Recommendations
Books Like The Corrections
What to read after The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) is the great American family novel of the 2000s — the Lamberts of St. Jude, and what happens to a midwestern family built on postwar certainties when those certainties collapse. If you were drawn to its intelligence, its moral seriousness, and its willingness to be both scathing and compassionate about the same people, these novels will sustain that feeling.
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Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's companion novel — Walter and Patty Berglund in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., across three decades; the same ambition as The Corrections, the same three-dimensional characterization, focused on the liberal professional class of the 2000s rather than the midwestern Protestant family of the postwar era
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Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Frank and April Wheeler in 1950s Connecticut suburbs — the ancestor of The Corrections in American literary fiction about the family and the American promise; Yates was doing in 1961 what Franzen is doing in 2001: showing the gap between what American life promised and what it actually delivered
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
A college professor of Hitler studies in a midwestern college town facing a chemical disaster and the fear of death — one of the defining American novels of the 1980s; Franzen is in direct dialogue with DeLillo's generation of American novelists, and White Noise asks many of the same questions about consumer capitalism and denial that The Corrections does
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The foundational American novel about the gap between the promise and the reality of American life; Franzen belongs to a tradition that runs from Fitzgerald through Yates through DeLillo, and The Corrections is the most fully realized expression of that tradition at the beginning of the twenty-first century
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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four friends from a Massachusetts college and the long shadow of Jude St. Francis's traumatic childhood — the other defining American literary novel of the 2010s; different in subject and tone from The Corrections but the same commitment to taking characters seriously across decades and the same willingness to be formally ambitious
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The Interestings
by Meg Wolitzer
Six friends who met at an arts camp in 1974 and what happens to their relationships and their sense of themselves across the following forty years — closer in structure and tone to The Corrections than almost any other American novel of the period; Wolitzer is interested in the same things Franzen is: what we owe each other, what success means, what marriage costs
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The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women in three different eras — Virginia Woolf in 1923, a suburban housewife in 1951, a New York editor in 1999 — each connected to Mrs. Dalloway; one of the formal innovations that made literary fiction of the 1990s and 2000s possible; the novel that showed what could be done with the multiple-strand, multiple-era structure Franzen deploys in The Corrections
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Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a former high school basketball star, trying and failing to escape his life in a Pennsylvania suburb in 1959 — the first volume of Updike's Rabbit tetralogy; the midcentury American ancestor of The Corrections, mapping the same territory of failed promise and domestic entrapment with the same quality of moral attention
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