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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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007232444

Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007317998

Version: 2018-10-26

‘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

To David Means and Genève Paterson

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

ST. JUDE

THE FAILURE

THE MORE HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT, THE ANGRIER HE GOT

AT SEA

THE GENERATOR

ONE LAST CHRISTMAS

THE CORRECTIONS

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Jonathan Franzen

About the Publisher

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 with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred—she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table—each felt near to exploding with anxiety.