A strong recommendation: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

This is an exceptional novel.

Be prepared to be overwhelmed by the author's detailed knowledge about Wall Street/Insider trading, the mid western railroad business, culinary skills, psychotropic drugs, global business dealings, child rearing, etc.

On one level it reads like a documentary-- often critical of our times.

Yet, its power comes from the detailed portraying of a once happy family that has become so dysfunctional that it makes our  families with their all their foibles appear rather conventional.

At the center of the novel is Enid the proud mother who just wants to have her children home for Christmas in a mid western town called St. Jude.

Her  husband Alfred. once a gifted Railroad executive and inventor, is suffering from Parkinson's disease.

Their eldest son Gary is a portfolio manager and is constantly arguing with his wife who claims he is clinically depressed and cannot convince either his wife or children to accompany him for Christmas.

Chip, the middle child, has lost his academic job because of an affair with one of his students; this despite the fact he wrote the very regulations prohibiting such conduct. He then acts an internet engineer for a Lithuanian mogul attempting to bring his country's assets to the world economy.  He is forced to leave Lithuania during a rebel takeover

Finally, there is Denise their youngest, a culinary whiz who exits a stable marriage to establish one of Philadelphia's most successful restaurants. She is fired from her position by her backer after he discovers she's involved in an affair with his wife.

Despite the length of the book --at some 566 pages --and the flow and symbolism of the language, often gushing like a waterfall, the book held my attention.

Here is an example:  "The chair was a monument and a symbol and could not be parted from Alfred. It could only be relocated, and so it went into the basement and Alfred followed. and so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground."

And, so our collective lives will emerge from the underground into the full glare of daylight.

This is a book that pierces the veil around the follies of our families, business dealings and even world politics and order.

It is a sharp seething social satire!

Enjoy!