A Few Corrections

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. From the Hardcover edition.

Review :
"Brad Leithauser's new novel is very clever and engaging. It's amusing and inventive metafiction that says serious things about a writer's-or anyone's-attempt to describe a person's life. With its last-minute echo of "Gatsby," even more comes clear: this is a story about America; this is a story about the way our lives-whether public or private-actually take place off the page or in parenthesis." -Ann Beattie "What makes "A Few Corrections" such a successful experiment is that Leithauser does not allow the metafiction to get in the way of his storytelling. The stories, and the characters who relate them, fit seamlessly into the architecture of the larger narrative [of] . . . this smart, moving, and fully realized novel."-"Chicago Tribune" "Leithauser displays an enviable control of his material, with a magician's feel for what to reveal and when . . . It's a delight to see him at work, like watching someone make an origami swan out of a back issue of the "Detroit Free Press," Read "A Few Corrections" for an evocation of an earlier era, if you wish, or for the tangled tale of a Midwestern Lothario, but read it as a tour de force in narrative construction. You'll certainly never read a simple narrative in the same way again."-"Washington Post Book World" "A gentle, occasionally funny and moving, always humane and intriguing novel."-"San Francisco Chronicle" "This crafty, kind, beautifully written novel tells a number of interwoven stories . . . "A Few Corrections" is 'about' many things. It is vividly and knowledgeably about the minutiae of growing up in a Michigan small town in the 50s. It is about how people change or stay the same, or, mysteriously, how they do both. . ."-"San Diego Union-Tribune" "Leithauser has written a book shot through with sparks of light that glint from the tiniest of sources, no less bright for their size."-"Baltimore Sun" "A pleasure to read, full of deft touches and quirky insights, never dull, always diverting."-"Los Angeles Times" ""A Few Corrections" is no small achievement . . . it makes 'one local corner of the cosmos' well worth the visit."-"Newsday" "From the Hardcover edition."