The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

To feel as if he couldn’t survive without a woman made a man feel weak; ¶ And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing.

in New York City you never had to go far to find filth and rage.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it.

What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other.

Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—

it seemed to her that he’d asked her to do more than “one thing” while he was gone. He’d also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband’s kisses or kind words. 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.

You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. 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. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.

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

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

this was what jail was for: people who believed that they, rather than society, made the rules.

Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on my case for wanting things my way?”

“Well, for goodness’ sake,” he said once more. This phrase often proved useful in dissipating the shame of small failures.

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before?

How could people respond to these images if images didn’t secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak.

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.

“What’s it do?” she said. “Absolutely nothing,” Hibbard replied, “if you are in perfect mental health. However, let’s face it, who is?”

“I wonder if we’re depressed because there’s no frontier anymore. Because we can’t pretend anymore there’s a place no one’s been. I wonder if aggregate depression is on the rise, worldwide.”

Odd to glimpse infinity precisely in a finite curve, eternity precisely in the seasonal.

They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

Billy soon figured out that no matter how cruel he was to Robin, she would always blame herself.

His hands made her hips into a woman’s hips, his mouth made her thighs into a woman’s thighs, her whatever into a cunt. These were the advantages of being wanted by someone older—to feel less like an ungendered marionette, to be given a guided tour of the state of her morphology, to have its usefulness elucidated by a person for whom it was just the ticket.

Boys her own age wanted something, but they didn’t seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function—the role she’d played on more than one lousy date—was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.

Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want—imagining herself as Don Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself—made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the ma...

Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.

She was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to Don Armour, that he wasn’t what she wanted. She was too inexperienced to know she simply could have said, “Sorry—big mistake.” She felt a responsibility to give him more of what he wanted.

For years, he’d lived with death and kept it in its place by making it trivial.

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.

“What’s life for?” “I don’t know.” “I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”

If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hard-wired genetic stake in their children’s welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents.

he was an American under forty, and Americans under forty were exquisite judges of what was slick and cool and what was not.

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.

No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn’t trash.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

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.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter—to inflict that version of himself on other people—was a violation of privac...

He was aware, nevertheless, that if the girl had been more attractive, he might have been less cruel.

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.

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. Alfred, likewise, had shown his faith in her by taking her at face value: by declining to pry behind the front that she presented.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. She understood this better than Chip and Gary did, and so she felt a particular responsibility for him.

To Chip, unfortunately, it seemed that Alfred cared about his children only to the degree that they succeeded. Chip was so busy feeling misunderstood that he never noticed how badly he himself misunderstood his father. To Chip, Alfred’s inability to be tender was the proof that Alfred didn’t know, or care, who he was. Chip couldn’t see what everyone around him could: that if there was anybody in the world whom Alfred did love purely for his own sake, it was Chip. Denise was aware of not delighting Alfred like this; they had little in common beyond formalities and achievements. Chip was the one whom Alfred had called for in the middle of the night, even though he knew Chip wasn’t there.

For the man who’d taken care to protect her privacy and who had only ever asked that his privacy be respected, too, wasn’t the kindest course to let him suffer by himself and not compound his suffering with the shame of being witnessed? Hadn’t he, with every question that he’d ever failed to ask her, earned the right to relief from any uncomfortable question she might want to ask him now?

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.