The Corrections

This book begins and ends with short chapters set in St. Jude, Missouri. These chapters are like bookends, framing the much longer chapters in between them. Both bookending chapters are told from Enid’s point of view. Enid is a character who is often underestimated by other members of the Lambert family; at the same time, she looms large for her children. Chip, the middle child, thinks of his mother at one point that “she was so much personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like” (18). Because Enid is such an overbearing mother, her children have little idea of how mysterious she really is; the opening and closing chapters focus on the internal life that she keeps hidden from her children and, to an extent, even from herself.

Hiding and evasion are themes in this opening chapter. Enid is hiding a letter from the Axon Corporation; we do not yet understand the significance of this letter, which serves to create suspense. She keeps hiding the letter in different places, as if it were a much larger and more conspicuous object, showing how large the letter looms in her own mind. More broadly, Enid feels a need to keep the house impeccably tidy and to hide all mail and clutter from her husband: “By day, she ferried material from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force” (5). Her impulse is both a controlling and a fearful one; she wishes to take care of the bills that come in the mail but also to hide the more frivolous mail from her husband to avoid his “wrath” (6).

All of Enid’s evasive tactics spring from a larger denial: that of her own and her husband’s old age. Enid cannot always remember where she has last hidden the mail—nor what this mail consists of—making her elaborate “guerilla” maneuvers an increasing challenge (5). She fears her husband’s censoriousness and anger, while avoiding all the evidence of her husband’s increasing senility. Noting the disorder and squalor of Alfred’s basement workshop, she searches for a benign explanation: “She felt a shortness of breath then, but perhaps it was only the smell of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that smelled like urine (but could not possibly be urine). She fled upstairs to look for the letter from Axon” (5).

The tone in this chapter is both comical and serious, setting the tone for the novel. The comparison of an elderly middle-class woman hiding the mail from her husband to a guerilla practicing secret warfare against a government is an exaggerated, humorous one; at the same time, there is a serious desperation behind all of Enid’s petty maneuvers. Likewise, Alfred is twice described in the chapter as “shaking his head at the complexity of it all,” evoking a comically bemused and grumpy husband (4). Yet the truth is that Alfred is not merely bemused but increasingly disoriented, being in the early throes of Parkinson’s.

The backdrop of the chapter is also an ominous one; there are clouds gathering over St. Jude, and there is an implied mood of national unease and avoidance: “You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen” (1). This line refers specifically to the cold front gathering over St. Jude, but also evokes a less tangible atmosphere of instability and dread. There is the dread of old age and death, and the dread of an impending market crash; these two anxieties will be intertwined in the plot thread about the Axon Corporation, highlighting the theme of The Precarity of the Boom Economy.