the corrections is full of absolutely brilliant things, wonderful descriptions of getting lost in the woods between words, of the glow of digital readouts, of the sanctuary of fat leather chairs like a first baseman's glove. i mean, actually fantastic, thrillingly evocative writing. i guess it's convenient to have such diverse wonderful moments in one book but one consequence is that they have to get strung together. and if there's any weakness in franzen's work, and a similar thing often happened in freedom, it's a love of super cheesy, cheap catchphrases that're supposed to be really zeitgeist-y that he uses to thread together his epic. these show up especially when the book gets global pretensions, when freedom's joey ends up in poland and his iraq war debacle, and now with chip flying off to lithuania. this book has so many intimate treasures, it's almost obscene to thrust them in with chip's pornographic adventures and vodka and other such nonsense.

but whatever! those things are outliars, literally and figuratively, in a book of hawk-eyed sensitivity. marvelous!