Джонатан Франзен – The Corrections (страница 1)
Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections
Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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
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Source ISBN: 9780007232444
Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007317998
Version: 2018-10-26
Praise
‘Intelligent, compellingly readable, funny and above all generous spirited, it is a rare thing, a modern novel with both head and heart’ TERENCE BLACKER,
‘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,
‘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,
‘In its complexity, its scrutinising and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between drama and global events,
‘
‘A major novel that reflects the achievements of Updike and DeLillo while being an entirely original voice. A big, beautiful novel’ GEORGE WALDEN,
‘A remarkably energetic novel, by turns funny, caustic, upsetting and dramatic’ CRAIG BROWN,
‘As good as anything I’ve ever read’ RACHEL CUSK,
‘A big-hearted, panoramic American epic, intelligent and wise but also wildly, stonkingly funny’ LIZ JENSEN,
‘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,
‘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.
‘Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless,
Dedication
To David Means and Genève Paterson
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
ST. JUDE
THE FAILURE
THE MORE HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT, THE ANGRIER HE GOT
AT SEA
THE GENERATOR
ONE LAST CHRISTMAS
THE CORRECTIONS
About the Author
Also by Jonathan Franzen
About the Publisher
ST. JUDE
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.
The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer autumn colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past: that these hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been ringing for years.
She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. She was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and had shouted, “Enid! Enid!” so loudly that he couldn’t hear her shouting back, “Al, I’m getting it!” He’d continued to shout her name, coming closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because there were aspects of the Axon situation that Enid knew about and hoped that Alfred didn’t, she’d quickly stashed the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from the basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment, “There’s somebody at the door!” and she’d fairly screamed, “The mailman! The mailman!” and he’d shaken his head at the complexity of it all.
Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn’t have to wonder, every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she might, she couldn’t get him interested in life. When she encouraged him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. When she asked whether there wasn’t some yard work he could do, he said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of her friends all had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? He’d been repainting the love seat since Labor Day. She seemed to recall that the last time he’d painted the furniture he’d done the love seat in two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he’d painted of the love seat was the legs.