From the National Book Award-winning author of "The Corrections," a collection of essays that reveal him to be one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics While the essays in this collection range in subject matter from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each one wrestles with the essential themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civil life and private dignity; and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Reprinted here for the first time is Franzen's controversial l996 investigation of the fate of the American novel in what became known as "the Harper's essay," as well as his award-winning narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, and a rueful account of his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections , a darkly comedic novel about family

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paulthe gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walterenvironmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family manshe was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katzoutré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rivalstill doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes?
In his first novel since The Corrections , Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom ’s intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

「當你走出去，和真實的人，甚或只是真實的動物發展真實的關係後，
你便會面臨非常真實的危險：最後可能交付出『愛』的危險。」
―強納森．法蘭岑
到遠方，是出走，是尋找，是開拓，也是歸屬
繼《如何獨處》後，法蘭岑再次以幽默的機鋒與銳利的洞察，
帶讀者前往荒島的遠方、觀點的遠方、思想的遠方，以及閱讀的遠方。
精彩內容：
★科技消費主義如何偽裝成「愛」，讓人們逃避所有可能的痛。
★帶著《魯賓遜漂流記》與好友的骨灰，法蘭岑開啟了一段差點回不來的荒島放逐。
★摯友大衛．華萊士的迷人風采，與其孤決又令人心碎的自盡之路。
★「先發展，後環保」的口號，實際「創造」的是環境的毀滅。
★「狩獵」是傳統文化的一部份，「無差別獵殺」卻是新時代的產物！
★小說家最討厭被問到哪四個問題？
★法蘭岑談艾莉絲．孟若「短篇」小說裡的「完整」人生，談她擅長的「事中之事」。
「我對鳥的愛儼然成為一個入口，通往心中一個重要但沒那麼自我中心的部分，我從不知道有這東西存在的地方。我不能再以地球居民的姿態一輩子漂流，不能再只管喜不喜歡而把承諾留給未來，反而被迫面對一個要不就坦然接受，要不就斷然拒絕的自我。這就是愛會對人做的事。」——強納森．法蘭岑
在這本深刻的演說和散文選集，強納森‧法蘭岑帶著煥然一新的力度回到縈繞心頭已久的主題，包括人和文學。無論是回憶他在賽普勒斯和違法獵鳥者的暴力衝突，省視心中對亦敵亦友的作家大衛‧華萊士自殺的感受，或是針對科技如何改變人們表達愛的方式提出動人而風趣的看法，這些文章都實現了法蘭岑「毫不隱瞞」的承諾。出自當代頂尖小說家之手，《到遠方》是部傑出而具啟發性的作品，記錄了一顆獨特而成熟的心靈與自我，與文學和當今一些最重要議題角力的過程。
名人推薦
「睿智、銳利的散文，在幾乎每一件事物中挖掘深刻的社會意義。」──《今日美國報》（USA Today）
「（法蘭岑的）寫作有種不炫技、近乎無自我的完美。」──萊夫‧葛羅斯曼（Lev Grossman），《時代》（Time）雜誌
「美妙絕倫的散文。」──《洛杉磯書評》（Los Angeles review of Books）
「一部多面相、啟迪人心的選集，《到遠方》實則帶領讀者更接近作者。」──《經濟學人》（The Economist）
「如同最好的小說，《到遠方》標出了一條告別孤獨的路。」──《基督教科學箴言報》（The Christian Science Monitor）

★《紐約時報》十大好書 ★史蒂芬金十大選書 ★《時代》雜誌年度小說第一
★大西洋月刊年度圖書 ★歐普拉讀書俱樂部選書 ★歐巴馬渡假選書
追求自由，就能得到幸福？
小說描寫柏格蘭這個家庭及其家族成員，並延伸到他們最親近的朋友、包括戀人，時間跨越多年一層層描繪這些人之間的關係。
柏格蘭家座落在明尼蘇達州聖保羅，這一帶正在變化著。沃爾特．柏格蘭在跨國企業集團3M任職。他的妻子佩蒂——一個不滿現狀的郊區母親——大學時代她是明星籃球員，婚後無工作，在家照顧兩個孩子：潔西嘉和喬伊。這個家庭看上去其樂融融，但家庭所賴以存在的情感基礎並不牢靠。
沃爾特的父親是個酒鬼，經營汽車旅館，家裡多半依賴他勤懇照料旅館，卻對他不表感激，他心中一直有着不滿之情。他與佩蒂的婚姻慢慢出現裂痕，當孩子長大後，他開始沉溺於一場堂吉訶德式的營救活動，深信自己將解救一種即將絕種的深藍色鳴鳥。佩蒂沒有工作，學生時代曾是籃球明星，婚後的佩蒂，通過酗酒，以及溺愛兒子喬伊排憂解愁，後來更重燃對大學時代另一個朋友的戀情，一個搖滾音樂家理查•卡茲，也是沃爾特的好友。
小說基本上延著這群人（沃爾特的父母、佩蒂的父母、孩子、孩子的戀人、鄰居、同學、同事等）而發展，法蘭岑對這一切只需要隨便勾勒幾筆，人物形象便躍然紙上。他對待書中人物的態度既溫和又無情，準確寫出21世紀的美國人心靈，寫出這些追求著幸福，卻總在失落感中徘徊的人們。法蘭岑筆下這群人對自由的追求似乎並不能帶來幸福，而最後因為營救蔚藍鶯而捲入華府醜聞的沃爾特，會對自由美國做出怎麼樣的回應呢？會對他自己似乎破碎的人生做出怎麼樣的決定呢？
《自由》這個書名，起源於作者希望透過這個故事，釋放自己，讓自己自由。但是追尋自由會為人帶來甚麼？自由自在就是幸福？透過小說，法蘭岑有全新的答案。
世紀小說的誕生 The novel of the century
2010年8月23號，十年不曾以作家當封面人物的《時代》雜誌，以「偉大的美國小說家」為封面大標題，推選法蘭岑為當期封面人物。當年八月初，歐巴馬總統看完法蘭岑的最新小說《自由》樣書，讚嘆：「太驚人了！」這本書隨後在八月底出版，隨即登上紐約時報及各大書店暢銷冠軍。一時之間（其實延燒到年底），美國人到處問人：「你看過《自由》了嗎？」
法蘭岑不是第一次掀起媒體風潮，2001年，他就曾經以第三部小說《糾正》豔驚全美，不但創下文學小說暢銷三百萬冊的紀錄，並拿下美國國家書卷獎，還鬧出轟動的歐普拉vs.法蘭岑事件（傳媒女王與純文學明星彼此較量？）。相距九年後，平日深居簡出、不修邊幅的法蘭岑交出了第四本長篇小說，這一次，美國人先問：「他能超越獲得滿堂采的前作《糾正》嗎？」天生不適應傳媒喧囂的寫作個性，這次媒體還願意捧著他嗎？
法蘭岑做到了，讀過《自由》的驚歎聲此起彼落，各大媒體書評相繼叫好，《紐約時報》說：「這是法蘭岑迄今為止最觸動人心的小說——這既是一部關於問題家庭的精彩記錄，又是一幅不可磨滅的時代畫像。」英國《衛報》則激動地寫道：「他是文學天才……完全與其他當代小說在不同層次上……《自由》是年度之作，世紀小說。」九月中，歐普拉登場，這位影響美國千萬讀者選書的媒體女王公開表示已看完這本書，並對著電視機觀眾大呼：「這本書太優美了。這絕對是偉大的小說！」同時宣布這本書是她讀書節目的壓軸首選。兩人一笑泯恩仇，再度成了讀者熱烈討論的八卦話題。
11月24號的感恩節前夕，美國最具書評權威的《紐約時報》選出「年度最受注目的百本好書」（100 Notable Books）。該報負責選書的三大資深書評家也推出個人前十名最愛，《自由》不出所料，名登榜上。隨後出刊周日書評版從百大裡挑出年度十大，《自由》排名年度小說第一。其他媒體包括《出版者週刊》（Publisher Weekly），《School Library Journal》，具份量的網站Salon藝文評論，美國公共電台的文化節目…….都在年度書榜中一致推崇《自由》。隨後本書並入圍美國國家書評獎決選。
說《自由》是年度之書顯然不能表達這本書給人的震撼，正如《時代》雜誌特約撰稿人Lev Grossman對法蘭岑的描寫 ：「他或許不是美國最有錢、最有名的作家，但他絕對是最有抱負的一個。他就像那些他沉迷觀賞的、數量逐日減少的鳥類一樣，他是瀕臨絕種的動物——堅持寫作要有思想內容的小說家。」這些情感濃烈的字句，我們相信凡是親自讀過《自由》的人，便能感同身受。
精裝版特別介紹
中文版《自由》的出版，為了呈現該書世紀小說的地位，邀請國內得獎無數的設計師王志弘出任限量典藏精裝版設計師。這本小說敘事手法有19世紀托爾斯泰等大師的宏觀寫法，但不失對現代人心理(婚姻的、社會得)精湛觀察，對現下社會有一針見血的洞察力。
王志弘以傳統打字機字樣呈現書名，錯誤重複的打印造成失落失序的美感。以進口丹迪黑紙裱裝精裝書封，打凹呈現作者簽名字樣。書衣則以紙紋復古的瑪芬紙與打字字體圖顯本書的細膩高雅。
限量精裝版《自由》採線裝裝訂，方背硬殼精裝。
書衣：瑪芬紙(白)。
書封裱紙：日本丹迪紙(黑)。
扉頁：日本丹迪紙(黑)。
精裝書頭布：全黑。
內頁：日本書籍紙。

Über die Einsamkeit des Schriftstellers in der Gesellschaft schrieb Wolfgang Borchert einmal, dass diese eine Last, ein Privileg, und eine Verantwortung zugleich darstelle. Von ihrer hohen Warte aus, so Borchert, sehen Literaten mehr als gewöhnliche Mitmenschen, deren Blick meist zu sehr vom Alltag verstellt ist. Doch ist die Aussicht nicht nur ein Genuss, sondern vielmehr auch dringliche Aufforderung, das Gesehene jenen mitzuteilen, die dazu nicht in der Lage sind. Und das gilt vor allem für all die Unzulänglichkeiten, Missstände und Ungerechtigkeiten, die den Schriftstellern ins Auge fallen mögen.
Borcherts Vorstellung von der moralischen und gesellschaftlichen Verantwortung, die sich mit literarischer Sensibilität verbünden sollte, mag den meisten heute ziemlich anachronistisch erscheinen. Dass sie in der Literatur -- in der deutschen zumal -- eher selten geworden oder, was noch schlimmer ist, als Aufforderung zum hemmungslosen Moralisieren missverstanden wird, ist selbst ein Missstand, den es durchaus literarisch zu hinterfragen lohnte. Natürlich haben sich die Zeiten geändert, und wenn Jonathan Franzen heute von der Einsamkeit des Schreibens spricht, dann ist damit weniger die Entrückung der Literatur vom Leser, sondern eher das Gegenteil, die Entfremdung des Lesers von der Literatur gemeint. Auch Franzen meint, die Literatur werde heute mehr denn je gebraucht -- doch sie wird immer weniger beachtet, weil sie hinter den Spektakeln der Bildmedien verschwindet.
So jedenfalls klagte der amerikanische Autor bereits 1996 in einem viel gerühmten Essay, der das Herzstück dieser Sammlung äußerst lesenswerter Artikel, Aufsätze und Rezensionen bildet. Inzwischen ist Franzen mit seinem zu recht auch in Deutschland gefeierten dritten Roman, Die Korrekturen, ein international bekannter und anerkannter Schriftsteller geworden, und seine Lesungen rund um die Frankfurter Buchmesse 2002 waren sämtlich ausverkauft. Doch auch, wenn Franzen im Vorwort seiner Anleitung zum Einsamsein einige seiner recht verbitterten Thesen der 90er-Jahre relativiert, immer noch behauptet er mit einiger Überzeugungskraft, dass Literatur Aufmerksamkeit nur mit hoher Qualität erringen kann. Statt Anpassung an den Markt der schnellen Sensationen und billigen Effekte fordert Franzen, ähnlich wie sein Kollege (und Freund) David Foster Wallace, die Rückbesinnung der Literatur auf das Literarische selbst: auf die Kraft der Sprache, den Sog der Erzählung und die Macht der Identifikation.
Während Franzen dies in Die Korrekturen eindrucksvoll gelingt, zeigen ihn die Essays in seiner Anleitung zum Einsamsein als ebenso feinfühligen Beobachter persönlicher Schicksale wie scharfsinnigen Kritiker amerikanischer Verhältnisse. Die erstaunliche Spannbreite von Franzens Themen wird dabei nur übertroffen von der Souveränität, mit welcher er diese vor seinen Lesern ausbreitet. Die "erste Lektion, die einem das Leser erteilt," heißt es an einer Stelle, "handelt von der Kunst des Einsamseins". Für diese Kunst hat Jonathan Franzen eine vorzügliche Anleitung geschrieben. --Peter Schneck -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

'The loveliest -- and certainly the most human -- book about pop music I've ever read ! A delightful and humane soap opera, a real page-turner, full of rounded and entirely recognisable characters.' Jon Ronson, Daily Telegraph THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF BRITPOP -- BLUR, OASIS, ELASTICA, SUEDE & TONY BLAIR Beginning in 1994 and closing in the first months of 1998, the UK passed through a cultural moment as distinct and as celebrated as any since the war. Founded on rock music, celebrity, boom-time economics and fleeting political optimism -- this was 'Cool Britannia'. Records sold in their millions, a new celebrity elite emerged and Tony Blair's Labour Party found itself, at long last, returned to government. Drawing on interviews from all the major bands -- including Oasis, Blur, Elastica and Suede -- from music journalists, record executives and those close to government, The Last Party charts the rise and fall of the Britpop movement. John Harris was there; and in this gripping new book he argues that the high point of British music's cultural impact also signalled its effective demise -- If rock stars were now friends of the government, then how could they continue to matter? Britpop in numbers: /There were an astonishing 2.6 million ticket applications for the Oasis gig at Knebworth in 1996. 1 in 24 of the British public wanted to see them play. In the end the band played to 250,000 fans across two nights with a guest list that ran to 7,000. /'Definitely, Maybe', Oasis's debut album, went straight to No 1, selling 100,000 copies in 4 days and outselling the Three Tenors in second place by a factor of 50% /On its first day in the shops Oasis's second album, 'What's The Story, Morning Glory', was selling at a rate of 2 copies a minute through HMV's London stores. / By 1997 Creation Records (which had been founded 12 years earlier with a bank loan of GBP1,000 by an ex-British Rail Clerk Alan McGee) announced a turnover of GBP36million thanks almost entirely to one band: Oasis.

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award
An American Library Association Notable Book
Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D------ College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a "transgressive" lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man--or so Gary hints.
Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.

In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes―both human and literary―that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we’ve come to expect from Franzen.
Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

It’s December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high school class, has veered into the era’s counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in Crossroads, has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its workings, is truly at the center.
By turns comic and harrowing, a tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Complete in itself, set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years.
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it “a masterpiece of American fiction” and lauded its illumination, “through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew.”
In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen’s implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn’t omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China’s economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calami- ties, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world.
Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and
is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love.
Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit,
provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’s tale of growing up, squirming in his own über-sensitive skin, from a “small and fundamentally ridiculous person,” into an adult with strong inconvenient passions. Whether he’s writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka’s fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, or the web of connections between bird watching, his all-consuming marriage, and the problem of global warming, Franzen is always feelingly engaged with the world we live in now. The Discomfort Zone is a wise, funny, and gorgeously written self-portrait by one of America’s finest writers.

The winner of the National Book Award, the New York Times No.1 Bestseller and the worldwide literary sensation, 'The Corrections' has established itself as a truly great American novel. The Lamberts -- Enid and Alfred and their three grown-up children -- are a troubled family living in a troubled age. Alfred is ill and as his condition worsens the whole family must face the failures, secrets and long-buried hurts that haunt them if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs. Stretching from the Midwest in the mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of globalised greed, The Corrections brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty into wild collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and New Economy millionaires. It confirms Jonathan Franzen's position as one of the most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul currently at work.

"The Corrections" is 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 of 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 Corrections" brings 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 healthcare, and globalised 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.