Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections deals with a subject of increasing popularity over the last 25 or so years: what it means to be alive in modern times. While each of the characters has their own relatively complex personality and story, each one is essentially trying to find meaning in their life while struggling to adapt to changing times. All of the characters share the train of being unable to quite keep up - to different, and sometimes disastrous, consequences.
This inability to adapt affects Alfred and Enid's relationship, which is hindered by denial over the actual state of Alfred's health and other delusions. Both parents are unable to keep up with the changing norms and desires of their children, whose lifestyles are not comprehensible to the parents. This gap in understanding is exacerbated by the different cultural and financial norms of the East Coast versus the Midwest, another central rift in the novel.
Simultaneously, each of the three children struggles to keep up in their way. Chip, who seemed to assimilate flawlessly into the professional environment of the college where he teaches, falls into a serious breach of social, ethical, and professional norms when he sleeps with one of his students. Denise, a talented and hardworking chef, is unable to stay ahead of her desire and confusion, to the suffering of her career. Gary, though he has a successful career and of all the three children has the most normative life (wife and three children), is unable to fully shake the baggage of his childhood, a problem exacerbated by the generation gap between him and his children. None of the characters can see their way around the obstacles that trip them up; we, as readers, are allowed this view.
By inundating the reader with minor injustices, Franzen's prose elevates the drama of these seemingly normal familial conflicts into matters that touch on deep generational faults of trauma, expectation, and financial baggage.
Chip shares his father's fear of mortality, and that shapes both of their experiences of shame. This creates a suffering deficit where after enough suffering, these men finally chose to face their existential dread in the face. When that happens, they catalyze their fates. Just one more note about the novel's use of allusion—when Alfred's wife talks to a doctor she is prescribed "Aslan," which is the name of C.S. Lewis's portrait of deity from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. This is a little comment on Marx's famous axiom that religion is an opiate for the masses.
