Due to the average individual's preference to use things such as Amazon star ratings and reviews as an accurate benchmark of a book's quality, it's somewhat easy to think of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections as a polarizing work that has been received with both praise and scorn. However, this is where you'd be wrong, as it's won numerous high-profile literary awards, been included on basically every list of best English-language novels, was well-received and praised by fellow writers and most every literary critic, and has held up over time, being placed on oodles of "best books of the decade" lists. Why, then, does the popular reception of The Corrections seem so unenthusiastic, polarized, and harsh? My opinion: it's too damn real.

In The Corrections, Franzen has created what is certainly the most unfortunately realistic group of characters I have ever read in fiction. The parents are an aging, generally unhappy, couple with a lifetime of built up emotional baggage. Their adult children are each unhappy and mentally unhealthy in their own unique ways. The book is structured to provide a view into each character's psyche and history, and this allows the reader understand how they got to be where they are during the primary arch of the story. These back stories are woven in with the backbone of the novel, which is a contemporary story about (among other things) human relationships and old age.

The fundamental issue with The Corrections is that Franzen examines family relationships and the human experience through a brutally clear lens. Each character's story is profoundly negative and discouraging, every relationship is flawed, every conversation reveals a dysfunction -- it gets pretty overwhelming at times. It's so perfectly real that it drags you into it's deeply negative world, and you begin analyzing your own relationships through that same brutal lens: "Do *I* talk to my mom like that?" "Is this what *my* relationships are like?" You have to remind yourself that Franzen's world an incomplete, skewed picture, one that does not fully represent the intriciate nature of human relationships.

So why is The Corrections so good? It does everything fiction is supposed to do. It is frequently amusing, brutally honest, deeply insightful, and ultimately discouraging. It is expertly and cleverly written. It's captivating and emotionally moving. It's, objectively, a Great Work.

I think, honestly, that the "emotionally moving" thing is what makes some people hate it. It's moving, sure, but not positively. It makes you feel BAD. It makes you feel that all your relationships, and that you yourself, are deeply flawed. If you can't handle this -- if you want characters you want to be friends with -- look elsewhere. However, if you read a book to have your thoughts provoked, your views challenged, to have some emotional baggage removed from the storeroom, read this book. If you want to read some incredible use of the English language, read this book. If you want to be driven to laughter, frustration, and maybe even depression, read this book. But remember that it just might be a little too real for some to enjoy.