The Corrections

The focus in these two chapters is on Chip and Gary, the two oldest children. Enid and Albert are seen mostly through their eyes, as is Denise, the youngest child and only daughter. Denise is largely a mystery in these chapters, and the enigma of her private identity is a quiet source of suspense in the novel. She is an outwardly successful character who seems guarded around her family; from her efforts to fend off her mother’s questions about her love life, we get the sense that she is hiding some darkness.

Neither Chip nor Gary have easy private lives either. The two brothers are foils to one another, heightening one another’s opposing qualities by dramatic contrast. Gary is outwardly conventional, a prosperous banker as well as a father and husband; Chip is “alternative” (489), a New York City bohemian intellectual who wears leather trousers and an earring. The brothers’ contrasting personas arise from a similar need to improve on their Midwestern childhoods and “correct” the failings of their parents; they both consciously pursue East Coast Versus Midwestern Values. Gary is consumed by his father’s caution and thriftiness, both financial and emotional. In his instances of indulgence toward his own three sons and his efforts to acquire shares from the Axon Corporation, he is trying to be both a gentler parent than his father and a more aggressive businessperson. Chip is more embarrassed by his father’s lack of hipness, warning one girlfriend that his parents are “the squarest people in America” (23). (This same girlfriend’s observation that Chip is more like his father than he realizes foreshadows Chip’s eventual transformation into a loving and dutiful son.)

Both Chip’s and Gary’s struggles take place against a background of exaggerated wealth and prosperity. Gary lives in a sheltered Philadelphia suburb, where every house has a sophisticated burglar-alarm system; Chip lives in a New York City of high-powered film producers and upscale delis. It is in one of these delis (called The Nightmare of Consumption) that Chip first hears about the Corecktall treatment that the Axon Corporation is funding. While he is unaware (as is the reader at this stage) of this treatment’s connection to his own family, the scene shows that Chip’s and Gary’s worlds are less divergent than they think. The only difference is that Chip’s downtown New York milieu affects a disdain toward capitalist values while secretly embracing them; this is seen in the arch store title Nightmare of Consumption, for example. Gary’s wealthy Philadelphia milieu is more straightforward and honest in its adherence to these values.

Chip is broke and jobless, while Gary is a bank vice president, yet Gary is no more at ease in his surroundings than Chip is. His material security only makes him feel guilty and inadequate for not being happier and more fulfilled. He is obsessed with the idea that he might be “clinically depressed” (138), a term which he also throws at his father. The specter of clinical depression looms large in Gary’s family as a malady to fend off at all costs; Caroline reads manuals about it and secretly tells her two oldest sons that Gary is suffering from it. Clinical depression implies a lack of interest in living and engaging with the world, and Gary has built his life around constructing a happy and productive adult identity. In his stoic refusal to admit to any sort of sadness at all, Gary ultimately falls apart in front of his family; his drunken efforts to save face at the end of Chapter 3 are clumsy and comical.

Both Gary and Chip ultimately “surrender” to their environments in different ways and experience some relief in doing so (254). While Gary has some private qualms about admitting his depression to Caroline and conceding that she doesn’t need to spend Christmas in St. Jude, it brings about a new mood of marital intimacy: “An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered—possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression […] he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric” (234). Chip likewise experiences a new feeling of closeness and connection once he has escaped New York City and is on a plane to Lithuania with Gitanas, his new accomplice and friend. He feels an almost brotherly closeness to Gitanas, who physically resembles him. Compared to the polished and disingenuous characters with whom Chip has been dealing, Gitanas is honest about his plans and motivations. He tells Chip his life story almost upon meeting him, and he makes Chip aware of a world beyond New York City: Chip “felt himself awakening to a rich and varied world to which he’d been dead for who knew how long. Years” (110).

Chip’s journey to Lithuania is one precarious journey in these two chapters; Alfred and Enid’s Pleasurelines cruise is another. Although the one is a desperate flight and the other is a leisurely boat tour, both voyages are undertaken in a similar spirit of denial and avoidance. Chip is trying to escape his debts and responsibilities, while Alfred and Enid are trying to outrun their old age and frailty. These two endeavors seem equally doomed, and it is not a surprise when Gary receives a phone call from his mother on the cruise ship at the end of Chapter 3.