The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
George Eliot believed that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot”. Franzen’s highly regarded novel, The Corrections, allows us a complete immersion and contact with a dysfunctional but highly recognisable middle-class family called the Lamberts. The matriarch of the family is Enid, who is struggling to cope with the demands of caring for her husband Albert, who is struggling with dementia and Parkinson’s. She is powered by a strong sense of optimism and nags at all her children to convene for “one last Christmas” at their Midwestern homestead. Her children all have their own battles. Denise, the youngest, is a talented chef with a penchant for romantic entanglements that sabotage her life. Gary, the eldest, is married with three children and has a lucrative job in banking. Chip, the middle child, is a failed academic and a Marxist devotee currently working as an aide to a Lithuanian conman. Enid’s brood are all present for the “last Christmas” but the day is stained with the siblings’ resentments, misunderstandings and by the accelerating decline of Albert. “After breakfast the hours passed in the sickishness, the invalid waiting of a major holiday.” The Christmas scenes in this novel are not all mistletoe and wine and awash with the seasonal sentimentality of Dickens. They show us real struggles and human difficulties that lurk behind the seasonal cheer of Christmas and help us to manage and correct our own expectations of the season of good will with a dollop of reality.

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