A Few Corrections
by By Leithauser, Brad
Category: Fiction , Literary

This novel opens with a newspaper obituary. The deceased is Wesley Sultan, a respectable, unexceptional, civic-minded mid-western 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.