Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Anyway, that was the story of her and Gitanas, and she hoped that Chip wouldn’t be too mad at her.

And Chip was not. Indeed, at first he not only didn’t mind that Julia was married, he adored the fact. He was fascinated by her rings; he talked her into wearing them in bed. Down at the offices of the Warren Street Journal , where he sometimes felt insufficiently transgressive, as if his innermost self were still a nice midwestern boy, he took pleasure in alluding to the European statesman he was “cuckolding.” In his doctoral thesis (“Doubtful It Stood: Anxieties of the Phallus in Tudor Drama”) he’d written extensively about cuckolds, and under the cloak of his reproving modern scholarship he’d been excited by the idea of marriage as a property right, of adultery as theft.

Before long, though, the thrill of poaching on the diplomat’s preserve gave way to bourgeois fantasies in which Chip himself was Julia’s husband — her lord, her liege. He became spasmodically jealous of Gitanas Misevičius, who, though Lithuanian, and a slapper, was a successful politician whose name Julia now pronounced with guilt and wistful-ness. On New Year’s Eve Chip asked her point-blank if she ever thought about divorce. She replied that she liked her apartment (“Can’t beat the rent!”) and she didn’t want to look for another one right now.

After New Year’s, Chip returned to his rough draft of “The Academy Purple,” which he’d completed in a euphoric twenty-page blaze of keyboard-pounding, and discovered that it had a lot of problems. It looked, in fact, like incoherent hackwork. During the month that he’d spent expensively celebrating its completion, he’d imagined that he could remove certain hackneyed plot elements — the conspiracy, the car crash, the evil lesbians — and still tell a good story. Without these hackneyed plot elements, however, he seemed to have no story at all.

In order to salvage his artistic and intellectual ambitions, he added a long theoretical opening monologue. But this monologue was so unreadable that every time he turned on his computer he had to go and tinker with it. Soon he was spending the bulk of each work session compulsively honing the monologue. And when he despaired of shortening it any further without sacrificing important thematic material, he started fussing with the margins and hyphenation to make the monologue end at the bottom of page 6 rather than the top of page 7. He replaced the word “continue” with “go on” to save three spaces, thus allowing the word “(trans) act(ion)s” to be hyphenated after the second t , which triggered a whole cascade of longer lines and more efficient hyphenations. Then he decided that “go on” had the wrong rhythm and that “(trans)act(ion)s” should not be hyphenated under any circumstances, and so he scoured the text for other longish words to replace with shorter synonyms, all the while struggling to believe that stars and producers in Prada jackets would enjoy reading six pages (but not seven!) of turgid academic theorizing.

Once, when he was a boy, there was a total eclipse of the sun in the Midwest, and a girl in one of the poky towns across the river from St. Jude had sat outside and, in defiance of myriad warnings, studied the dwindling crescent of the sun until her retinas combusted.

“It didn’t hurt at all,” the blinded girl had told the St. Jude Chronicle . “It felt like nothing.”

Each day that Chip spent grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue was a day in which his rent and food and entertainment expenses were paid for, in large part, with his little sister’s money. And yet as long as the money lasted, his pain was not acute. One day led to another. He rarely got out of bed before noon. He enjoyed his food and his wine, he dressed well enough to persuade himself that he was not a quivering gelatinous mess, and he managed, on four out of five evenings, to hide the worst of his anxiety and foreboding and enjoy himself with Julia. Because the sum he owed Denise was large in comparison to his proofreading wage but small by Hollywood standards, he worked less and less at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. His only real complaint was with his health. On a summer day when his work session consisted of rereading Act I, being struck afresh by its irredeemable badness, and hurrying outside to get some air, he might walk down Broadway and sit on a bench at Battery Park City and let the breeze off the Hudson flow under his collar, and listen to the ceaseless fut-fut of copter traffic and the distant shouts of millionaire Tribeca toddlers, and be overcome with guilt. To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing : neither taking advantage of his good night’s sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. 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. Of all the things he was wasting — Denise’s money, Julia’s goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunities afforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history — his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst.

He ran out of money on a Friday in July. Facing a weekend with Julia, who could cost him fifteen dollars at a cinema refreshments counter, he purged the Marxists from his bookshelves and took them to the Strand in two extremely heavy bags. The books were in their original jackets and had an aggregate list price of $3,900. A buyer at the Strand appraised them casually and delivered his verdict: “Sixty-five.”

Chip laughed in a breathy way, willing himself not to argue; but his U.K. edition of Jürgen Habermas’s Reason and the Rationalization of Society , which he’d found too difficult to read, let alone annotate, was in mint condition and had cost him £ 95.00. He couldn’t help pointing this out by way of example.

“Try somewhere else, if you like,” the buyer said, his hand hesitating above the cash register.

“No, no, you’re right,” Chip said. “Sixty-five is great.”

It was pathetically obvious that he’d believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue. By the beginning of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he’d sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. To raise money for lunch for his parents and Denise, all he had left was his beloved cultural historians and his complete hardcover Arden Shakespeare; and because a kind of magic resided in the Shakespeare — the uniform volumes in their pale blue jackets were like an archipelago of safe retreats — he piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and Hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.

He spent sixty dollars on a haircut, some candy, a stain-removal kit, and two drinks at the Cedar Tavern. Back in August, when he’d invited his parents, he’d hoped that Eden Procuro might have read his script and advanced him money before they arrived, but now the only accomplishment and the only gift he had to offer was a home-cooked meal. He went to an East Village deli that sold reliably excellent tortellini and crusty bread. He was envisioning a rustic and affordable Italian lunch. But the deli appeared to have gone out of business, and he didn’t feel like walking ten blocks to a bakery that he was certain had good bread, and so he wandered the East Village randomly, trudging in and out of meretricious food stores, hefting cheeses, rejecting breads, examining inferior tortellini. Finally he abandoned the Italian idea altogether and fixed on the only other lunch he could think of — a salad of wild rice, avocado, and smoked turkey breast. The problem then was to find ripe avocados. In store after store he found either no avocados or walnut-hard avocados. He found ripe avocados that were the size of limes and cost $3.89 apiece. He stood holding five of them and considered what to do. He put them down and picked them up and put them down and couldn’t pull the trigger. He weathered a spasm of hatred of Denise for having guilted him into inviting his parents to lunch. He had the feeling that he’d never eaten anything in his life but wild-rice salad and tortellini, so blank was his culinary imagination.