Book review: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
This is the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen , first published on September 4, 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This was exactly one week prior to 9/11, a fact that all of the retrospective reviews now discussing The Corrections will note. I purchased my paperback edition a couple of years ago, because I thought I should read it. I didn't know about the books upcoming 25th anniversary and it got stuck, unread, on my bookshelf. In 2013 I read Freedom which I purchased primarily for the blue bird, a Cerulean Warbler, on the cover. I knew that Franzen was a birder from reading a couple of his New Yorker essays. Freedom kept my attention, but there were a few things I didn't like. It seemed to me to be full of character issues; just one of which I remember was the unlikely relationship between the father character, Walter, with a young Indian woman. The relationship didn't work for me because...