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What it argues
Jonathan Franzen's third novel, published in 2001 and winner of the National Book Award, follows the Lambert family across three adult children and their aging parents, Alfred and Enid, through the late 1990s. Enid wants one last family Christmas at the family home in the fictional Midwestern city of St. Jude before Alfred's Parkinson's disease makes everything impossible. The novel cuts between each family member's plotline — Chip in New York burning his academic career; Gary in Philadelphia managing his depression and his difficult marriage; Denise in Philadelphia cooking her way through professional success and personal wreckage — before drawing them all back to St. Jude for the ending.
The novel is structurally traditional — omniscient third person, recognizable family drama — but it operates at a much higher temperature than most family novels. Franzen brings a Dickensian appetite for social satire (dot-com excess, pharmaceutical cures for everything, the managed-care infantilization of the old) and a Tolstoyan commitment to interiority: every major character gets a long, unflinching passage inside their own head. Alfred's Parkinson's chapters are the most formally audacious sections, depicting a mind losing its grip on reality in prose that destabilizes accordingly.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Lamberts each carry a version of the family's pathologies — control, denial, performance — while being unable to see this clearly in themselves.
- 2.
Alfred's Parkinson's gives the novel its emotional spine: the horror of watching a difficult father become vulnerable is something Franzen refuses to make sentimental.
- 3.
Franzen treats the 1990s prosperity and its technologies — Prozac, the dot-com boom, managed-care psychiatry — as a backdrop of managed unreality against which the family's actual suffering plays out.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist born in 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois. His first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), established him as a serious literary novelist. The Corrections (2001) won the National Book Award and sold millions of copies worldwide, making him one of the most prominent American novelists of his generation. His subsequent novel Freedom (2010) was another bestseller. He has also published essay collections including How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone.
