Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I don't think we did know how people hurt each other in a closed loving circuit of an unbroken family. And I don't know anybody who has never had this feeling where in the glowing windows of the other homes is a normal family. And your family is not normal.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the book review from the New York Times. Two years ago, the New York Times published a list of the hundred best books of the 21st century. And that wasn't just us saying so. We reached out to hundreds of novelists and non-fiction writers, poets, and bookstore owners, literary luminaries of every stripe, and we asked them what they thought were the best books published since the year 2000. We took all of those votes, we crunched the numbers, and we put together our list. It's a great guide to older but not ancient books that you should probably check out.

Today we're going to focus on the fifth book on our list of 21st century greats. It's a very high number, number five. That book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month. The novel, in addition to becoming a much-discussed bestseller, won the National Book Award. It was a Pulitzer finalist. It was an Oprah Book Club pick until it was not.

It's also a book that came out just a week before 9/11. You could not think of a more terrible time to try to promote and sell a novel. And yet, The Corrections was an instant success. Perhaps because to many it represented the end of a pre-9/11 America. When I realized this anniversary was on the way, I knew I had to bring in my friend and colleague Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Taffy is a features writer at the New York Times magazine. She has reported and written heartbreaking stories and hilarious stories and some of the best celebrity profiles in existence. She is also the author of two novels herself, Fleishman is in trouble and Long Island Compromise, the latter of which was deeply influenced by The Corrections. In fact, Taffy loves The Corrections so much that she says — well, we'll hear what she says in a minute. Please help me say hello to Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Thank you for having me. I feel like how could you not discuss that this book became the defining book of the climax of America's golden moment which ended on September 10th and and it is it is filled with all this stuff about a world that sounds like Mars to us now, which is a world without cell phones, with dialup, without email, when everyone was like looking into Lithuania's privatization.

Gilbert Cruz: Before we talk about all the things that it represents, I think we should just talk a little bit about who the people are in the book, what the book is about, this is a full spoiler conversation. The book is 25 years old, so you've had your you've had all spoilers all the time. Taffy, let's talk briefly about what it's about. It's a book about America. It's a book about medication. It's a book about sex. It's a book about money. It's a book about intimacy. It's a book about marriage. And at its heart, it's a book about family. Who are the Lamberts?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Okay. This book is about the Lambert family. They are from St. Jude, which feels like it must be St. Louis, Missouri. They are a sort of nuclear family of father, mother Alfred and Enid, and three children, Gary, Chip, Denise, who are grown up. And the plot of the novel is driven by the mother Enid's insistence that they all have one last Christmas together at home because the father Alfred is suffering from a very advanced dementia due to Parkinson's and is really in decline.

And Enid is determined that whatever it takes, she's going to get all her children back. And these three grown children are each in a complete mess of their own lives and also pushing back against her desperate desire to do this. And so the book takes off into the lives of each of these people.

Gilbert Cruz: And in preparation for this, you read it again?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: This was the 20th time.

Gilbert Cruz: This was the 20th time, beginning to end?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Beginning to end.

Gilbert Cruz: That's like once a year, or once almost every year. That's not the worst thing, that's a great thing. I watch Jaws every year, like...

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: That's like 90 minutes.

Gilbert Cruz: It's closer than two hours, but I see your point.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yeah. This book is almost 600 pages.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: And I'm not a fast reader and I'm a demoralized reader and I have other things to read.

Gilbert Cruz: Um, so you've read it 20 times. Let's go back to the first time. When was the first time that you read it and what was the situation?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It was November 2001. I was at the home of my boyfriend Paul. Paul was the last boyfriend I had before I got married, we got married. We bought this little penthouse apartment downtown and he was painting the walls, and I was sitting on an upturned spackle bucket. I was 25 years old and I was reading this book. There's like a time lapse and I can't put this book down.

And I decide that one day I want to write a novel. That's what I decide. I decide that I want to be in the letters.

Gilbert Cruz: In letters. Is that how you thought of it?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Yes. Right before this I had read American Pastoral. Before that I was reading classics because I had gone to a yeshiva where I felt that we were not like roaming around modern classics. And then 2001, those two books did it.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Did it ruin books for you?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It sort of ruined books for me. It's sort of the book I judge all the other books against because this was written with such urgency. It was written in a hyperverbal fever. And I divide all the books into books that want to please you and books that need you to know something.

Gilbert Cruz: What does it need you to know?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It needs you to know how families hurt each other.

Gilbert Cruz: Is this something we didn't know before this book was written? We didn't know exactly the way the book lays out how family members torture each other?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I forgot about this part. I don't know how — this book is so good that by the time that happens, you're like, "Yes, like I have no questions anymore."

He gives this neighbor a piece of information that he knows the neighbor is going to use to insinuate... and owe my family an apology for...

In this read, the thing I noticed maybe for the first time is how absurdly funny it is. Meaning, the tragedy and comedy live so close together. I'm going to read you a line. In this, they are at the lunch in New York. Chip has lost his job, he has no money, and Enid is talking about Gary's perfect life and his stock options, and it is torturing Chip.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, of course. Please.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: He writes about the sheer absurdity of the social interaction, the cost of the salad, the unspoken resentments across the table. It captures the exact intersection of psychological brutality and laugh-out-loud American satire.

Gilbert Cruz: In doing a little research over the past few days, I learned something which you probably already knew, which is that this was a title for a completely different book that was about a different set of characters. Possibly it was about prison, which is why correction was...

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Right, like the privatization.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, and to bring it in and to have it sort of fit all the different instances, definitions, meanings of the word corrections, whether it's a financial correction, there's a lot about sort of late 20th century American capitalism in here, whether it's about moral correction, personal correction, corrections on a literal script...

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: A medication called Corecting. He doesn't care. He's like, "Here, here."

Gilbert Cruz: It's great. I'm going to read part of it now describing Alfred's last moments. Alfred, as you said, has been suffering from dementia as a result of Parkinson's, and he's in his final moments:

"He lay curled up on the bed and barely breathed. He moved for nothing and responded to nothing except to shake his head emphatically once, if Enid tried to put an ice chip in his mouth. The one thing he never forgot was how to refuse. All of her correction had been for naught. He was as stubborn as the day she'd met him. And yet when he was dead, when she'd pressed her lips to his forehead and walked out with Denise and Gary into the warm spring night, she felt that nothing could kill her hope now. Nothing. She was 75 and she was going to make some changes in her life."

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Is there anything better? Holy cow.

Gilbert Cruz: Holy cow.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: She gets her Christmas. She's sort of the most miserable person in the book. She is the one who feels the most hopeless, like you feel that the children are battling against the parents, and then in the end the book turns out to have been about her freedom. They are from a generation and a place and a religion where they are not going to divorce, and then in the end she walks out into the night.

Gilbert Cruz: Tell me about the beginning and then I want to talk about Franzen himself.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Let me tell you the beginning and then you'll have to stop me if I keep going cuz I'll be in a trance.

"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it. Something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky. A minor light. A cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless. Temperature falling..."

Gilbert Cruz: And then we have to talk about this even though it ended up all being fine in the end. And then the Oprah thing happened, right? Oprah selected the novel for her book club. Franzen was conflicted. He said in a couple of interviews he was uncomfortable with having her seal on the cover. It sort of struck him as being overly corporate and he had the feeling that men maybe would stay away from the book because they associated the Oprah book club with books that were written for women.

And then eventually, totally her right, Oprah rescinded her invitation for him to appear on her show and discuss the book. They eventually ended up making up nine years later when she picked Freedom. But this incident has followed him.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: People remember it wrong. There's a part of it that exposes something about how we talk about literature, which is about like what is literature? What is popular fiction? What is the responsibility of an author to the capitalist infrastructure? How much should you be invested in your own success?

I think there's also like a Gen X "sellout" conversation happening here. I think a lot of that stuff underlies why it has stuck to him. Because he is also someone who in the years since, regardless of the fact that he has done many interviews, he still seems like someone who's against modern culture in some way. He doesn't participate in social media, and I pedaled to him the theory that he is too fragile to interact with the audience.

Gilbert Cruz: How did The Corrections influence your own novel, Long Island Compromise?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: When I sat down to write about childhood trauma, it kept coming out as a dime-store Corrections. I fought it for so long. I tried to make the sections with the siblings shorter, and then I realized I was only doing that so that it wouldn't seem like I was copying The Corrections. And then I realized there is no copying The Corrections.

And then a friend said to me something that got me through, which is: "Don't you think this is how literature goes? It is imitation upon imitation and you are doing your best." And I think very often of our friend and colleague A.O. Scott and his book Better Living Through Criticism. The way it starts is saying that all art is trying to photocopy and recreate the Garden of Eden. And we mostly accept that we can't do that, but there is so much value in the effort.

Gilbert Cruz: The Corrections has had a long history of attempted adaptations. Noah Baumbach shot an HBO pilot with Anthony Hopkins and Dianne Wiest that didn't go forward. Now Netflix has announced an adaptation directed by Cord Jefferson, who directed American Fiction, with Meryl Streep attached. Is Meryl Streep the perfect Enid?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: She's the perfect anything. Franzen told me once, "I am sort of always rooting for these things to not work out because I am a partisan of the novel." He very much understands that the audience is a TV audience now. The numbers on books all around are different than they were when he published The Corrections.

But he also understands that a novel makes its case for itself by being a thing you can't truly adapt. Enid is a hard character to convey because beneath all her Midwestern domestic cliches is the emotional engine of the entire American post-war dream coming undone.

Gilbert Cruz: Special thanks to Dalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at thebookreview@nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.