The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

“Oh, Chip,” she burst out miserably, “your script starts off with a six-page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama!”

He landed heavily on his bottom and continued on over backwards, coming to rest with his knees in the air above him. “Al, are you all right?” Enid called. “I don’t understand this furniture,” he said, struggling to sit up and sound powerful. “Is this meant to be a sofa?”

From Gary and his wife, in addition to the port, Chip received a clever vacuum-pump system for preserving leftover wine from oxidation, as if leftover wine were a problem Chip had ever had.

It looked, in fact, like incoherent hackwork. During the month that he’d spent expensively celebrating its completion, he’d imagined that he could remove certain hackneyed plot elements—the conspiracy, the car crash, the evil lesbians—and still tell a good story. Without these hackneyed plot elements, however, he seemed to have no story at all.

“We have so many elections,” Gitanas said, “nobody reports them internationally anymore. We have three or four elections a year. Elections are our biggest industry. We have the highest annual per capita output of elections of any country in the world. Higher than Italy, even.”

“Are the proceeds going to you or to the Party?” “OK, so my philosophy about that is in transition,”

his smirk had been a protective mask donned by a lonely boy surrounded by people who hated him,

Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. And the nights were getting cold now.

??

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn’t understand antiques or architecture, she couldn’t draw like Sylvia, she didn’t read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she’d ever had.

Chip had (briefly, honkingly) attempted the bassoon.

The concrete floor had been serially repatched and deeply gouged by materials even harder than itself; it was more like a terrain than a floor.

“Erin’s learning birdcalls,” Brian said. “Why?” “Basically, we have no idea.”

He liked a climate and a latitude that substantially dispensed with daylight.

The underground economy soon learned to price a precinct captain as unerringly as it priced a box of lightbulbs.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

“Is anybody actually shooting at people?” Chip asked. “No, it’s mostly posturing. A tragedy rewritten as a farce.”

“Police in ski masks,” Chip said. “I’m struggling to put a positive construction on this.”

The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building.

Twenty times he ran his hands along its length and twenty times he failed to find a buckle. He was like a person of two dimensions seeking freedom in a third.