Having read Freedom and been mostly disappointed by the great white hope of American Lit, I was sad to see The Corrections on my MA reading list. I shouldn’t have been. Where Freedom is a largely laborious read with at least one dubious narrative choice (a character writing her autobiography in third person? -really, Jonathon?), The Corrections is as engaging and amusing a story as one could hope to have spun out over 500 or so pages. Yes, the trademark Franzen detail is there, often in excess, but it’s the characters that matter here and love ’em or hate ’em, and with most of the novel’s core cast the reader moves between both states, you can’t help but be swept along by their unique, frail, often funny stories. A shame it took Franzen nearly a decade to write a less satisfying follow-up.