The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.

Denise closed one eye and opened the other very wide. Her open eye was like nearly black balsamic vinegar beading on white china.

He turned on his heel and walked into the downpour and marched toward University Place, smiling with rage. He was ankle-deep in a boiling gray sidewalk-shaped lake.

Chip had grown up listening to his father pontificate on the topics of Men’s Work and Women’s Work and the importance of maintaining the distinction; in a spirit of correction, he stuck with Tori for nearly a decade.

D—— College, with an elite reputation and a middling endowment, depended for its survival on students whose parents could pay full tuition. To attract these students, the college had built a $30 million recreation center, three espresso bars, and a pair of hulking “residence halls” that were less like dorms than like vivid premonitions of the hotels in which the students would book rooms for themselves in their well-remunerated futures.

(despite his many grievances with Alfred, Chip was careful to impress on his dinner guests what a giant, in his own way, the old man was),

He never asked her if she was the one who’d left roses outside his office door on Valentine’s Day, or the chocolate statuette of Michael Jackson on Easter weekend.

And he could see that he was ruined—that he didn’t like her but would miss her disastrously.

His affliction offended his sense of ownership. These shaking hands belonged to nobody but him, and yet they refused to obey him. They were like bad children. Unreasoning two-year-olds in a tantrum of selfish misery. The more sternly he gave orders, the less they listened and the more miserable and out of control they got. He’d always been vulnerable to a child’s recalcitrance and refusal to behave like an adult. Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devil’s logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his body’s refusal to obey him.

These, too, he pretty well destroyed before he developed a method of bouncing them off a low step and then, while they were airborne, punting them all the way upstairs. When he punted the box from Gary it exploded in a cloud of white Styrofoam saucers. A bubble-wrapped bottle fell out and rolled down the stairs. It was a bottle of vintage Californian port. Chip carried it up to his bed and worked out a rhythm whereby he swallowed one large mouthful of port for each gift that he succeeded in unwrapping.

The subtle signs that Denise was exercising patience—the slightly deeper breaths she took, the soundless way she set her fork down on her plate and took a sip of wine and set the glass back down—were more hurtful to Enid than a violent explosion.

“Is that all you’re going to eat?” Enid said. “Yes. That was my lunch.” “You’ve lost weight.” “In fact not.” “Well, don’t lose any more,” Enid said with the skimpy laugh with which she tried to hide large feelings.

“It’s misleading and you know it,” Alfred said. “I guess I should just never say anything.”

“Paraguay being for some reason the bane of my existence.”

“What are Lithuania’s natural resources?” he asked Gitanas. “Chiefly sand and gravel,” Gitanas said. “Huge strategic reserves of sand and gravel. OK.”

“He gets business-class plane fare, too, of course,” Eden said. “Yes, all right.” “And first-class accommodations in Vilnius.” “There’s a room in the villa, no problem.” “Also, who protects him from these criminal warlords?” “Maybe I’m a criminal warlord myself, a little bit,” Gitanas said with a wary, shame-faced smile.

All her friends were nice and had nice friends, and since nice people tended to raise nice children, Enid’s world was like a lawn in which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out: a miracle of niceness.

Unless Enid was very much deceived by appearances, young men of this caliber continued, even as the twentieth century drew to a close, to be the norm in suburban St. Jude.

where she was less different from her daughter than she liked to admit,

Alfred loved weddings, too. They seemed to him the one kind of party that had a real purpose. Under their spell he authorized purchases (a new dress for Enid, a new suit for himself, a top-quality ten-piece teakwood salad-bowl set for a gift) that he ordinarily would have vetoed as unreasonable.

It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn’t match. They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” Enid said, “about my high-school friend Norma Greene.” “You tell me about Norma Greene literally every time I see you.”

Enid let her eyes fall shut in raconteurial pleasure. She was aware that Denise didn’t like this story, but there were plenty of things about Denise’s life that were disagreeable to Enid, too, so.

Enid found a coupon offering sixty cents off I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! with any purchase of Thomas’ English muffins. Her scissors cut the paper and with it the silence that had fallen. “If I do one thing on this cruise,” she said, “I’m going to get through all these magazines.”

Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY and had seeded links and references in American news groups and chat rooms for investors. Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17—“one of Lithuania’s most venerable political parties,” the “cornerstone” of the country’s governing coalition for “three of the last seven years,” the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a “Western-leaning probusiness party” reorganized as the “Free Market Party Company.”

“Denise,” Alfred said impatiently, as if she were speaking nonsense, “please talk to Gary.” “OK, I will. I will.” Alfred’s hands bounced in the air. “I don’t know how much time I have! You and your mother need to get along. You and Gary need to get along.” “Al, you have plenty of—” “We all need to get along!” Denise had never been a crier, but her face was crumpling up. “Dad, all right,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.” “Your mother wants a Christmas in St. Jude.” “I’ll talk to him. I promise.” “Well.” He turned abruptly. “That’s enough of that.” His black raincoat was flapping and whipping in the wind, and still Enid managed to hope that the weather would be perfect for cruising, that the water would be calm.

“This was my 1990,” he said. “Eight months in a Red Army barracks in the sovereign state of Lithuania.” “You were a dissident,” Chip said. “Yeah! Yeah! Dissident!” He worked his arm back into its sleeve. “It was horrible, great. Very tiring, but it didn’t feel tiring. The tiredness came later.”

The North Atlantic night was dark and lonely, but here, on the plane, were lights in the sky. Here was sociability. It was good to be awake and to feel awakeness all around him.

He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.

“Surveillance is not a hobby,”

“It’s like they’re on a luxury cruise,” Jonah said, “except they’re trying to sail to the end of the world. See, that’s where Aslan lives, at the end of the world.”

Each failed overture of peace made the next overture less likely to succeed.

Colleagues far less capable than he were moving on to work for mutual funds, to be freelance money managers, or to start their own funds; but they were also working twelve- or fourteen-hour days, and every single one of them had the perspiring manic style of a striver. Gary, cushioned by Caroline’s inheritance, was free to cultivate non-ambition and to be, as a boss, the perfect strict and loving father that he could only halfway be at home.

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

“My first guess is salmon,” Denise said. “No, my only guess is salmon.”

Dry land lacked this z-axis. Dry land was like being awake. Even in chartless desert you could drop to your knees and pound land with your fist and land didn’t give. Of course the ocean, too, had a skin of wakefulness. But every point on this skin was a point where you could sink and by sinking disappear.

She was sleeping now, silently, like a person feigning sleep. Alfred asleep was a symphony of snoring and whistling and choking, an epic of Z’s. Enid was a haiku. She lay still for hours and then blinked awake like a light switched on. Sometimes at dawn in St. Jude, in the long minute it took the clock-radio to flip a digit, the only moving thing in the house was the eye of Enid.

turbid water,

He blamed God for allowing such people to exist. He blamed democracy for inflicting them on him. He blamed the motel’s architect for trusting a single layer of cinder block to preserve the repose of paying customers. He blamed the motel management for not keeping in reserve a room for guests who suffered. He blamed the frivolous, easygoing townspeople of Washington, Pennsylvania, who had driven 150 miles for a high-school football championship game and filled every motel room in northwest Pennsylvania. He blamed his fellow guests for their indifference to the fornication, he blamed all of humanity for its insensitivity, and it was so unfair.

It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world.

In the blocks between the station and his house the last leaves were coming down. It was the season of hurtling, hurtling toward winter.

Chuck worked easy hours at the branch he managed, but Alfred nonetheless considered him a friend. Chuck actually listened to what he said, seemed impressed with the work he did, and recognized him as a person of singular abilities.

Farmers in eastern Iowa never learned not to trust the world. Whereas any soil that might have nurtured hope in Alfred had blown away in one or another west Kansan drought.

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.

Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner.

(Schopenhauer: If you want a safe compass to guide you through life … you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony.)

“Seven thousand hundred million M-80s,” Chipper cried. He made explosive noises to suggest the megatonnage he had in mind.

He loved this boy, and he put the cold, poisonous mash into his own mouth and jerked it down his throat with a shudder.

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

So true

“Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee,” Mr. Söderblad said, “I can’t fall asleep at night.”