Confession: for a long time I thought this book was going to be about jail.

Get it – corrections?

I don’t know why I thought that. I think I had it mixed up in my head with The Reader or something, which isn’t about jail but is fairly bleak, and so I had this sort of POW, Holocaust thing attached to it, rather than the satire it is. I finally found out it wasn’t about jail, and I really wanted to read it. And then I read that Franzen told Oprah to go take a flying leap when she wanted to add this book to her Book Club, and I really wanted to read it. Especially when she called him ‘elitist, so there.’ (I don’t know about the ‘so there.’ It’s implicit, if you ask me.)

So anyway. The Corrections is not about jail, The Corrections is about a dysfunctional modern family. “Is there any other kind?” you ask. Well, no, probably not. But a book about a perfectly functioning family would be a very short book. It would also be total, total fiction. And boring.

The story starts with Chip Lambert, a college professor who is toiling away at a screenplay that he at first believes is brilliant but rapidly realizes, after giving it to a high-powered movie exec, probably isn’t. It’s a stack of paper he desperately wants back in order to make the titular “corrections” that he believes will save the story and, for once, allow him some success. Chip has a few issues with the media and society in general, and spends most of his days trying to get his students to realize that pop culture is filled with Corporate Agendas and Hidden Messages. His students don’t appreciate Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky as much as Chip does, though that doesn’t seem to stop Chip from starting an affair with one of them. Long story short, everything self-destructs, Chip loses his job and ends up working in Lithuania.

Meanwhile, his parents, Enid and Alfred, are facing their own issues. Alfred is struggling with the onset of Parkinson’s disease and dementia, and Enid is struggling with her embarrassment and inability to deal with a future that doesn’t match her vision of twilight years spent surrounded by a loving family.

But it doesn’t stop there. Chip’s siblings are also battling personal demons and lives filled with upheaval. His brother Gary is, despite appearing to have everything, hopelessly depressed. His sister Denise, who seems, on the surface, to have everything under control, has made some seriously questionable decisions (the kind you think only Chip could make) that have left her life in ruins.

What it all seems to boil down to for the Lamberts is a the modern family’s impossible search for happiness. Their relationships are often empty and unfulfilling, their lives filled with stuff. The book traces the family from the early days of Enid and Alfred’s courtship, through Chip, Gary, and Denise’s childhoods, to the “one last Christmas” Enid is dying for them to spend together. In the meantime, Franzen fills in the corners with disquieting accounts of big business, whose benevolent message, as usual, hides something deeper.

The “corrections” in the book refer to far more than the editing of Chip’s screenplay. Every Lambert is trying to “correct” something – unhappiness, loneliness, missed opportunities. Each other. In the end, we can realize it’s an impossible task, even if they can’t.

So totally not about jail.