The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Pleasurelines Cruise Ship

The Pleasurelines cruise that the senior Lamberts take is meant to be a diversion, but it is one on which they are trapped. The cruise ship is full of senior citizens, all of whom have different ways of coping with their old age. On one extreme end, there are the Söderblads, a Swedish couple who focus only on frivolity and pleasure. On the other end, there is Sylvia Roth, a tough-minded woman who prides herself on facing the central tragedy of her life—the murder of her daughter—head on.

The fact that the boat is traveling north, toward the Arctic, gives a literal and metaphorical darkness to the setting. The boat is meant to symbolize both death and the denial of death: a relentless progression toward the cold and dark and the ways in which people distract themselves from this movement. Although Alfred’s condition deteriorates during this cruise, he retains a sense of perspective that the more seemingly-alert passengers lack. While “alone on top of the world”—standing on the boat’s top deck, from which he will shortly fall—he registers the remoteness and impersonality of the northern landscape: “In the forests that stretched west to the limits of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air’s supernal clarity, there was nothing local. Odd to glimpse infinity precisely in a finite curve, eternity precisely in the seasonal” (330).

Financial Markets

The Corrections takes place during a financial boom market, and its title has a clear double meaning. It refers both to the financial market correcting itself—that is, crashing after a boom—and to the Lambert family’s constant attempts to correct one another, either by example or by direct interference.

The novel suggests that in the case of both finance and family, there is only so much correction that is possible. Tellingly, the forays of the Lamberts into financial markets involve significant uncertainty, with each child making a risky gamble: Denise on a restaurant (as well as on Chip, with the loans she provides him), Gary on an experimental therapy, and Chip on selling a country as a product. The booming economy creates a sense of anxiety and instability that is ultimately worse than the market corrections, which turn out—after much doomful prophesying—to be mild. Likewise, Enid realizes in the book’s last chapter that “[a]ll of her corrections had been for naught. He was as stubborn as the day she’d met him” (566). This realization brings Enid some relief, as well as regret; it restores her to herself and her human limits.

The Brain

The brain is evoked literally in this novel, in a neurological treatment that is about to be put on the market. Alfred Lambert, whose own mind is failing him, has developed a patent that helped to create this treatment. The treatment claims to be able to fix the brain quickly and in myriad ways; in an investors meeting that Denise and Gary Lambert attend, the scientist behind the treatment gives a video presentation of how it works. While this presentation is full of impressive-sounding jargon, it is also clumsy and silly. The scientist himself (“Earl ‘Curly’ Eberle”) is an unimposing figure, and the presentation has him traveling around a brain model in a wheelchair (185).

The brain appears elsewhere in the novel in a more metaphorical way. The Lamberts’ household is compared to “the mind of a depressed person” (267), with its few scattered lights and lack of activity. In this same section, the omniscient narrator theorizes that “[t]he waking mind was like the light in a house […] Consciousness was to brain as family was to house” (267). The brain here is closer to a source of light than to the “sashimi”-like brain that surrounds Dr. Eberle (185); it is something that cannot be diagrammed or quantified.

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The Lambert children must cope with their father’s increasing senility; they must also cope with his limitations as a parent and the resulting Familial Dysfunction throughout their childhoods. Ultimately, Alfred does not take the neurological treatment; this is because his children have realized the extent of his senility, and the treatment suddenly seems brutal and far-fetched. It focuses on his brain but not on his consciousness, and shows the limitations of the marketplace and scientific data in resolving messy human problems.