The Corrections, Twenty-Five Years On: Now Streaming
In 2001, Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline “Great American Novelist.” Oprah called. He hesitated in ways that were promptly interpreted as declining, which may be the same thing. The resulting fuss said more about America’s complicated feelings toward literary ambition than it did about the novel itself, which was, by most accounts, very good indeed.
Twenty-five years on, The Corrections is finally coming to Netflix. If you needed further evidence that the cycle of literary prestige in America has its own particular rhythms, here it is.
The limited series will be directed by Cord Jefferson—whose American Fiction, the 2023 adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure, won him an Academy Award and established him as the rare filmmaker capable of handling satirical literary material without defanging it. Franzen himself will adapt the novel. Meryl Streep is attached to star, which means the whole enterprise carries the kind of marquee gravity that makes people take things seriously whether or not they’ve read the book.
This is not Netflix’s first foray into prestige literary adaptation, nor Franzen’s first brush with a screen version. In 2012, Noah Baumbach and Scott Rudin developed an HBO mini-series—Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest were cast, a pilot shot—before the project collapsed under the weight of its budget. The memory of that abandoned production has acquired a curious mythological quality: the great American family novel that could not, it seemed, be translated to any screen.
Jefferson’s involvement changes the calculation. American Fiction demonstrated that he knows what to do with a text fundamentally about the gap between how America imagines itself and how it actually behaves—which is precisely what The Corrections is also about. The Lambert family, their failing patriarch, their three children each pursuing a different variety of American disappointment, are not warm viewing prospects. But Jefferson has shown he can make that kind of bleakness entertaining without making it comfortable.
Whether Franzen can adapt his own novel is a separate question. Writers adapting their own work tend toward one of two categories: those who cannot let go of a single word, and those so relieved to escape the novel that they overcorrect entirely. Franzen, who has never seemed indifferent to the protection of his own sentences, may find himself at war with himself in the writers’ room.
Still: Meryl Streep, Cord Jefferson, and a 2001 novel that won the National Book Award. Netflix has assembled the pieces. Whether the result will resemble the book—or whether it will become, for a generation of viewers who will not read it, the thing that is the book—is the only interesting question left to ask.
