Comment:

The first journal entry I have for A Few Corrections is dated 20 July 1994. I had been kicking around the idea of a novel that would begin with the obituary of what sounds like quite an unexceptional man--a typical Midwestern businessman. But the first sentence in the actual novel would reveal that most everything in the obituary is false, for the deceased was in fact something of a con man.

The novel really began to grow once a clear picture came into my head of the deceased's brother -- someone who could be a foil for the deceased, a competitor, and -- in the end -- a mourner.

 

transcription:

"I've been thinking increasingly these last few days that after Freeland I'd like to write not the dinosaur novel or Northern Shore but what I think will be called A Few Corrections: the novel about the man who corrects the obituary.

"It occurs to me that the dead man's brother might be homosexual. I picture a big -- maybe huge -- once quite handsome man, who went to fat abruptly and irreversibly.

"He explains -- with a good deal of wisdom --that there is something distressingly "simple" about sexual attraction. "Depressing, really, how we keep falling for the same trick. How undemanding and unimaginative most of us are in the end."