The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building esprit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise and, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising—

Al, didn’t you say the house alone probably cost a million dollars? Al?” “It’s a large house but cheaply done,” Alfred said with sudden vigor. “The walls are like paper.” “All the new houses are like that,” Enid said. “You asked me if I was impressed with the house. I thought it was ostentatious.

He was the only male professor in D—— history to have taught Theory of Feminism, and he understood how important it was for women not to equate “success” with “having a man” and “failure” with “lacking a man,” but he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies:

What this stagnating economy needs, thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman Gary R. Lambert, is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin.

It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.

The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.