Recommendations
Books Like The Corrections
Best books to read after The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is a National Book Award–winning multigenerational family novel — Alfred Lambert's Parkinson's disease and Enid's last Christmas, seen through five perspectives. These recommendations extend the experience through Franzen's other novels and through the tradition of the big American family novel.
- 1Buy
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's companion novel — another big American family story, following the Berglunds through thirty years of marriage, parenting, and environmental politics; the natural next read after The Corrections.
- 2Buy
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Roth's Pulitzer-winning novel about the Dream — a Newark athlete whose perfect American life is destroyed by his daughter's radicalism; the closest parallel to The Corrections in ambition, moral scope, and its meditation on what happens to American idealism.
- 3Buy
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections itself — listed here to note that the novel rewards rereading; the first read follows the plot, the second notices the moral architecture.
- 4Buy
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's novel about a professor of Hitler Studies in a Midwestern town — the same satirical attention to the American middle class and its consumer culture, with an airborne toxic event as the Corrections' equivalent catastrophe.
- 5Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenides's debut novel — five daughters in a Michigan suburb, observed by neighborhood boys; shares The Corrections' interest in family dysfunction observed from outside and the gap between surface and interior.
- 6Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four friends in New York over decades — an ambitious, emotionally extreme account of friendship and trauma that shares The Corrections' interest in what constitutes a family and what is owed its members.
- 7Buy
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
A missionary and his family in the Congo — another big American family novel organized around the catastrophic consequences of a patriarch's certainty, told through five perspectives.
- 8Buy
Saturday
by Ian McEwan
McEwan's novel about a London neurosurgeon on a single day — shares The Corrections' interest in a successful professional whose inner life is more complicated than his surface confidence suggests.
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