The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

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

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.

She decided that Chipper was exactly like his father—at once hungry and impossible to feed.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, 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.

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.