The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

The chair was the only sign he’d ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Enid’s words filled him with such sorrow—he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal—that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep.

before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

but also because the author of articles like “Creative Adultery” and “Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels” was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding, and he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parents for the person he had become—

She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

“I’m wondering why we’re having this particular conversation,” Chip said to his mother. “Why this conversation and not some other conversation.”

For a moment it seemed to Chip that his father had become a likable old stranger; but he knew Alfred, underneath, to be a shouter and a punisher.

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

If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? 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. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

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

Even at the age of seven Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture of his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

How could people respond to these images if images didn’t secretly enjoy the same status as real things?

but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

He won’t deal with it himself, and somebody’s got to deal with it, so I do, like I’m a surrogate mother except I’m not carrying a baby, I’m carrying emotions.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?” “I don’t know.” “I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”

“Patron saint of hopeless causes?” “Exactly. What’s a church for if not lost causes?”

The for-profit nation-state, with a globally dispersed citizenry of shareholders, is the next stage in the evolution of political economy.

The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

When you knew in advance that your mother would consider you the villain no matter what you did, you lost your incentive to play by her rules.

The disappointment on Enid’s face was disproportionately large. It was an ancient disappointment with the refusal of the world in general and her children in particular to participate in her preferred enchantments.

“So many things you think are going to matter,” Enid said with a new sobriety, “turn out not to matter.” “Some things still matter,” Denise said.

It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn’t simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.

His impressions were fresh in a way that he would either remember all his life or instantly forget. A brain could absorb only so many impressions before it lost the ability to decode them, to put them in coherent shape and order.

Like a wife who had died or a house that had burned, the clarity to think and the power to act were still vivid in his memory. Through a window that gave onto the next world, he could still see the clarity and see the power, just out of reach, beyond the window’s thermal panes. He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he’d lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

The sorry fact seemed to be that life without Alfred in the house was better for everyone but Alfred.