""The Corrections has been out for five years, but I only read it in 2003 after all the initial hype and hubbub had wound down about it. I needed a reason more than hype to read the book and found it when my father started coming down with dementia.
The Corrections is about a household in St. Louis - it's called St. Jude in the book - a family, nuclear family, the children; and the children rebel against what they consider the "parochial tyranny" of their parents' lives. The book is very compassionate in how it describes that wearing down of the father Alfred's mental faculties. It's almost a clinical study, and as my own father's condition got worse and worse, I could see it described and even anticipated in the book, which is very harrowing and very painful, but it's tremendously reassuring to have that insight and to have an author describing things that my father would say if he could only say them about how his life was declining.
I've read The Corrections three times now, and there's new - always new things. It's a very carefully constructed, very complex, social novel of ideas; but it's got a lot of humor and a lot of satire. I'd recommend The Corrections to - first of all - anyone who's in the helping professions, who's in the clinical professions, who has to deal with aging people, dementia and how it works on families, or anyone who works in family dynamics. Book clubs because there's so much to talk about; it brings up so many personal experiences. I mean, it's just a great novel. I'd give The Corrections five stars."
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