β
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insightβisn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said.
Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing."
"Self-inflicted. You pathetic American."
"Different kind of prison" Chip said.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
β
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"
"I don't know."
"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
β
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
β
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
β
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
That was the way most people were - stupid.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
...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.
β
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
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.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
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. It could be read, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Chevrolet had crunched on the gravel driveway; but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
The family was the house's soul.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.
He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong heβd been and how right sheβd 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 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.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn't trash.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from "Black Beauty" or "The Chronicles of Narnia". How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos-
β
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
You see a person with kids,β she said, βand you see how happy they are to be a parent, and youβre attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.
This futility had let's call it a flavor.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people wereβstupid.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
As she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing β ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoeverβs message. That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone β that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day β cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Gary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di societΓ , in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter-- to inflict that version of himself on other people-- was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.
He was also afraid that it might hurt.
And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.
And the question was:
The question was:
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband's kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Impossibility is attractive.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn's eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory.
When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her.
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correctionβno way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boyβs disgust.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insightβisnβt that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and youβre less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isnβt it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything youβve experienced before?
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
E quando l'evento, il grosso cambiamento nella tua vita Γ¨ semplicemente una presa di coscienza, non Γ¨ strano? Non c'Γ¨ assolutamente nulla di diverso, tranne il fatto che vedi le cose in un altro modo e di conseguenza sei meno impaurita e meno ansiosa e nel complesso piΓΉ forte: non Γ¨ sorprendente che una cosa completamente invisibile nella tua testa possa sembrarti piΓΉ vera di qualunque altra cosa tu abbia mai provato prima?
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn't understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it.
And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We're all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live vicariously through them. All of a sudden I was sick of that kind of thinking. I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I'm alive now. And I can live deliberately. I've paid the price, I've done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Oh, il mito, lβinfantile ottimismo delle riparazioni! La speranza che gli oggetti non si logorassero mai! La sciocca fiducia nel fatto che ci fosse sempre un futuro in cui lui, Alfred, non solo sarebbe stato vivo ma avrebbe anche avuto sufficiente energia per aggiustare le cose. La tacita convinzione che alla fine tutta la sua frugalitΓ e la sua passione di conservatore avessero uno scopo, e che un giorno, svegliandosi, si sarebbe trasformato in una persona completamente diversa, con tempo ed energia infiniti per occuparsi di tutti gli oggetti che aveva conservato, per mantenere tutto funzionante, tutto a posto.
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β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the seasonβs rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didnβt work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didnβt affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement . . .
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Terwijl hij wachtte tot het trillen minder werd - terwijl hij machteloos keek naar de rukkerige, maaiende bewegingen, alsof hij in een kinderkamer vol krijsende, zich misdragende peuters zat en zijn stem kwijt was en ze niet tot bedaren kon brengen - vermaakte Alfred zich ermee zich voor te stellen dat hij zijn hand afhakte met een bijl: dat hij het ongehoorzame lichaamsdeel duidelijk maakte hoe vreselijk boos hij erop was, hoe weinig hij ervan hield als het hem niet wilde gehoorzamen. Het leidde tot een soort extase als hij zich voorstelde hoe het blad van de bijl de eerste keer in het bot en de spieren van zijn ergerlijke pols hakte; maar tegelijk met de extase, ermee samengaand, was er een neiging om te wenen om die hand die van hem was, waar hij van hield en die hij het beste toewenste, die hij zijn hele leven al kende.
61
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Robinβs voice on the executive chefβs line came to signify tongue. She didnβt say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robinβs tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the dayβs exigencies, but in Deniseβs ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the worldβs noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.
β
β
Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
β
Suggested Reading Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Binchy, Maeve. Tara Road, The Copper Beech, and Evening Class; Bloom, Amy. Come to Me; Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeperβs Daughter; Ferris, Joshua. The Unnamed; Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections; Ganesan, Indira. Inheritance; Hanilton, Jane. Disobedience; Jonasson, Jonas. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees; Mapson, Jo-Ann, The Owl & Moon Cafe; McEwan, Ian. Atonement; Miller, Arthur. All My Sons; Morrison, Toni. Love; OβNeill, Eugene. Long Dayβs Journey into Night; Pekkanen, Sarah. The Opposite of Me; Porter, Andrew. In Between Days; Quindlen, Anna. Blessings and One True Thing; Rosenfeld, Lucinda. The Pretty One; Sittenfeld, Curtis. Sisterland; Smith, Ali. There But For The; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club; Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; White, Karen. The Time Between; Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; Yates, Richard. The Easter Parade.
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Maggie O'Farrell (Instructions for a Heatwave)
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Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbsβa substantia nigra deep inside the tangle.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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Sheβd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that sheβd had her fill of the place.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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Robin turned and looked straight into her. βWhatβs life for?β βI donβt know.β βI donβt either. But I donβt think itβs about winning.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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Dad, Dad, Dad. Whatβs wrong?β Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was βIββ Iβ I have made mistakesβ I am aloneβ I am wetβ I want to dieβ I am sorryβ I did my bestβ I love my childrenβ I need your helpβ I want to dieβ βI canβt be here,β he said.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. (βSixtyβs too bright,β he said, βand forty is too dim.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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In the elevator it seemed to Enid that the ship was suffering not only from a seesaw motion but also from a yaw, as if its bow were the face of someone experiencing repugnance.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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The soul,' he said to Pip, 'is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified enzyme. Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That's what I've become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.' He nodded at Leila. 'And she worries that I'm not happy.'
Pip's eyes widened with swallowed comment.
'She's still looking for her molecule,' Charles continued. 'I already know mine. Do you know yours?
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Jonathan Franzen
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They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell nightβs approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)