The Corrections

Enid Lambert’s primary identity has been as a wife and mother. She is often a source of irritation to her family, who fails to see her loneliness and frustration. Enid is a foil to Alfred, her optimism and emotionality contrasting with his remoteness and resignation. She is often hurt by her husband but cannot admit the extent of her hurt and disappointment, as she comes from a generation that equates such an admission with failure. Instead, she channels her feelings into keeping up appearances, keeping busy, and trying to corral her children home for the holidays.

Enid is more open-minded and less conventional than she realizes, and unlike her husband, she does undergo a character arc. She finds herself newly accepting of her children once Alfred has been moved into a nursing home, and she realizes that her former intolerance and primness were a result of Alfred’s inhibiting presence. She is unable to forgive Alfred, even once he has died, but does find some relief in accepting the extent of his stubbornness. This is also a backhanded way of accepting herself and realizing that his behavior was not her fault. 

Chip Lambert is the middle child in the Lambert family—and also the black sheep, particularly in his adherence to East Coast values. He is aware and ashamed of it. His shame expresses itself in an inability to face his family and in increasingly reckless, escapist behavior, culminating in his disastrous getaway to Lithuania.

Chip is a foil to Gary, his older brother, who is outwardly conventional and responsible. While Gary is a banker and a family man, Chip is perennially single and unemployed; while Gary is dutiful toward his parents, Chip avoids them. Yet Gary’s respectable surface is also a means of holding his parents at bay, and he is finally unable to face the reality of his father’s dying. It is Chip, at this moment, who takes over as the responsible caretaker.

Chip’s character transformation is abrupt and mysterious and can be interpreted in several ways. The book implies both that his misadventures in Lithuania have frightened him to the extent that the staid Midwest is reassuring to him, making him want only to retreat to his family home, and that these misadventures have prepared him for the unknown and the frightening, so that he is better equipped to face his father’s dying than his more sheltered siblings.

Gary Lambert is the oldest of the Lambert children and is in many ways a typical oldest child. Of his siblings, he has chosen a life that most resembles that of his parents: He is the only one to have married and had children of his own, and he is the vice president of a bank, just as his father was the vice president of a railroad company. At the same time that Gary emulates his father, however, he tries to improve upon and better him. He is materialistic where his father is thrifty, an indulgent parent where his father was a strict one.

Gary changes the least of all of the Lambert children; like his father, he is stubborn. He clings to his banker’s profession as a way of understanding the world and dealing with both of his families. He uses financial language to interpret his own feelings and equates paying off debts with being on good terms; his emotional life is greatly informed by the precarity of the boom economy. It is an outwardly correct posture and one that the world rewards. However, it leaves him poorly equipped to deal with emotional complexity or the demands of his aging parents and is a facet of The Precarity of the Boom Economy.

Gary presents a different challenge for Enid than do Chip and Denise. She grows closer to Chip and Denise at the novel’s end, having accepted their unconventional lives; Chip and Denise, in turn, are less guarded around their mother. Gary, however, uses his conventionality as a shield, and Enid must learn to accept his stubbornness and guardedness.