The Corrections

falling-down house on Phil-Ellena Street, and she went to a good Quaker high school and then to an excellent Quaker college, both on full scholarships, and she married her college boyfriend and had two baby girls, while Billy was going down the tubes.
    Nick had taught Billy to love politics, and Billy had repaid him by taunting him with the epithet bourgeois liberal, bour geois liberal . When this failed to incense Nick sufficiently, Billy befriended the other Passafaros, who were predisposed to love any traitor in the family traitor’s family. After Billy was arrested on his second felony charge and Colleen threw him out of the house, his Teamster relatives gave him something of a hero’s welcome. It was a while before he fully wore it out.
    He lived for a year with his Uncle Jimmy, who well into his fifties felt happiest among like-minded adolescents with whom he could share his large collections of guns and knives, Chasey Lain videos, and Warlords III and Dungeonmaster paraphernalia. But Jimmy also worshipped Elvis Presley at a shrine in one corner of his bedroom, and Billy, who never got it through his head that Jimmy wasn’t joking about Elvis,finally desecrated the shrine in some grievous and irreversible manner that Jimmy afterward refused to talk about, and was put out on the street.
    From there Billy drifted into the radical underground scene in Philly—that Red Crescent of bomb-makers and Xeroxers and zinesters and punks and Bakuninites and minor vegan prophets and orgone-blanket manufacturers and women named Afrika and amateur Engels biographers and Red Army Brigade émigrés that stretched from Fishtown and Kensington in the north, over through Germantown and West Philly (where Mayor Goode had firebombed the good citizens of MOVE), and down into blighted Point Breeze. It was an odd Philly Phact that a non-negligible fraction of the city’s crimes were committed with political consciousness. After Frank Rizzo’s first mayoralty nobody could pretend that the city police force was clean or impartial; and since, in the estimation of Red Crescent denizens, all cops were murderers or, at the very least, ipso facto accessories to murder (witness MOVE!), any crime of violence or wealth redistribution to which a cop might object could be justified as a legitimate action in a long-running dirty war. This logic by and large eluded local judges, however. The young anarchist Billy Passafaro over the years drew ever more severe sentences for his crimes—probation, community service, experimental penal boot camp, and finally the state pen at Graterford. Robin and her father often argued about the justice of these sentences, Nick stroking his Lenin-like goatee and asserting that, although not a violent man himself, he was not opposed to violence in the service of ideals, Robin challenging him to specify what political ideal, exactly, Billy had advanced by stabbing a Penn undergrad with a broken pool cue.
    The year before Denise met Robin, Billy was released on parole and attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Community Computing Center in the poor near-northneighborhood of Nicetown. One of the many policy coups of Mayor Goode’s popular two-term successor was the commercial exploitation of the city’s public schools. The mayor had shrewdly cast the deplorable neglect of the schools as a business opportunity (“Act Fast, Be Part of Our Message of Hope,” his letters said), and the Ν——Corporation had responded to his pitch by assuming responsibility for the city’s severely underfunded school athletic programs. Now the mayor had midwifed a similar arrangement with the W——Corporation, which was donating to the city of Philadelphia sufficient units of its famous Global Desktop to “empower” every classroom in the city, plus five Community Computing Centers in blighted northern and western neighborhoods. The agreement granted W——the exclusive right to employ for promotional and advertising purposes all classroom activities within the school district of Philadelphia, including but not limited to all Global Desktop applications. Critics of the mayor alternately denounced the “sellout” and complained that W——was donating its slow and crash-prone Version 4.0 Desktops to the schools and its nearly useless Version 3.2 technology to the Community Computing Centers. But the mood in Nicetown on that September afternoon was buoyant. The mayor and W——’s twenty-eight-year-old corporate-image