The Corrections

“At Sea,” the title of Chapter 4, refers literally to the senior Lamberts’ cruise trip. But it also refers metaphorically to Alfred’s worsening condition, the loneliness of Enid and Alfred’s marriage, and the dysfunction of the Lambert children’s upbringing. There is a sense in which the Lamberts have always been at sea, even when they were all at home in St. Jude, Missouri. While we have previously understood St. Jude to be a staid and conventional place—one that mainly embarrasses the Lambert children—we now understand it to be just as dark and complicated as the wider world.

It is in these chapters that we first get Denise’s full backstory. It is significant that Denise’s coming of age and disillusionment occur not once she has moved away from St. Jude but while she is still at home as a teenager. Moreover, her affair with Don Armour takes place almost under her father’s nose, while she is working for a summer in the clerical department of her father’s railroad company. This short affair will have long-ranging consequences not only for Denise but for Alfred and the Lambert family. For Denise, it will set a pattern of affairs with older men, whose desire and social power are reassuring to her and blind her, for a time, to her attraction to women. The affair is also, as we will later learn, what causes Alfred to retire from the railroad company, and Familial Dysfunction is an important theme in the novel.

As the youngest child and the only girl in the family, Denise has different allegiances than her two older brothers. She has always had more sympathy for her father than for her mother and feels a classic female anxiety about turning into her mother. It is her father who has the greater public identity, and Denise wants to live a big public life rather than a confined domestic one. At the same time, Denise’s attraction to restaurant kitchens stems in part from a desire to create a more loving and accepting family environment than the one in which she grew up:

A good [kitchen] crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this (376).

This interdependent yet freewheeling environment is the inverse of Denise’s lonely childhood household, which is compared to “the mind of a depressed person” (267).

These chapters provide a fuller portrait of Alfred Lambert, both as a distant father and as an ailing man. While up until now he has been seen mostly from the outside, through the eyes of his adult children, we have access in these chapters to his internal life; we also see him in flashbacks as a relatively young man. This gives us a fuller sense of why he is such a forbidding figure to his family, and it is one reason why these chapters mark a new, darker turn in the book.

While there is still comedy in these chapters, it is comedy that is right on the edge of tragedy. The episode of Alfred having hallucinations about feces escaping from his adult diaper and mocking him, for example, is farcical but also dark; the toilet humor illustrates how helpless and ashamed of his helplessness he is. Likewise, the other guests at Alfred and Enid’s cruise-ship dinner table are a hybrid of comedic and tragic. These include the frivolous Swedish Söderblads and the pedantic Norwegian Nygrens, who are all comic characters in different ways (and whose sparring at the dinner table provides comic relief). These characters serve to offset the character of Sylvia Roth, whose story is not funny at all.

Sylvia is a minor character with a full backstory that reflects on the stories of the major characters. She is a wealthy, educated woman whose wealth has not shielded her from tragedy: that of the murder of her daughter. Nor has her high-minded Quaker background shielded her from a new fascination with guns, pornography, and a desire to avenge her daughter’s killing. Enid is initially drawn to Sylvia because of her intelligence and honesty but is ultimately put off by her as well. This is not only because of the darkness of Sylvia’s story but also because Enid senses something oblivious and privileged in Sylvia’s demeanor: “[S]uddenly she reminded Enid of Katherine Hepburn. In Hepburn’s eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal” (308).

The estranging effects of capitalism is another source of darkness (and dark comedy) in these chapters. It is significant that Alfred’s fall from the boat occurs while Enid and Sylvia are attending an investment lecture about the possibility of a market crash. Sylvia, who is less affected by market fluctuations than Enid—and who is preoccupied by her own tragedy—dismisses the lecturer as superficial. However, Enid understands the lecturer to be really “talking about death” and to be preying on the fears of his elderly audience (334). Enid’s new mood-enhancing drug prescribed by the opportunistic, money-minded doctor gives her a delayed response to the sight of her husband falling past the window. For a moment, she gets her response backward and imagines Alfred to be the literal embodiment of the falling market:

For an instant it seemed to Enid as if Jim Crolius were doing a technical market analysis of the kind that her broker in St. Jude had told her never to pay attention to. Discounting the minimal effects of wind drag at low velocities […] and assuming a 6-foot-long object, and also assuming for simplicity’s sake a constant velocity over the interval, derive a figure of approximately four-tenths of a second of full or partial visibility (335).

The effect of this long associative passage is that the reader only gradually understands, just as Enid does, that the falling figure is Alfred. Her slow understanding of the situation mirrors her long period of denial of Alfred’s failing health up to this point.

Alfred’s thoughts as he falls into the ocean are of his children, and Chapter 5 ends with Chip in Lithuania, trying to make his way back home. Chip has realized that as frightening as Lithuania has become to him, the prospect of going home to St. Jude for Christmas is even more frightening; he then, on an impulse, phones Enid in St. Jude. It is only in life-threatening circumstances that Alfred and Chip face the extent of their dependency on their families; they are alike in this way, and their similar natures may be one reason why Chip is Alfred’s favorite child.