“The ties that bind,” though a banal phrase, would be a fitting subtitle to Jonathan Franzen’s novel “The Corrections,” which was fleetingly a selection of Oprah’s Book Club.

A rather dysfunctional Midwestern family is the focus of the book. The hectic state of the relationship between the aging Alfred and Enid (the parents) and their three children — Chip, Gary and Denise — is a sad but realistic portrait of how family life can go terribly wrong, yet the family can still remain intact.

Chip is a former English professor who was close to getting tenure when he was let go because of an affair with a student. The title of Chip’s chapter in the novel is “The Failure,” and aptly so: Throughout the novel, Chip seems to fail at everything he does, no matter how hard he tries.

After losing his teaching post, he writes a horrible screenplay (the first six pages are a lecture about literary theory) and tries unsuccessfully to get it published by a friend of his girlfriend.

Through a strange turn of luck, Chip travels to Lithuania as a business partner to a warlord, who happens to be the former husband of his ex-girlfriend. There he helps create a Web site to lure American investors into investing in Lithuania’s failing economy.

After civil unrest breaks out in the country, Chip is forced to leave Lithuania, leaving behind all of the money he earned and coming back to America more broke than before. Gary, Chip’s brother, could be said to be the exact opposite of Chip. Though his chapter is not titled “The Success,” it might as well be. Gary is a wealthy stockbroker with a beautiful wife and three boys and a gigantic house in suburbia. Gary’s success, however, is only superficial. He believes his wife and children are conspiring against him, and absolutely hates both Enid and Alfred.

Gary tries to get back at Enid for controlling his life by constantly reminding her that she and Alfred need to move out of their house and into a nursing home.

Denise is an ambitious and hard-working five-star chef and is the head chef of The Generator, her friend Brian’s upscale restaurant. Brian, though married, is attracted to Denise, and they have a brief but meaningless sexual encounter before Denise becomes involved with Brian’s wife, Robin.

Denise, much like Chip, is on a continually downward spiral throughout the novel. Her relationship with both Robin and Brian ends shortly after both parties find out she has used them. Needless to say, Brian fires her.

Alfred and Enid are quite the pair. Alfred, stoic and cold towards both his wife and their children for a great portion of his life, has become afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. Enid, though still mentally stable, is an emotional mess. Angry at Alfred and disappointed by her children, she makes everyone in her family miserable with her belittling comments and relentless attempts to control their lives.

At 566 pages, Franzen’s novel is both a literary feat and a complicated read. Franzen is ultimately sardonic in tone, and stylistically cynical. He includes many allusions to classical and contemporary literature, which add a high-literature aspect to the novel, something he admitted he was striving for in multiple interviews.

His politics shine through in the novel. He subtly condemns capitalism and shows the hypocrisy of those who do the same but are also part of the bourgeoisie. Franzen seems to tease out what makes a family a family, and questions what parents owe their children, and what children owe their parents. Another main question raised by the novel is the place of our occupation in our lives, and how we measure our own success as opposed to how others do so.

Parts of the novel were rendered counter-intuitively as far as pace is concerned, but the characters were well-developed and Franzen is a master of plot and literary device.

Infinitely complicated and stunningly brilliant, “The Corrections” is a rollicking tour-de-force of the Midwestern family.