The Corrections

“[Denise] was the one who’d instructed Chip to invite his parents to stop and have lunch in New York today. She’d sounded like the World Bank dictating terms to a Latin debtor state, because, unfortunately, Chip owed her money.”

Denise is more successful and financially prosperous than Chip, which gives her a position of seniority, even though she is the youngest Lambert sibling. The passage shows the degree to which financial and sociopolitical concerns can color intimate family life. Chip’s lack of financial security gives him a significantly less-powerful position in the family’s hierarchy.

“Chip had grown up listening to his father pontificate on the topics of Men’s Work and Women’s Work and the importance of maintaining the distinction; in a spirit of correction, he stuck with Toni for nearly a decade.”

Chip is particularly embarrassed by his father’s social and cultural conservatism. His vow to be more progressive than Alfred leads him to stay with a partner with whom he is ill-matched for too long. It is a poor criterion for choosing romantic partners and one that ultimately shows the power that Chip’s father still wields over him.

“He couldn’t figure out if [Melissa] was immensely well-adjusted or seriously messed up.”

Melissa, the student with whom Chip has an affair, is very much a creature of her moment; it is for this reason that Chip both envies and is put off by her. She comes from a fractured and nontraditional family, while he comes from a traditional one; she is also unconflicted about capitalism and the joys of making money. Chip likes to think of himself as progressive and youthful, but Melissa challenges this self-conception.

“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.”

Chip is unable to finish his screenplay because his entire livelihood—and dignity—depends on it. He wants to sell the screenplay for a decent sum of money, but he also wants to write a serious intellectual work. The fact that these are two irreconcilable ambitions causes him to continually second-guess himself.

“‘The implications are disturbing, but there’s no stopping this powerful new technology.’ That could be the motto for our age, don’t you think?’”

Doug, a financier acquaintance of Chip’s, is speaking about the new neurological treatment that Chip’s father has had an unwitting hand in creating. Doug has slight ethical qualms about the treatment but is mostly on the side of technology and money, which he seems to regard as uncontrollable forces. In this way, he is even more of his age than he realizes.

“The North Atlantic night was dark and lonely, but here, on the plane, were lights in the sky. Here was sociability. It was good to be awake and to feel awakeness all around him.”

Chip feels newly sheltered and refreshed on the plane to Lithuania. This is partly because he has escaped his unpromising circumstances in New York City, including the large amount of money that he owes his sister. It is also because there is a relief for him in escaping to a poor struggling country, where his own struggles seem minor. Taking this risk makes him feel more solid and real to himself.

“His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well-contained.”

As a banker, Gary is in the habit of applying market terminology to his own feelings. This habit does not help him at all to communicate with his family, showing the distance between rational-sounding language and rational behavior. Gary’s interior monologues show the degree to which jargon can enter into and mold our thoughts.

“[Caroline’s] real life centered on the boys. She called them her best friends.”

Caroline, Gary’s wife, refers to her sons as her “best friends,” just as Melissa refers to her parents as her “best friends” in Chapter 2. Gary and Chip both have qualms about this lack of parental boundaries, showing that they are both more traditional than they realize. They view parents as disciplinarians rather than peers.

“He would have slit his own throat if the boy needed blood; his love was immense in that way: and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he was also coalition-building.”

Families in this novel are sites of intimacy and comfort but also of underground power struggles. Gary both adores his youngest son, Jonah, and needs him as a bulwark against his wife and his two oldest sons, who he feels are allied against him. His inability to view his family without perceiving a hierarchical power structure reflects his traditional Midwestern upbringing.

“Even in a rising market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We’ve got to sell this fucker now, we can’t lose another day.”

Gary is channeling his panic over his parents’ mortality into a need to sell their inefficient old home. His attention to the crumbling house is detailed and careful, while his attention to his parents’ aging is impatient and brusque.

“‘It’s because you’re depressed, Dad. You are clinically depressed.’ ‘And so are you.’”

Gary uses the term “clinically depressed” as a blanket condemnation. He sees it as both a moral failing and a condition to be treated, and he throws the term at his father as a way of managing and undermining him. However, Alfred feels no generational shame about being told that he is depressed, and he only reminds Gary that they are more alike than Gary realizes.

“He saw an opportunity to make some money and avenge Axon’s screwing of his father and, more generally, be bold where Alfred had been timid.”

Gary wants to get wealthy off of the new neurological treatment partly so that he can provide for his aging parents. At the same time, he wants to compete with his father and to show that he is a better provider than Alfred. His frail father is still a powerful adversary in his mind.

“It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world.”

Alfred’s values are values of modesty and rectitude; he is also “considerate to the world” in the sense that he respects durable, well-made objects, such as railroad tracks and Christmas lights. He is offended by people who do not have his sense of propriety and equally offended by thoughtless shoddy design. He is conservative—and is also, in his way, a conservationist.

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

This line refers specifically to Chip, as a boy, finding ways to entertain himself while he is left alone at the dinner table. It evokes the Lambert family’s larger denial about its own fractures. It also hints at a still larger mood of national denial about the possibility of a devastating market correction.

“Maybe the futile light in a house with three people separately absorbed in the basement and only one upstairs, a little boy staring at a plate of cold food, was like the mind of a depressed person.”

The Lambert household is often a lonely one, with each family member off in their own separate orbit. The comparison of the family to a depressed mind, in which parts that should be interconnective are not communicating, shows the particular intimacy of this loneliness. This image is one of several instances in which the brain is evoked as an organ to be studied.

“She wondered: 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.”

Sylvia Roth, whose daughter has been tortured and murdered, is describing her first time looking at pornography. She has done so in an effort to understand the motives behind her daughter’s death. Her observation about images being as powerful as real things is the inverse of Alfred Lambert’s respect for concrete objects, yet the two of them share a similar distress over the state of the world.

“Death, Enid thought. He was talking about death. And all the people clapping were so old.”

Enid is listening to a lecturer talk about the stock market, invoking its inevitable crash. She is on a cruise trip full of senior citizens, and her thoughts about death foreshadow her husband’s fall from the boat deck. These thoughts also demonstrate Enid’s deep perceptiveness and honesty, which she often keeps hidden from others in the name of convention and appearances.

“‘Anyhow,’ her father said, ‘now you’ve had a taste of life in the real world.’”

Alfred’s comment to Denise is more pertinent than he realizes. He believes that her horizons have been broadened by her summer internship at his railroad company; in fact, she has experienced great disillusionment through her affair with Don Armour, one of the workers at the company. Alfred’s line is therefore both truthful and ironical.

“Her affair was like a dream life unfolding in that locked and soundproofed chamber of her brain where, growing up in St. Jude, she’d learned to hide desires.”

Denise has learned early on how to compartmentalize and keep secrets, preparing her for her affair with Robin Passafaro. This line shows how Denise’s repressed St. Jude upbringing has stuck with her, even while she has always been restless and independent. This also highlights her similarity to Enid; the two women never truly recognize their shared propensity for secret-keeping, which is a way to insulate their true selves from a cold and disappointing world.

“Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America.”

Chip sees in Lithuania a mirror image of the America that he has just left. Lithuania is an openly-corrupt country while America is a capitalist one, but in both countries there is a similar gap between the poor and the wealthy. At first, Chip finds a relief in these underground similarities, which suggest to him that his own country is more corrupt than he had realized.

“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.”

Denise understands her father partly because she is like him and shares his need for privacy. She is also beginning to see her father as an individual, rather than just an authority figure. In his vulnerable old age, she has to consider what he might need from her.

“Chip could see it clearly now, behind the cold front of Gary’s wordless departure: his brother was afraid.”

Chip sees beyond Gary’s officious demeanor with their parents and understands that he cannot face their aging. This realization marks Chip’s transformation into a more attentive and responsible son himself. His experience in Lithuania has made him aware of the frailties and evasions of others, beneath their bossy prosperous facades; his brush with real-world danger has made him more psychologically astute.

“The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.”

The market correction has been an undercurrent throughout the novel: the anxiety that the boom market might crash, which echoes and amplifies the Lambert family’s anxiety about Alfred’s age and frailty. Yet in the end the corrections are much milder than anticipated, just as the Lambert family finds a simple, gentle solution for handling Alfred’s illness. Rather than sell his house or subject him to an experimental neurological treatment, they simply put him in a nursing home.