The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

Phew! I made it through to the end of The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)! I started it with great expectations, since some of the reviews are fantastic and a friend of mine whose judgement I trust loved it. I found it painful. Franzen can certainly write well, he is witty and funny. But I found that unfortunately his writing turned too often into verbal diarrhea. In fact I felt as if Franzen was pleasing himself instead of trying – even a little – to please his readers. It's writing that draws attention to itself, something that I can't stand. Each of the main characters in the book is damn awful, and impossible to like (to say the least). There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, except that reading more than five hundred pages about their lives when you don't care the least about them quickly becomes a chore. There's also heaps of secondary characters who muddle the story. Having said that, I must agree that Franzen has a knack of getting you into the characters' head, of making you feel you somehow understand them. As a book that aims to criticise society, it does a good job, but couldn't it have done so while providing readers with (a little) pleasure at the same time? The Corrections was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also attracted attention when it was selected for Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, but Franzen later expressed worries that this selection could detract male readers from buying the book. It was subsequently taken off the Club's list. Oprah obviously forgave him because she picked his latest novel, Freedom, as her 64th Book Club selection. And yes, you guessed right, I won't be reading it.