The Corrections Reading Order

The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen is a multigenerational family novel following the Lambert family — parents Alfred and Enid in their Midwestern home, and their three adult children Chip, Gary, and Denise — as Enid tries to organize one last Christmas with the whole family before Alfred's Parkinson's disease makes it impossible. Alfred has spent his life building a structure of orderliness and self-denial; his children have spent their adult lives both escaping that structure and reproducing it in different forms. Franzen weaves together the domestic and the global — scenes from a Lithuanian financial collapse, a Chip in Brussels, a pharmaceutical subplot for Alfred's dementia — and won the National Book Award with this novel in 2001, the same year it appeared on Oprah's Book Club.