The Corrections Chapter 2 Summary

The Failure

• Chip Lambert is waiting at the airport for Alfred and Enid to arrive in New York City.
• Suddenly, Alfred appears and gives Chip a giant hug. Enid follows close behind, making a funny comment about Chip's new earrings—though she doesn't mention his all-leather outfit that wouldn't be out of place in an 80s hair metal band.
• Alfred and Enid are stopping in town briefly on their way to a Norwegian cruise.
• Enid asks Chip about his job at the Wall Street Journal as they wait in baggage claim. Whoa, Chipper is in the big-time.
• In reality, he actually works at the Warren Street Journal (a much less prestigious organization, to say the least), but Chip doesn't have the heart to tell Enid that she had misheard him.
• Chip was a college professor just a year prior, but lost his job after "an offense involving a female undergraduate" (2.14). His parents don't know about that either, of course.
• The trio takes a cab back to Chip's place. After a brief argument over proper tipping etiquette (twenty percent or nothin', chumps), they head up to his apartment.
• They're met by Julia Vrias, Chip's girlfriend, who's on her way out; Chip follows her into the hallway.
• He asks her if her boss, Eden, has read his script. Julia tells him that Eden hasn't yet, but she has… and Julia doesn't like it—not one bit.
• The screenplay starts off with a "six page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama" (2.109). Here's some advice, Chip—movies these days don't have six pages of anything, except maybe a fight scene. You need robots. Or zombies. Robo-zombies, perhaps?
• Chip sold the pitch to Eden Procuro about a year and a half earlier. That's how he met Julia.
• Back in the present, Julia points out how Chip's screenplay is overloaded with references to breasts—Chip can think of at least twenty off the top of his head. She storms off.
• Chip leaves his parents alone and follows Julia out to the rainy Manhattan streets, where he sees his younger sister, Denise, stepping out of a cab across the street
• He begs Denise to hang out with his parents while he follows Julia to Eden's studio. Chip owes his sister some money ("whatever ten thousand and fifty-five hundred and four thousand and a thousand dollars add up to" (2.160)), so it's a tough sell, but Denise ultimately agrees.
• As a teenager, Chip's form of rebellion was to date feminists, study literary theory, and embrace left-leaning politics. That's one edgy dude.
• Chip ends up teaching literary theory at a college. While there, he lives in a small community called Tilton Ledge, where he hosts monthly gatherings of his fellow professors and "the occasional precocious student" (2.196).
• Things are going well. He's on track for tenure, which basically means he'll start making a lot more money for a lot less work in the coming years.
• But then Melissa Paquette comes along.
• Melissa is a first-year student in his Consuming Narratives course (2.198). She is his sharpest student and quickly becomes hated by her peers for her know-it-all attitude; she also happens to flirt with Chip constantly.
• Thus begins Melissa's quest to bag herself a Lambert. Chip finds "roses" and a "chocolate statuette of Michael Jackson" (2.206) in his office on Valentine's Day and Easter, respectively.
• He responds by avoiding Melissa both in and out of class, but then, near the end of the semester, Chip returns home to find flowers stuck in his front door.
• The culprits reveal themselves: It's Melissa and one of her fellow students, Chad. Chip scolds them—to little effect—and they scurry off.
• On the final day of the semester, Chip shows the class an ad series called "You Go, Girl" from the hilariously-titled "Beat Psychology" ad agency (2.225).
• The ad (for computer software) follows the life of a working woman with breast cancer. Surprisingly, the character passes away in the final ad.
• Chip thinks this is emotionally manipulative tomfoolery and expects the class to respond similarly. They don't, though, and even Melissa defends the schmaltzy ad.
• Melissa argues with Chip and is busy tearing him to pieces when the final bell of the semester rings.
• Shaken up, Chip spends his summer backpacking through the United Kingdom. He tries desperately to pick up American college girls who are studying abroad, but his success rate is about equal to Shaq's free throw percentage.
• Things improve when he gets back home, but—yes, you guessed it—his brief respite is shattered when Melissa knocks on his front door one night.
• To his surprise, she gives him a tray of cupcakes and leaves. Although Chip curses her when she walks out, he ends up eating most of the cupcakes before falling asleep. Because cupcakes.
• The next time he sees Melissa is just after Halloween. She tells Chip that she has a greater appreciation for him now that she's in a class with Vendla O'Fallon, Chip's archrival—at least in his own head.
• Melissa then tells Chip about her upbringing. Her dad is irony personified: a "trust fund" kid who once played in a seminal "punk band" (2.313). Melissa's parents eventually channeled that sweet, sweet trust fund cash into a disgustingly profitable mutual fund.
• A few weeks later, Chip is reading an article about Denise's new restaurant in Philadelphia Magazine. He turns the page and is shocked to find a gushing review of Daddy's Girl—a novel by none other than the diabolical Vendla O'Fallon. Curses.
• This spells trouble. There are only a few tenure spots available and O'Fallon's success could shoot her to the top of the list.
• Luckily, Chip has something in his back pocket: his bromance with Jim Leviton, one of the college's senior administrators.
• Four glasses of wine later, Chip receives a call from Jim's wife. The unthinkable has happened: Jim Leviton just suffered a stroke and will be retiring effective immediately. In the words of America's greatest canine—ruh roh.
• With that, Chip makes his decision; he consummates his relationship with Melissa a few nights later.
• After a second late-night rendezvous, Chip suggests that they take a road trip to Cape Cod for Thanksgiving break. Melissa happily agrees.
• Melissa picks up a drug called Mexican A on their way out of town (2.341), and they take the pills immediately.
• Chip doesn't feel anything at first. That changes a few hours later, though, so he stops the car suddenly and demands that they fulfill their sordid needs.
• They end up staying at an off-brand Comfort Inn and having a debaucherous weekend. We're seeing a very different Chip now that Mexican A has entered the picture.
• But every high has to end, and Chip wakes up experiencing some nasty withdrawal symptoms. He's instantly "plunged into shame and self-consciousness" (2.155) and doesn't even want to look at Melissa.
• Chip tears Melissa's luggage apart looking for more pills, but stops when her ringing cell phone wakes her up.
• After Melissa gets off the phone, she tells Chip that she's going to visit her father. Chip, still in a panic, argues with her until her cab arrives.
• Back in Chip's New York apartment, Enid tells Denise that Gary—Denise's older brother—wants her and Alfred to move to Philadelphia. This is unthinkable to Enid.
• At the same time, Alfred is in the living room calculating the proper angle of descent needed to successfully sit in Chip's chair.
• In the meantime, Denise has cooked up some hors d'oeuvres and brings them into the living room. The old man is moved by the gesture, but his swelling emotions cause him to have a small panic attack. Denise leaves him be.
• Alfred thinks about his time with the Midland Pacific Railroad. He had been the head of the Engineering Department and enjoyed a comfortable living.
• The Midpac was ultimately bought out by "Hillard and Cauncy Wroth," a set of twins better known as the "Oak Ridge Raiders" (2.462). Instead of investing in their new purchase, the Wroth brothers disassembled the railroad for parts.
• This long tale of corporate espionage is still affecting the family today—the freshly renamed "Orfic Midland" corporation is removing former employees from its health plan, leaving Alfred without much option for treatment.
• Back in the kitchen, Enid confides to Denise that "one of Dad's old patents is finally paying off" (2.473) and that she needs advice on how to deal with it.
• She pulls out a copy of the letter from the Axon Corporation. It's an offer of $5,000 for Alfred's "Therapeutic Ferroacetate-Gel Electropolymerization" (2.484) patent. Try saying that five times fast.
• Enid tried to convince Alfred to demand more money, but the stubborn old grump refused. She even got Gary involved, but Alfred held strong and signed the contract despite their protests.
• Although she doesn't reveal this to Denise, Enid hid the letter to buy herself more time to strategize.
• Their conversation is interrupted by a crash in the living room. Alfred dropped his plate, which Denise quickly cleans up.
• When Denise returns to the kitchen, Enid tells her that she wants all of the kids to come back home to St. Jude for "one last Christmas" (2.511); Denise agrees, albeit halfheartedly.
• Alfred turned seventy-five that January, while Chip was still in midst of his infatuation with Melissa. He had gone so crazy that he spent his father's birthday underlining every single uppercase "M" in the New York Times. That's some Zodiac level insanity right there.
• Suddenly, the phone rings. It's Denise, and Chip tells her that he lost his job because a student accused him of having an affair, but he still claims that he did not have sexual relations with that woman.
• Denise offers to loan Chip some money until he gets on his feet. She also suggests contacting her friend Julia, who works in the film industry in Manhattan. Chip had just started writing his script at this point, which was based on his twisted perspective of his relationship with Melissa.
• Then, of course, she makes him promise to call their dad.
• And finally, he does. Chip and Alfred have a predictably stilted conversation and Chip once again lies about the circumstances behind his firing.
• Chip moves to New York, buys leather clothes, and gets his ears pierced. Now there's the Chip we know and love.
• Things are going pretty well. Chip gets a proofreading job through Doug O'Brien, Eden's husband, and he spends his night boozing and socializing with his wealthy friends. YOLO, yo.
• At the same time, he's learning more about Julia—and boy is there a lot to learn.
• Julia is currently married to a man named Gitanas (the deputy prime minister of Lithuania) but they've been separated for a while.
• They got married in New York, but Julia got cold feet and didn't want to move to Lithuania, so now she lives in his swanky NYC apartment and he uses their marriage to move in and out of the country at will.
• Meanwhile, Chip begins writing for the off-beat Warren Street Journal and works through countless revisions of his script, now titled The Academy Purple.
• He spends months polishing the opening monologue, desperately trying to add a little extra oomph to his Razzie Award-worthy script.
• All the while, his money is running out and his relationship with Julia is turning sour. Things get so bad that Chip has to sell his prized book collection to afford food.
• Back in the present, Enid is raving about a gaudy party thrown by their neighbors, the Dribletts. Enid asks Denise about Chip's job, but Denise changes the subject.
• Meanwhile, Chip finally reaches Eden's office. Julia isn't there, but Eden tells him that she has a huge business opportunity for him.
• She introduces him to none other than Gitanas, Julia's kinda-husband. Chip is shocked that Gitanas looks "more like Chip than anybody Chip could remember meeting" (2.829).
• Eden's daughter April is in the corner doodling on paper. It takes Chip a few minutes to realize that she's drawing on the tossed-aside pages of his script. Okay, so that's how Eden's going to play it?
• Gitanas explains his job offer to Chip. Lithuania is going through an economic crisis, and international corporations have purchased much of the country's infrastructure, leaving the government without the resources to properly run the country.
• This is where Chip comes in. Gitanas wants Chip to build fake websites extolling Lithuania's virtues—he hopes to con foreign investors into pouring money into the country and, more specifically, his back pocket.
• Chip names his position as the "Vice President of Willful Tortious Misrepresentation" (2.914) and accepts.
• At the same time (and across town) Enid reminisces about Denise's ex-husband, Emile Berger. Although she had pressured her kids toward marriage, she didn't feel very good when Denise chose to marry an East Coaster, of all people.
• They divorced a handful of years later—around the time that Alfred's health started deteriorating.
• Enid tells Denise about her friend Norma Greene, who was left heart-broken after she got involved with a married man. Denise thinks that Enid is fishing for something, but Enid backpedals when she confronts her.
• Chip, now with several thousand dollars in his pocket, is riding in a car back to his apartment.
• Gitanas had gotten the idea for his scheme when he created a parody website titled "Democracy for Profit" to protest the "plight of small debtor nations." Prospective investors could purchase a street in Vilnius, get a painting of themselves added to the "Gallery of National Heroes," or buy any number of other silly rewards (2.1013).
• To his surprise, the money started pouring in and "Lithuania Inc." was born (2.1014).
• Chip hustles upstairs, but the apartment is empty: Denise and his parents have already left. Denise dropped them off at their cruise ship, the Gunnar Myrdal, and Enid and Alfred both pushed Denise to come home for Christmas.
• Chip and Gitanas get on a flight to Lithuania. Gitanas, not realizing that Julia has been dating Chip, tells him that he has a disc with footage of Julia with another man.
• However, Chip convinces him to get rid of the footage, and Gitanas seems to understand the subtext of his request. Gitanas hands him the CD and they relax for the rest of the flight.