'' Entertainment Weekly '' put '' The Corrections '' on its end-of-the-decade " best-of " list , saying , " Forget all the Oprah hoo-ha : Franzen 's 2001 doorstop of a domestic drama teaches that , yes , you can go home again . But you might not want to . " With '' The Corrections '' , Franzen moved away from the postmodernism of his earlier novels and towards literary realism . In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim for '' BOMB Magazine '' , Franzen said of this stylistic change , " Simply to write a book that was n't dressed up in a swashbuckling , Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult . " Critics pointed out many similarities between Franzen 's childhood in St. Louis and the novel , but the work is not an autobiography . Franzen said in an interview that " the most important experience of my life ... is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had . I feel as if they could n’t fully speak for themselves , and I feel as if their experience — by which I mean their values , their experience of being alive , of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it , that whole American experience they had — is part of me . One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience , to give it real life and form . " The novel also focuses on topics such as the multi-generational transmission of family dysfunction and the waste inherent in today 's consumer economy , and each of the characters " embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era . " Influenced by Franzen 's life , the novel in turn influenced it ; during its writing , he said in 2002 , he moved " away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance – even a celebration – of being a reader and a writer . " In a '' Newsweek '' feature on American culture during the George W. Bush administration , Jennie Yabroff said that despite being released less than a year into Bush 's term and before the September 11 attacks , '' The Corrections '' " anticipates almost eerily the major concerns of the next seven years . " According to Yabroff , a study of '' The Corrections '' demonstrates that much of the apprehension and disquiet that is seen as characteristic of the Bush era and post-9 / 11 America actually predated both . In this way , the novel is both characteristic of its time and prophetic of things to come ; for Yabroff , even the controversy with Oprah , which saw Franzen branded an " elitist , " was symptomatic of the subsequent course of American culture , with its increasingly prominent anti-elitist strain . She argues that '' The Corrections '' stands above later novels which focus on similar themes , because unlike its successors it addresses these themes without being " hamstrung by the 9/11 problem " which preoccupied Bush-era novels by writers such as Don DeLillo , Jay McInerney , and Jonathan Safran Foer
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
The Corrections