only the literal testimony of the Self. And the problem is aggravated when fiction writers take refuge in university creative-writing programmes. Any given issue of the typical small literary magazine reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: "My Interesting Childhood," "My Interesting Life in a College Town," and "My Interesting Year Abroad". As a reader, I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience. Even though social reportage is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental by- product, I still like a novel that's alive and multivalent like a city. - Jonathan Franzen.
Library Journal Review
Here's a family that will never be mistaken for the Royal Tennenbaums. Meet the Lamberts: Dad is a retired railroad man who is slipping into dementia; Mom is still trying to believe in the rosiest possible marriage and family life; and their grown children are each living out a catastrophe. The youngest son is failing miserably as a sort of screenwriter in Lithuania, the daughter is a chef of some accomplishment who can't seem to keep out of bed with just about anyone, and the oldest son is yelling at and withholding affection from his family just as his father did before him. The family home is in St. Jude (aptly named for the patron saint of hopeless causes). Enid, the wife and mother, wants the whole family together for one last Christmas before her husband, Alfred, slips beyond reach. Getting them all under the same roof even for a few hours is a massive undertaking. Franzen is a keen observer of the way the world works, and it is a tribute to his skill as a novelist that the listener remains interested in the craziness of these lives. Reader Dylan Baker brings these quirky characters to life. Recommended for fiction collections in public libraries. - Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
