The Corrections

It's a very high number, number five.

That book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

The Corrections is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month.

The novel, in addition to becoming a much-discussed bestseller, won the National Book Award.

It was a Pulitzer finalist.

It was an Oprah Book Club pick until it was not.

It's also a book that came out just a week before 9/11.

You could not think of a more terrible time to try to promote and sell a novel, and yet The Corrections was an instant success, perhaps because to many it represented the end of a pre-9/11 America.

If you're interested in joining us over on Zero to Well-Read, r- really in general, please come join us.

Recently in the feed we have The Corrections, uh, with Rob Harvilla of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, which is now Indefinite Number of Songs That Explain Subsequent Decades-

Yes

... which we're all thrilled for.

But today we are taking a deep dive into a family that actually is exactly that.

We're talking about Jonathan Franzen's 2001 masterpiece, The Corrections.

Such a massive book.

And since you're joining us for this deep dive, you likely already know the basic architecture of the Lambert family and the massive cultural footprint this book left behind.

It's agonizingly real.

But I want to push on the core concept of the book here.

We know the title, The Corrections, has a double meaning.

Right.

How do you do that? Like, is this something that you're making up as you go or are you outlining and it's like kind of preconceived or...

Well, there was something resembling a plausible proposal for this book, unlike the previous two, The Corrections and Freedom, where the book bore essentially no resemblance to the proposal I'd had and tried to raise some money on.

This time around, if you read the proposal, you'd say, oh, well, that's kind of the book he was imagining writing.

I did have a very conscious intention of going back and doing something more like the first two novels, because I do love plot.

And I felt like, well, now that I've written these...

Corrections and Freedom are plotted, but they're really just totally character foreground.

And I wanted to go back to something where the plot structure of the book itself carried meaning.

and felt that I could do it better now.

He had a bestseller.

I think it was called The Corrections years ago.

I didn't read it, but there was an interview with him, and he would only type on a laptop that did not have any Wi-Fi capability because he knew.

It's sort of like that self-restriction because he knew, you know, if I have Internet, I'm going to be checking it so that – that's self-limiting or trying to remove ourselves from distractions plays a role.

okay.

So one of the answers was The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

One of them was When Pride Still Mattered by David Maraniss.

And one of them is Patriot's Media Guide.

Yeah, I know.

Well, obviously, the media guide is Reese.

What are the other two? When Pride Still Mattered by David Maraniss and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

I

I said it on the show.

I think it's true that Franzen is underrated now, especially the corrections.

And it hits a quarter of a century later as hard as it hit 25 years ago.

It is... excellent and sharp and funny and so much weirder than i remembered and i mean i thought it was good when i was in my 20s but when you are a middle-aged person reading these stories about middle-aged people dealing with their aging parents and reckoning with all the mess of midlife and the mom who just wants one last christmas with the whole family together and can't you just give her that It's potent stuff.