Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections

Somehow Chip and Denise had the patience to sit and converse with him about whatever demented scenario he inhabited, whatever train wreck or incarceration or luxury cruise, but Enid couldn’t tolerate the least error. If he mistook her for her mother, she corrected him angrily: “Al, it’s me, Enid , your wife of forty-eight years .” If he mistook her for Denise, she used the very same words. She’d felt Wrong all her life and now she had a chance to tell him how Wrong he was. Even as she was loosening up and becoming less critical in other areas of life, she remained strictly vigilant at the Deepmire Home. She had to come and tell Alfred that he was wrong to dribble ice cream on his clean, freshly pressed pants. He was wrong not to recognize Joe Person when Joe was nice enough to drop in. He was wrong not to look at snapshots of Aaron and Caleb and Jonah. He was wrong not to be excited that Alison had given birth to two slightly underweight but healthy baby girls. He was wrong not to be happy or grateful or even remotely lucid when his wife and daughter went to enormous trouble to bring him home for Thanksgiving dinner. He was wrong to say, after that dinner, when they returned him to the Deepmire Home, “Better not to leave here than to have to come back.” He was wrong, if he could be so lucid as to produce a sentence like that, not to be lucid at any other time. He was wrong to attempt to hang himself with bedsheets in the night. He was wrong to hurl himself against a window. He was wrong to try to slash his wrist with a dinner fork. Altogether he was wrong about so many things that, except for her four days in New York and her two Christmases in Philadelphia and her three weeks of recovery from hip surgery, she never failed to visit him. She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he’d been and how right she’d been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn’t listen, she had to tell him.

He’d been living at the Deepmire Home for two years when he stopped accepting food. Chip took time away from parenthood and his new teaching job at a private high school and his eighth revision of the screenplay to visit from Chicago and say goodbye. Alfred lasted longer after that than anyone expected. He was a lion to the end. His blood pressure was barely measurable when Denise and Gary flew into town, and still he lived another week. He lay curled up on the bed and barely breathed. He moved for nothing and responded to nothing except to shake his head emphatically, once, if Enid tried to put an ice chip in his mouth. The one thing he never forgot was how to refuse. All of her correction had been for naught. He was as stubborn as the day she’d met him. And yet when he was dead, when she’d pressed her lips to his forehead and walked out with Denise and Gary into the warm spring night, she felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

From the reviews of The Corrections:

‘Intelligent, compellingly readable, funny and above all generous spirited, it is a rare thing, a modern novel with both head and heart’

TERENCE BLACKER, Daily Mail

‘A genuine masterpiece, the first great American novel of the twenty-first century. Sentence by whiplash sentence this novel offers extraordinary pleasures of language, of structure, of plot, of perception, of history, and, most dazzlingly, of character… A wisecracking, eloquent, heartbreaking beauty’

WILL BLYTH, Elle

‘For anyone who has ever found themselves guiltily yearning for an Anne Tyler while in the middle of an Updike or Wolfe. The Lamberts are utterly believable, and once they have all told their stories you can’t help but sympathise with them. Be prepared to be moved’

LAURENCE PHELAN, Independent on Sunday

‘In its complexity, its scrutinising and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, The Corrections stands in the company of Mann’s Buddenbrooks and DeLillo’s White Noise . It is a major accomplishment’

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

‘ The Corrections is the whole package… You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place’

JOHN LEONARD, New York Review of Books

‘A major novel that reflects the achievements of Updike and DeLillo while being an entirely original voice. A big, beautiful novel’

GEORGE WALDEN, Evening Standard

‘A remarkably energetic novel, by turns funny, caustic, upsetting and dramatic’

CRAIG BROWN, Mail on Sunday

‘As good as anything I’ve ever read’

RACHEL CUSK, Daily Telegraph

‘A big-hearted, panoramic American epic, intelligent and wise but also wildly, stonkingly funny’

LIZ JENSEN, Independent

‘Compelling. A pleasure from beginning to end. Franzen, in one leap, has put himself into the league of Updike and Roth and that’s why there is so much excitement about it’

DAVID SEXTON, Evening Standard

‘Jonathan Franzen has built a powerful novel out of the swarming consciousness of a marriage, a family, a whole culture’

DON DELILLO

‘What this man writes is true, and what is true indicts us. The Corrections transcends its many wonderful moments to become that rarest of things, a contemporary novel that will endure’

SVEN BIRKERTS, Esquire

‘Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures that great fiction affords’

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

JONATHAN FRANZEN is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone . His fiction and nonfiction appears frequently in the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine , and he has been named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and the New Yorker . He lives in New York City.

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The Twenty-Seventh City

Strong Motion

How to Be Alone

The Discomfort Zone