A Few Corrections - Hardcover

Leithauser, Brad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411496 ISBN 13: 9780375411496

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

his obituary, Wesley Sultan died at the age of 63, leaving behind three children, a wife, an ex-wife, a brother, a sister, and a life-long business career. According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan led a quiet, respectable, and unremarkable life. Our narrator, however, is about to discover that nothing could be further from the truth.

Using Sultan’s obituary as a road map to the unknown terrain of the man himself, our narrator discovers dead-ends, wrong turns, and unexpected destinations in every line. As he travels from the bleak Michigan winter to the steamy streets of Miami to the idyllic French countryside, in search of those who knew Wesley best, he gradually reconstructs the life of an exceptionally handsome, ambitious, and deceptive man to whom women were everything. And as the margins of the obituary fill with handwritten corrections, as details emerge and facts are revised, our mysterious narrator–whose interest in his quarry is far from random–has no choice but

From the Back Cover

"Beautifully drawn with the quiet assurance of the master builder. . . . Leithauser is a writer of prodigious gifts." —Baltimore Sun
“A pleasure to read, full of deft touches and quirky insights.” —Los Angeles Times

"A tour de force in narrative construction. . . . Leithauser has a poet's eye for defining details. . . . [He] demonstrates the craftsmanship of a master . . . and displays such bravado that it is a delight to see him at work. . . . Throughout, [he] displays an enviable control over his material, with a magician’s feel for what to reveal and when.” —The Washington Post Book World

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375411496
• ISBN 13: 9780375411496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288