The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived here—Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn’t think of herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was.

“And what about the money I made? What about the work I did?” This argument had been effective in the past—it was, so to speak, the constitutional basis of the tyranny’s legitimacy—but it didn’t work now.

to make her pay for liking herself in a way he couldn’t like himself. How he hated and how he loved the lilt in her voice, the bounce in her step, the serenity of her amour propre! She got to be her and he didn’t.

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.

In the pageantry of weddings Enid reliably experienced the paroxysmal love of place—of the Midwest in general and suburban St. Jude in particular—that for her was the only true patriotism and the only viable spirituality.

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?

The cheeks of Axon’s CEO were puffed out like a squirrel’s. Merilee Finch put a napkin to her mouth and regarded the accosting Lamberts warily. “I’m so starving,” she said. It was a thin woman’s apology for being corporeal.

The two Lamberts were crossing the courtyard when Gary’s anger found a fault through which to vent itself.

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.

For months the cruise had been her mind’s safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable,

She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn’t know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth.

He already had one “alternative” sibling and he didn’t need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it undercut the pleasure he took in his home and job and family; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.