Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So this book is supposed to be on a par with Mann's 'Buddenbrooks' (well, it is according to Michael Cunningham on the cover of my paperback copy). Forget it (and please don't insult one of the greatest writers who ever lived). I had no trouble at all finishing the over 700 pages that 'Buddenbrooks' covers. But the only way to finish 'The Corrections' was quitting it, a decision I only postponed because on principle I never quit a book. So I struggled through 320 pages blindly ignoring the obvious fact that it wasn't going anywhere. Well, it wasn't. 'The Corrections' seems to be just the next book by a novelist who took a course in contemperary writing. All basic rules taught in such a course can be seen to full effect in this novel (or whatever you should call it). They run something like this, I imagine: 1. Avoid clear story lines at all times, but instead apply a garble of as many flashbacks and flash forwards as you can possibly fit in. 2. Annoy your reader with constant slow-motion, focussing on details of details, or on reflections on musings on thoughts of characters. Hallucinations are also great! The content or relevance of these are not an issue; the more trivial they seem the more suggestive of hidden depths they will be (and your reader, who is far less clever than you are, will never find out that there are no such hidden depths). Don't forget: banality is the hallmark of a contemporary novel! 3. Be very, very clever. Insert as many citable oneliners as you can. Don't worry if they are totally gratuitous ("Dry land lacked this z-axis"). Also, it is good to add many difficult words, a few in foreign languages, preferably. Don't ever say that 'things are quiet because father has taken to sleeping a lot'; better say that 'a Pax Somnis is descended on the household'. Doesn't that sound literary! And of course show off everything you (or your encyclopaedia) know: add little asides on say, Scandinavian history, Baltic politics, Dutch waterworks, psychofarmaceutical treatment or organ registration. 4. Don't bother with chapters or even paragraphs - just ramble on at will! Please wallow in the conviction that your novel is so engrossing the reader will never want to put it down, so no breaks are needed. Which, by the way, saves you the trouble of structuring your plot. Or better still, you don't even need one! 5. Use lots of similes. Far-fetched is always OK. Or you can be just plain ridiculous and, say, liken the act of intercourse to a model railroad engine tunneling up `warm and gently corrugated recesses'. 6. Avoid any trace of normality in your characters. A story becomes so much more interesting if people are paranoid, selfish, destructive, stark raving mad, abusive, addicted to drugs and porn, incontinent and generally dysfunctional! No character, not even a secondary one, should be without its great, dark tragedy. 7. Add gimmicks: a little picture of a logo here, a little diagram there, marked 'figure 1' - very sophisticated! 8. Of course sex should always be the clue to everything, which also gives you great opportunities to write very modern things with lots of four-letter words! You may even occasionally want to print these in capital letters. 9. Other, preferably revolting details involving bodily fluids or excrement are also very contemporary: use them! Well, you get the picture, and it isn't pretty. What Franzen tries to do has been done already, and so much better, by for instance Jay McInerney or Douglas Coupland. They prove that it is actually possible to write gripping novels about ordinary people, and that you can expose some of the tragedies of living a modern, urban life without reverting to self-conscious intellectualism, pedantry and forced 'literariness'; that you can even do so without boring your reader into a stupor. So please, don't waste your money on this book, as I unfortunately did!