The Corrections

Written by Jonathan Franzen
Read by Dylan Baker
Published by Simon & Schuster Audio

Unabridged: No.

Meet the Lamberts. They're all insane in their own special way, but isn't that just the way it is with families? Patriarch Alfred appears to have given up on life for some reason no one can fathom and is slowly slipping away into the farther reaches of dementia. Matriarch Enid's affections flit about between her children as she tries to stomach living with her distant husband, all the while wanting just one more Christmas with the family at home. Eldest son Gary is in deep denial about his depression, paranoid in his certainty that his wife and kids know--certainly must know that he's somehow gone awry. Other son Chip has a tremendous breast fixation, which is all right until it outnumbers the word "the" in his latest screenplay. And finally, daughter Denise can't seem to make up her mind what team she's playing on, all the while making potentially career-destroying seductions.

I made a bit of a joke out of Franzen with the whole Oprah Book Club debacle. I, then as now, have no concept of how someone would potentially throw away his connection with such a book-buying monster as the Oprah Overmind can provide--and from nothing more than wanting to be more hip than the last guy. Like I said, my opinion of the situation has not changed. But now, I can have an opinion about the work itself, and the opinion is this: it's actually pretty damn good.

Franzen takes five main characters and hops about with them between different locales (Philadelphia to Lithuania), different timelines and different states of mind with relative ease. You're never more off-kilter than the author meant for you to be, and his finesse with this shows. The characters are extremely well crafted, and fully three-dimensional, so that--hey, we know they're completely screwed in the head, but we as readers can identify with that and thus have an attachment to them. It's not just the characters that Franzen is tiltingly critical at, but it's the situations as well. He never comes right out and persecutes what's going on, but gives us the information we need to understand the gist just fine. It's an odd thing to have such a soft and thudding touch at the same time, but in Franzen's hands it works amazingly well.

If there's a drawback to the content here, it's that the ending seems to peter to a halt, and one that seems incongruous given the book up until to that point. It feels rushed, summarized--and having not read the book itself I honestly can't tell you if that's just the way it happened or if perhaps the abridgement is at fault. But regardless, the characters are strong enough and you care enough to stick it through to find out what happens.

Selling this book every inch of the way, though, is reader Dylan Baker. Baker is yet another of those grand character actors whose name you don't know but when pointed out to you you say "Ohhhhhh! HIM!" He delivers one of the best non-author readings I've probably ever heard. Character voices are distinct and the characters themselves are acted out perfectly. He even busts out accents (including one from the aforementioned Lithuania) that are pretty impressive. I had no idea the man was into doing audiobooks before now, but this showing was good enough to make me seek out books for his name, no matter what the content.

The only way this could have been better is if it had been unabridged, and that's saying something if that's my biggest qualm. Recommended for the performance and for the book itself, it's caused the actual book to make it on to my needs-to-be-read list.

Content: A-
Readings: A+

Review submitted by Widgett