My apologies for this week’s lack of posts.    I have been suffering my annual severe winter cold, which seems to be making the rounds around here, and have not felt up to posting.     I apologize also for being unable to credit one of the books blogs I read for recommending to me The Corrections,  Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel.    Chip Lambert is an humanities professor at a cozy New England college who is shocked to find himself fired ignomiously in a hale of sexual harassment allegations following an affair gone wrong with one of his students.    As the novel opens, Chip is hosting a lunch at his Manhattan apartment for his parents, Alfred and Enid who are in town to embark on a cruise ship for a fall foliage cruise.

On a whim,  Chip abandons the luncheon, leaving it to his sister Denise, a successful chef-restauranteur in Philadelphia, to feed his parents and get them to their ship.    He soon signs up with Gitanas, a politician from Lithuania who is creating a web site to fleece investors into sending money and is soon on a plane to Vilnius where he proves quite adept at salesmanship and PR and revenues soon soar.

As Chip is launched in this endeavor we then encounter long back stories, first of Chip’s brother Gary and Gary’s rich and demanding wife Caroline and their three children,  then of  Chip’s sister Denise and her wild success in the kitchen and string of failed relationships with both men and women, and then finally of Chip’s parents,  Alfred and Enid the very Midwestern couple from Saint Jude, Illinois.    Alfred has Parkinson’s disease and suffering from increasingly frightening delusions and Enid struggling to make do with much less money than she had expected.    The novel culminates in Enid getting her long  held, much desired ‘last Christmas in Saint Jude’ wherein all three of her children return home for the holiday, after which Alfred is placed in a nursing home and then later dies.

This seemed to me a very long book and took me many weeks to read.   It has all the heft of Stephen King in verbose mode and an emotional depth and detail that brings to mind the novels of Pat Conroy.    I was very glad to finally finish it and am glad to have read it,  though I’m not honestly sure yet whether I like it or not.     If you enjoy intense and emotionally deep novels,  The Corrections is Recommended.  Buy Now $5.95