The Corrections

had clods of dirt in their hairy feet. “Kind of a stretch to say ‘decorating.’”
    “Well, you can’t see down here,” she said. “Where’s the light ?”
    “There is no light,” Chip said. “This is the Ghetto in the Woods. This is where your teachers live.”
    “Dude, that ivy is pathetic.”
    “Whose tulips are these?” Chip asked.
    “College tulips,” Melissa said.
    “Dude, I’m not even sure why we were doing this.” Chad turned to allow Melissa to put her mouth on his nose and suck it, which didn’t seem to bother him, although he drew his head back. “Wouldn’t you say this was sort of more your idea than mine?”
    “Our tuition pays for these tulips,” Melissa said, pivoting to press her body more frontally into Chad. She hadn’t looked at Chip since he turned the outdoor light on.
    “So then Hansel and Gretel came and found my screen door.”
    “We’ll clean it up,” Chad said.
    “Leave it,” Chip said. “I’ll see you on Tuesday.” And he went inside and shut the door and played some angry music from his college years.
    For the last meeting of Consuming Narratives the weather turned hot. The sun was blazing in a pollen-filled sky, all the angiosperms in the newly rechristened Viacom Arboretum blooming hard. To Chip the air felt disagreeably intimate, like a warm spot in a swimming pool. He’d already cued up the video player and lowered the classroom shades when Melissa and Chad strolled in and took seats in a rear corner. Chip reminded the class to sit up straight like active critics rather than be passive consumers, and the students sat up enough to acknowledge his request without actually complying with it. Melissa, usually the one fully upright critic, today slumped especially low and draped an arm across Chad’s legs.
    To test his students’ mastery of the critical perspectives to which he’d introduced them, Chip was showing a video of a six-part ad campaign called “You Go, Girl.” The campaign was the work of an agency, Beat Psychology, that hadalso created “Howl with Rage” for G——Electric, “Do Me Dirty” for C——Jeans, “Total F***ing Anarchy!” for the W——Network, “Radical Psychedelic Underground” for Ε——com, and “Love & Work” for Μ—— Pharmaceuticals. “You Go, Girl” had had its first airing the previous fall, one episode per week, on a prime-time hospital drama. The style was black-and-white cinema verité; the content, according to analyses in the Times and the Wall Street Journal , was “revolutionary.”
    The plot was this: Four women in a small office—one sweet young African American, one middle-aged technophobic blonde, one tough and savvy beauty named Chelsea, and one radiantly benignant gray-haired Boss—dish together and banter together and, by and by, struggle together with Chelsea’s stunning announcement, at the end of Episode 2, that for nearly a year she’s had a lump in her breast that she’s too scared to see a doctor about. In Episode 3 the Boss and the sweet young African American dazzle the technophobic blonde by using the W——Corporation’s Global Desktop Version 5.0 to get up-to-the-minute cancer information and to hook Chelsea into support networks and the very best local health care providers. The blonde, who is fast learning to love technology, marvels but objects: “There’s no way Chelsea can afford all this.” To which the angelic Boss replies: “I’m paying every cent of it.” By the middle of Episode 5, however—and this was the campaign’s revolutionary inspiration—it’s clear that Chelsea will not survive her breast cancer. Tear-jerking scenes of brave jokes and tight hugs follow. In the final episode the action returns to the office, where the Boss is scanning a snapshot of the departed Chelsea, and the now rabidly technophiliac blonde is expertly utilizing the W——Corporation’s Global Desktop Version 5.0, and around the world, in rapid montage, women of all ages and races are smiling and dabbing away tears at the image of Chelsea on their own GlobalDesktops. Spectral Chelsea in a digital video clip pleads: “Help us Fight for the Cure.” The episode ends with the information, offered in a sober typeface, that the W——Corporation has given more than $10,000,000.00 to the American Cancer Society to help it Fight for the Cure …
    The slick production values of a campaign like “You Go, Girl” could seduce first-year students before they’d acquired