The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parents for the person he had become

Summerlust came wafting off the bared arms and legs of boys and girls alike.

His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done.

in New York City you never had to go far to find filth and rage.

“Do you believe in America?” Gitanas said. “Jesus, where to begin,” Chip said.

After the thaw, you get the rot.

because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.

But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life,

Nobody who dealt in money did not wear stockings.

Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”

he shaped his face into the expression of bottomless suffering and self-pity that Caroline wore when her back was hurting. He understood, as he never had before, how much comfort this expression yielded.

He refused to weep. He believed that if he heard himself weeping, at two in the morning in a smoke-smelling motel room, the world might end.

Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

“Well, for goodness’ sake,” he said once more. This phrase often proved useful in dissipating the shame of small failures.

It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive.

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing?

She felt that she and Al were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich.

a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward.

Fear of humiliation and the craving for humiliation are closely linked: psychologists know it, Russian novelists know it.

“You romanticize poverty.” “I beg your pardon?”

Odd to glimpse infinity precisely in a finite curve, eternity precisely in the seasonal.

She said to herself: “I’m too young to be so old.”

“I’m not the person to ask about what’s normal,” Denise answered. “I’ve mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.”

“The job,” she said, “consists of tolerating pain.”

“What do I do now,” Gitanas asked Chip, “when the invader is a system and a culture, not an army?

He fitted the cookie into his mouth. Chewed carefully and swallowed. It was hell to get old.

but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

She was happy to think of her bones resting on a hillside such as this.

It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations;

It was as if, all along, she’d been conspiring to make herself available to nurse her parents.

You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

He’d lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he’d lost track of himself.

I’m the least unhappy person at this table, Chip thought.

She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.