the corrections

Why I love The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen:

“Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99-cent Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.”

“He realized why, on Monday night, Aaron had come and unilaterally apologized for having called him “horrible,” and why Caleb on Tuesday, for the first time in a month, had invited him to play foosball, and why Jonah, on Wednesday, had brought him, unbidden, on a cork-lined tray, a second martini that Caroline had poured. He saw why his children had turned agreeable and solicitous: because Caroline had told them that their father was struggling with clinical depression.”

“There’s bacon, you like bacon,” Enid sang. This was a cynical, expedient fraud, one of her hundred daily conscious failures as a mother.

“Brian had moved through the world like a golden retriever.”

This book is hysterical (pyramids of shrimp, mixed grill, salmon in pants) and Franzen writes better fights than I've read elsewhere. It is also incredibly brave knocking at stereotypes and taboo.