A FEW CORRECTIONS
By Brad Leithauser

A Few Corrections begins with the obituary of Wesley Cross Sultan, dead at the age of 63.

Or maybe that was supposed to be 62.

This is one obituary that is in need of a few corrections. And so at the beginning of each chapter the obituary reappears, with handwritten amendments that try to set the story straight. By the time we get to the end, the original notice has virtually disappeared beneath a network of scrawls and marginalia.

Which isn’t to say that Wes Sultan was a mysterious man. The facts, even when they stand corrected, are banal: A charming small-town Lothario who worked nearly his entire life as a sales rep for a Michigan shipping company. Promiscuous, yes; but even his poorly concealed affairs were ordinary, conventional.

In the real world, the ordinary has a way of disguising itself almost by accident. The camouflage of ordinary language, for example, is cliché. By definition cliché is language we use all the time, but what does it mean?

It is precisely such verbal formalities and conventions of expression - including the obituary itself - that exercise the truly mysterious narrator, a man on a mission to uncover the real Wesley Sultan. Shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic courtesy of thousands of accumulated frequent-flyer miles, he interviews Wesley’s significant survivors as part of an investigation into what he is convinced is the secret meaning of Wesley’s life.

But what do you get when you finally unpack a cliché? Something equally conventional? Or some deep human truth? Leithauser answers with the ambiguous image of a firefly glowing from within the throat of a frog, a symbol of the obscurity that swallows the memory of such average men as Wesley Sultan.

As Linda Loman said of another all-too-ordinary salesman, "attention must be finally paid to such a person." Why? Simply because he was a human being and, as Leithauser has it,

some mystical equivalence obtains between all extinguishings of the light – be it the flare and fade of a supernova or, on some stump by a Michigan riverbed, a swallowed firefly, glimmering for an instant in a frog’s translucent gullet . . .

It is a profound reflection, and just one of many themes that A Few Corrections investigates with considerate attention. I felt the book missed the sort of narrative music and operatic passion Philip Roth brings to similar material, but that might only be a comment on how dimly we see the firefly inside the frog.

Notes:
Review first published online September 14, 2001.

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