A Few Corrections [Hardcover]

Brad Leithauser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2001

This moving and resourceful novel by one of our most acclaimed writers opens with a newspaper obituary. The deceased is Wesley Sultan, a respectable, unexceptional, civic-minded midwestern businessman. But the novel’s first sentence hints of mysterious revelations to come: “There are at least a dozen errors here.”

Step by step, the book’s narrator—himself mysterious—sets about correcting the errors, investigating the deceptive but appealing Wesley Sultan by way of the lives he touched and often manipulated: his wives, his siblings, his
girlfriends, his children. Each chapter reprints the obituary but each time with a new handwritten amendment—correction piling upon correction until the original has been effectively demolished. It seems that businessman Wesley—handsome, dapper, flirtatious, and ambitious—lived a far more tangled and ambiguous life than the one he presented to the world.

A Few Corrections is both a psychological detective story and an epitaph for a vanishing figure—the gallant, sports-car-driving local Romeo who flourished in midcentury throughout small-town America. Written with humor and lyrical dash, it is also a compelling novel that explores its subject with wit and a flowering tenderness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brad Leithauser (The Friends of Freeland) has been compared to John Updike in the past, but in his latest novel he seems to be getting his cues from a realist of an earlier generation, John O'Hara. The novel takes up a cute premise: Wesley Sultan's obituary, published in the Restoration, Mich., Oracle, is not entirely accurate. Wesley's son, Luke a former investment adviser in Manhattan, now on a quest to understand the father he never really knew corrects it, heading each chapter with a copy of the obituary and the marginal notes that he's accumulated. Wes; Wes's brother, Conrad; and Wes's sister, Adelle, grew up in a family fallen on hard times. When he was 17, Wes dropped out of high school and got a lifetime job with Great Bay Shipping. But his real vocation was seduction Wes was the quintessential lady's man. Sally, his first wife and Luke's mother, divorced him for his incorrigible faithlessness; she is now a relatively rich widow, inheriting around $900,000 from her second husband, a doctor named Gordon. As Luke shuttles between Sally, on vacation in France; Conrad, in retirement in Miami; and Adelle, he becomes as much a protagonist as Wes. But neither Luke nor Wes are infused with the kind of Dreiserian energy necessary to power this tale of middle American hopes and disappointments. Sally and Conrad are the live wires in the book: Conrad is fat and dying, and cantankerous as a goat; Sally is happier and wiser now that she is finally able to do just what she wants. Despite its charismatic supporting players, Leithauser's cleverly conceived novel lacks a strong protagonist, and ultimately caves in on its empty center. (Apr. 17)Forecast: Respected poet and novelist Leithauser is in a bit of a slump. The response to his last novel (The Friends of Freeland) and collection of poetry (The Odd Last Thing She Did) was lukewarm at best, and it seems unlikely this well-crafted but listless tale will change reviewers' or book purchasers' tunes.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

At first, this exploration of a small-town Midwestern Lothario's lifeis like something out of Dreiser: Wesley Sultan––Rotarian, Episcopalian, and aspiring businessman––seems emphatically ordinary. The relevant characters, however, are Wesley's second wife, the brilliant, self-deprecating Sally, in France, who speaks in the style of the novels that fuel her mental life; and his brother Conrad, in Miami, riddled with disease and quite definitely raging against the dying of the light. The novel is formally constructed, each chapter offering a correction to the obituary of Wesley that appears on the first page, and this sobriety of design contrasts with the inventiveness of Leithauser's portraits.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (April 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411496
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411496
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,446,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Few Corrections; Many, Many Connections, May 21, 2001

By 

John Chapman (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Few Corrections (Hardcover)

Midway through this exquisite novel the narrator recalls, through an alcoholic mist, that, "the most distant object visible by day--the sun-- lies some eight minutes away at the speed of light. The most distant visible by night--the Great Andromeda Galaxy--lies two million light-years away. In terms of visible boundaries, then, night is some 100 billion times bigger than day." Clearly (or murkily), that leaves much to explore. The primary object of exploration in A Few Corrections, Wesley Sultan, the quintessentially American salesman, has departed for the great darkness beyond life, and the obituary of the man is less than illuminating. The narrator methodically seeks to shed light on this mystery.

While the novel is organized around the attempt to make a few corrections to the memory of this rather ordinary Midwestern life, Brad Leithauser makes more than a few fascinating connections, extending to the extraordinary. Some connections work as metaphor. Of Wesley's sister, the babbling Adelle, he writes, "Her monologue is a wandering creek of so gentle a propulsion, you have to take on faith the notion that you'll eventually get out of the woods and into open waterways." The connections work at the larger structural level of the novel, which will have the careful reader returning to the beginning of chapters and earlier parts of the book to confirm the revelations. For fans of Brad Leithauser, there are even connections to his other works of fiction and poetry. I'm anxious to see where this novel will connect to his future work.

The novel is filled with humorous vignettes and is beautifully written. (It's better when you read it aloud.) Though Wesley Sultan is elusive, the narrator reaches small epiphanies with those who aid him in his quest. Leithauser treats his characters with great warmth and understanding. He also effectively evokes an earlier and lost time. A Few Corrections is fast-paced: it's a good read. At the same time, its richness makes it a good re-read, too.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Printed = True?, September 30, 2010

By 

Frances S. Heales (STOUGHTON MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Few Corrections: A Novel (Paperback)

This fascinating book describes the (fictional) hunt for the truth behind a very bland obituary notice. The book begins with a copy of the notice and links what the reader (the author) knows to his search for the tangled life which the obituary concealed. Not only is it a good read, but it is a warning and inspiration to family historians.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a steady presence on the literary scene, November 14, 2009

By 

Hope N. Concern "HNC" (the midwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Few Corrections: A Novel (Paperback)

This book is sharp-minded and subtlely witty and knows whereof it speaks. I loved every moment of it.