A litany of mistakes

The Lamberts are like any other post-modern US family. In fact, they are like any family anywhere battling no particular disaster apart from the main one - life. Nothing has really happened to test any of them. Enid and Alfred live in their increasingly shabby and cluttered family home, a place that has become more symbol of a hollow way of life than comforting refuge. The three children are long grown and have left, free to make their own mistakes. As the title suggests, this novel is a litany of errors of judgment and bad behaviour - all waiting to be corrected.

St Jude, a mid-western suburb, provides the central setting and most of the psychological territory for Franzen's astute dash through the terrors of domestic warfare. From the moment the now elderly Enid, in need of a hip replacement, and her husband, "Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet" loom into sight, only to be viewed by their waiting son Chips as "killers", it should be clear that this is no ordinary tale of a family at war. But the fact is, it is about as ordinary as you can hope to get. Franzen merely elevates dysfunctional to the level of a full-scale if unsubtle opera, complete with a crazed jaunt to Lithuania with a displaced diplomat turned aspiring criminal war lord.

Most of the set pieces are as funny or as sad as life. The only problem is that Franzen himself, having objected to his book being selected as an Oprah Book Club choice and stressing its status as " a serious literary work" , may have scared off thousands of potential readers. Tolstoy it is not, nor does it approach the unexpected grace and profundity of Updike's Rabbit series. Blurb comparisons with Mann's Buddenbrooks or DeLillo's White Noise are also wishful.

Driven as it is by comic situations, sexual angst, graphic descriptions, multiple regret, sexual and emotional blackmail as well as the respective antics of the family members, The Corrections is a good book club choice and matches the pace of a superior television comedy script. But there are few silences, and as it is entirely character-driven by stressed, not quite likeable characters on the run from themselves, the abiding effect is one of squirming laughter rather than profound thought. Cheever, like Updike, effortlessly achieves the effect Franzen is aiming at, yet misses because of his dependence on over-statement throughout a narrative written at screaming pitch complete with neatly explanatory flashbacks. Early in the novel, Chips wonders if his craven student girlfriend is "immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up" - a variation of which could be also applied to Franzen's novel.

Chips, "a tall, gym-built man with crow's feet and sparse yellow hair", is obviously a mess, dressed in leathers and in a constant state of sexual heat. Before too long, just over a page in fact, it turns out he has been fired from his college job for allegedly sexually harassing a student and has lied to his parents about his current employment - sending unsolicited articles to the Warren Street Journal is not quite the same as being on the staff of the Wall Street Journal. Mom thinks her son has a big job, and Chips has not corrected her. And so it goes: mistakes and errors. His parents are en route to a cruise when they visit Chips at his apartment for lunch. Unfortunately, the date is disrupted by the departure of his girlfriend. Chips leaves in pursuit, and the narrative structure depends on these set pieces.

Franzen then provides us with the whole story of Chips as failure. From this chaos, it's on to the precariously constructed perfect family life of his exasperated older brother Gary, whose middle-aged wife, Caroline, is determined to keep up with their two pre-teen sons. One of those boys has a new hobby: surveillance. His father is surprised: "You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?" he asks. Banker Gary also frets about the depression from which his wife assures him he is suffering. It all has echoes of a less stylistic variation of Martin Amis's The Information.

Meanwhile the Lambert daughter, Denise, already past 30, divorced and still childless, has made a name for herself as a chef while also making a complete mess of her emotional life. The one-liners are endless, and the narrative bounces between the various family members as if caught up in a crazed game of beach volleyball.

Each of the three Lambert grown children views their old home as little more than the place where their parents wait - for them. In ways, the novel is the story of the slow decline and death of the cold, domineering Alfred, who has lived by a code of discipline, detachment and unconcealed disgust for the human race - see page 244. His disintegration never quite engages. "Alfred was shovelling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of memory."

Far more compelling is Enid's pathetic attempts to gather her reluctant children around her for a final family Christmas. For all her small snobberies and miserly habits, the true reason for her obsessive personality gradually emerges by examining the life she has endured with the unresponsive Alfred.

Only at the end, when he is barely alive does she get her say.

The Corrections is often very funny and remains entertaining for most of the journey, thanks to Franzen having quickly achieved a tone of comic horror that he sustains throughout a showman's narrative that is far too long for what it has to say, yet nevertheless says it vividly. The catch is many US writers have already had fun with the same material; aspiring middle-class families are not that rare. While the dialogue is snappy and believable, capturing the vicious short-hand that passes for conversation among sparring family members and stalemated spouses long past the point of no return, and the characters are convincing, some readers may feel they have been this way before - and have. Ultimately more popular than profound, this big, lively and somewhat contrived, episodic narrative tells the story of a disappointed wife and mother, while also chronicling the decline of a man who never learned either to love or live.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times