Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections
Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by 4th Estate
THE CORRECTIONS. Copyright © Jonathan Franzen 2001
Cover images © Praethip Docekalova / Shutterstock (armchair); Photka / Shutterstock (pills)
The right of Jonathan Franzen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental
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Source ISBN: 9780007232444
Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007317998
Version: 2019-09-24
Praise
‘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 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 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
Dedication
To David Means and Genève Paterson
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
ST. JUDE
THE FAILURE
THE MORE HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT, THE ANGRIER HE GOT
AT SEA
THE GENERATOR
ONE LAST CHRISTMAS
THE CORRECTIONS
About the Author
Also by Jonathan Franzen
About the Publisher
ST. JUDE
THE MADNESS of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.
Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he’d been sleeping since lunch. He’d had his nap and there would be no local news until five o’clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of “bell ringing” but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as