Read The Corrections: A Novel Online
Authors: Jonathan Franzen
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Holiday responsibilities
Mom says you won’t commit to coming home for Christmas, and she expects me to believe it. But I’m thinking no way could you talk to a woman who’s just had the highlight of her year truncated by an accident, and who otherwise has a shitty life with a semi-disabled man, and who hasn’t gotten to be at home for Christmas since like Dan Quayle’s vice presidency, and who *survives* by looking forward to things, and who loves Christmas the way other people love sex, and who’s seen you for all of forty-five minutes in the last three years: I’m thinking no way could you have told this woman, nope, sorry, staying in Vilnius.
(Vilnius!)
Mom must have misunderstood you. Please clarify.
Since you ask, I’m not working anywhere. Subbing a little at Mare Scuro but otherwise sleeping until two in the afternoon. If this continues, I may have to do some therapeutic thing of the sort that will horrify you. Got to regain my appetite for shopping and other non-free consumer pleasures.
The last thing I heard about Gitanas Misevicious was that he’d given Julia two black eyes. But whatever.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: “Holiday responsibilities”
I intend to get to St. Jude as soon as I make some money. Maybe even by Dad’s birthday. But Christmas is hell, you know that. There’s no worse time. You can tell Mom I’ll come early in the new year.
Mom says that Caroline and the boys will be in St. Jude for Christmas. Can this be true?
Don’t not take a psychotropic on my account.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: “The only thing I hurt was my dignity”
Nice try, but no, sorry, I insist that you come for Christmas.
I’ve been talking to Axon, and the plan is to give Dad six months of Corecktall beginning right after New Year’s,
and to let him and Mom stay with me while that’s going on. (Helpfully, my life is in ruins, so it’s easy to make myself available.) The only way this scenario won’t happen is if Axon’s medical staff decides that Dad has non-drug-related dementia. He admittedly seemed pretty shaky when he was in New York, but he’s been sounding good on the phone. “All I hurt when I fell was my dignity,” etc. They took the cast off his arm a week early.
Anyway, he’s probably going to be with me in Philly for his birthday, and for the rest of the winter and spring too, and so Christmas is the time for you to come to St. Jude, and so please don’t argue with me anymore, just do it.
I eagerly (but with confidence) await confirmation that you will be there.
P.S. Caroline, Aaron, and Caleb are not coming. Gary’s coming with Jonah and flying back to Philly at noon on the 25th.
P.P.S. Don’t worry, I say NO to drugs.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: “The only thing I hurt was my dignity”
I saw a man shot six times in the stomach last night. A paid hit in a club called Musmiryte. It had nothing to do with us, but I wasn’t happy to see it.
It’s not clear to me why I’m required to come to St. Jude on some specific date. If Mom and Dad were my children,
whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hardwired genetic stake in their children’s welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents.
Basically, I have very little to say to these people. And I don’t think they want to hear what I do have to say.
Why don’t I plan to see them when they’re in Philadelphia? That sounds more fun anyway. That way all nine of us can get together, instead of just six of us.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: A serious flaming from your pissed-off sister
My god you sound self-pitying.
I’m saying come for MY sake. For MY sake. And also for YOUR OWN sake, because I’m sure it’s very cool and interesting and adult-feeling to watch somebody get shot in the stomach, but you only have two parents, and if you miss your time with them now you won’t get another chance.
I’ll admit it: I’m a mess.
I will tell you—because I want to tell someone—even though you never told me why YOU got fired—that I was fired for sleeping with my boss’s wife.
So, what do you think *I* have to say to “these people”? What do you think my little Sunday chats with Mom are like these days?
You owe me $20,500. How’s THAT for a debt?
Buy the fucking ticket. I’ll reimburse you.
I love you and I miss you. Don’t ask me why.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Remorse
I’m sorry I flamed you. The last line is the only one I meant. I don’t have the right temperament for e-mail. Please write back. Please come for Christmas.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Worry
Please, please, please don’t talk about people getting shot and then do the silence thing to me.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Only six more shopping days before Christmas!
Chip? Are you there? Please write or call.
Global Warming Enhances Value
of Lithuania Incorporated
VILNIUS, OCTOBER
30. With world ocean levels rising by more than an inch per year and millions of cubic meters of ocean beach eroded daily, the European Council on Natural Resources this week warned that Europe could face “catastrophic” shortages of sand and gravel by the end of the decade.
“Throughout history, mankind has regarded sand and gravel as inexhaustible resources,” said ECNR chairman Jacques Dormand. “Sadly, our overreliance on greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels will leave many central European countries, including Germany, at the mercy of sand-and-gravel cartel states, particularly sand-rich Lithuania, if they wish to continue with basic road-building and construction.”
Gitanas R. Misevičius, founder and CEO of Lithuania’s Free Market Party Company, compared the impending European sand-and-gravel crisis to the oil crisis of 1973. “Back then,” Misevičius said, “tiny oil-rich countries like Bahrain and Brunei were the mice that roared. Tomorrow, Lithuania.”
Chairman Dormand described the pro-Western, probusiness Free Market Party Company as “currently the only political movement in Lithuania willing to deal fairly and responsibly with Western capital markets.
“Our misfortune,” Dormand said, “is that most of Europe’s reserve sand-and-gravel capacity is in the hands of Baltic nationalists beside whom Muammar Gadhafi looks like Charles de Gaulle. I scarcely exaggerate in saying that the future economic stability of the EC is in the hands of a few brave Eastern capitalists like Mr. Misevičius …”
The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole-cloth fabrications without troubling to check even his spelling. Reliability on the Web was ninety-eight percent a function of how slick and cool your site looked. Although Chip personally wasn’t fluent in Web, he was an American under forty, and Americans under forty were exquisite judges of what was slick and cool and what was not. He and Gitanas went to a pub called Prie Universiteto and hired five young Lithuanians in Phish and R.E.M. T-shirts for thirty dollars a day plus millions of worthless stock options, and for a month Chip rode these slang-slinging Webheads mercilessly. He made them study American sites like nbci.com and Oracle. He told them to do it like
this
, to make it look like
this
.
Lithuania.com was officially launched on November 5. A high-res banner—democracy pays handsome dividends —unfurled to the accompaniment of sixteen joyful bars of the “Dance of the Coachmen and Grooms” in
Petrushka
. Side by side, in a rich blue graphical space below the banner, were a black-and-white
Before
picture (“Socialist Vilnius”) of shell-scarred façades and shattered lindens on the Gedimino Prospektas and a luscious color
After
photograph (“Free-Market Vilnius”) of a honey-lit harborside development of boutiques and bistros. (The development was actually in Denmark.) For a week Chip and Gitanas had stayed up late drinking beer and composing the other pages, which promised investors the various eponyms and inseminatory privileges from Gitanas’s original bitter posting and also, according to the level of financial commitment,
The lesson that Gitanas had learned and that Chip was now learning was that the more patently satirical the promises, the lustier the influx of American capital. Day after day Chip churned out press releases, make-believe financial statements,
earnest tracts arguing the Hegelian inevitability of a nakedly commercial politics, gushing eyewitness accounts of Lithuania’s boom-economy-in-the-making, slow-pitch questions in online investment chat rooms, and line-drive-home-run answers. If he got flamed for his lies or his ignorance, he simply moved to another chat room. He wrote text for the stock certificates and for the accompanying brochure (“Congratulations—You Are Now a Free-Market Patriot of Lithuania”) and had them sumptuously printed on cotton-rich stock. He felt as if, finally, here in the realm of pure fabrication, he’d found his métier. Exactly as Melissa Paquette had promised him long ago, it was a gas to start a company, a gas to see the money flowing in.
A reporter for
USA Today
e-mailed to ask: “Is this for real?”
Chip e-mailed back: “It’s for real. The for-profit nation-state, with a globally dispersed citizenry of shareholders, is the next stage in the evolution of political economy. ‘Enlightened neotechnofeudalism’ is blossoming in Lithuania. Come see for yourself. I can guarantee you a minimum ninety minutes’ face time with G. Misevičius.”
There was no reply from
USA Today
. Chip worried that he’d overplayed his hand; but weekly gross receipts were topping forty thousand dollars. The money came in the form of bank drafts, credit-card numbers, e-cash encryption keys, wire transfers to Crédit Suisse, and hundred-dollar bills in airmail envelopes. Gitanas plowed much of the money into his ancillary enterprises, but, per agreement, he did double Chip’s salary as profits rose.
Chip was living rent-free in the stucco villa where the commander of the Soviet garrison had once eaten pheasants and drunk Gewürztraminers and chatted with Moscow on secure phone links. The villa had been stoned and looted and tagged with triumphant graffiti in the fall of 1990, and had then stood derelict until the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 was
voted out of power and Gitanas was recalled from the UN. Gitanas had been attracted to the shattered villa by its unbeatable price (it was free), by its outstanding security arrangements (including an armored tower and a U.S.-embassy-quality fence), and by the opportunity to sleep in the bedroom of the very commander who’d had him tortured for six months in the old Soviet barracks next door. Gitanas and other Party members had worked weekends with trowels and scrapers to restore the villa, but the Party had disbanded altogether before the job was finished. Now half the rooms stood vacant, the floors splashed with broken glass. As throughout the Old City, heat and hot water originated at a mammoth Central Boiler Facility and dissipated much vigor in the long trip, via buried pipes and leaky risers, to the showers and radiators of the villa. Gitanas had set up offices for the Free Market Party Company in the former grand ballroom, claimed the master bedroom for himself, installed Chip in the former aide-de-camp’s suite on the third floor, and let the young Webheads crash where they pleased.