The Corrections

time. He was wrong to attempt to hang himself with bedsheets in the night. He waswrong to hurl himself against a window. He was wrong to try to slash his wrist with a dinner fork. Altogether he was wrong about so many things that, except for her four days in New York and her two Christmases in Philadelphia and her three weeks of recovery from hip surgery, she never failed to visit him. She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he’d been and how right she’d 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 so 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. Even if he wouldn’t listen, she had to tell him.
    He’d been living at the Deepmire Home for two years when he stopped accepting food. Chip took time away from parenthood and his new teaching job at a private high school and his eighth revision of the screenplay to visit from Chicago and say goodbye. Alfred lasted longer after that than anyone expected. He was a lion to the end. His blood pressure was barely measurable when Denise and Gary flew into town, and still he lived another week. He lay curled up on the bed and barely breathed. He moved for nothing and responded to nothing except to shake his head emphatically, once, if Enid tried to put an ice chip in his mouth. The one thing he never forgot was how to refuse. All of her correction had been for naught. He was as stubborn as the day she’d met him. And yet when he was dead, when she’d pressed her lips to his forehead and walked out with Denise and Gary into the warm spring night, 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.

JONATHAN FRANZEN

    The Twenty-Seventh City

    ‘A huge and masterly drama … gripping and surreal and overwhelmingly convincing’
    Newsweek

    St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city. But that all changes when it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city’s leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unravelling into terror and dark comedy.

    ‘Franzen has managed to put together a suspense story with all the elements of a complex, multi-layered psychological novel… A riveting piece of fiction that lingers in the mind long after more conventional pot-boilers have bubbled away’
    New York Times Book Review

    Unsettling and visionary. The Twenty-Seventh City is not a novel that can be quickly dismissed or easily forgotten: it has elements of both “Great” and “American”. A book of memorable characters, surprising situations, and provocative ideas’
    Washington Post

    ‘Franzen goes for broke here – he’s out to expose the soul of a city and all the bloody details of the way we live. A book of range, pith and intelligence’
    Vogue

    ISBN: 978-1-84115-748-1

JONATHAN FRANZEN

    Strong Motion
    ‘By sheer force of his imaginative writing and his unsheathed views of American life, Franzen succeeds in joining together a love story, a family story, and a corporate-cum-environmental story … Distinctly original’
    New York Times

    Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of strange happenings – earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance Louis falls in love with Renée Seitchek, a passionate and brilliant seismologist, whose discoveries about the origin of the earthquakes complicate everything.

    ‘No doubt about it: Jonathan Franzen is one of the most extraordinary writers around’
    Newsweek

    ‘Ingeniously put together … His ear for American vernacular is flawless … His gift for description has a kinetic immediacy’
    Seattle Times

    ‘An affirmation of Franzen’s fierce imagination and distinctive seriocomic voice’
    New York Times Book Review

    ISBN: 978-1-84115-749-8

JONATHAN FRANZEN

    How to Be Alone
    ‘Compelling and invigorating’
    The Times

    Jonathan Franzen’s The