The Corrections

This chapter focuses on Alfred and Enid Lambert and their often difficult marriage. It opens with Alfred on the cruise, unable to sleep. Nights are when he experiences the strongest symptoms of Parkinson’s and dementia, and he is unnerved by the darkness and unknowability of the ocean at night: “By night […], the mind went forth and dove down through the yielding—the violently lonely—nothingness on which the heavy steel ship traveled, and in every moving swell you saw a travesty of grids, you saw how truly and forever lost a man would be six fathoms under” (239).

The chapter then shifts back in time to Alfred and Enid’s courtship and early marriage. We learn that Enid grew up in a St. Jude boardinghouse with a single mother and that she did the accounting for the business, having a talent for math. She was drawn to the young Alfred’s handsomeness and saw him as a reassuring provider. However, the two have profoundly different natures. Alfred is dour and rigid, while Enid is expressive and venturesome. Alfred’s own upbringing of scarcity has made him financially cautious, while Enid is more drawn to bold and potentially risky investments.

On the night before an eleven-day trip that Alfred takes to assess the Erie Belt railroad line, Enid and Alfred have an argument about investing.