Enid Lambert hides a registered letter from the Axon Corporation near the front door of her St. Jude home.

Chip Lambert's girlfriend Julia walks out on him the same day his parents arrive at his New York City apartment.

Gitanas Misevičius, Lithuania's former deputy prime minister, offers Chip a lucrative job helping defraud American investors online.

Chip boards a plane to Lithuania with Gitanas, abandoning his family and his collapsing life in New York City.

Gary Lambert researches the Axon Corporation and resolves to invest in the experimental Corecktall brain treatment.

Gary drunkenly confronts his family at dinner, demanding to know if Caroline has told their sons he is depressed.

Gary admits to Caroline that he is depressed and tells her she does not have to go to St. Jude for Christmas.

Alfred Lambert wanders to the cruise ship's top deck and falls into the ocean.

Robin Passafaro discovers Brian in Denise's apartment and Brian fires Denise from the Generator restaurant.

Gary calls Denise to tell her Alfred survived the fall from the cruise ship.

Chip calls Enid from the Vilnius airport promising to come home for Christmas just before all the lights go out.

Gary arrives in St. Jude alone for Christmas, having lost his battle with Caroline to bring the whole family.

Chip arrives at the St. Jude house the morning after Christmas, traumatized and transformed by his escape from Lithuania.

Chip persuades a reluctant Alfred to move into a nursing home, marking the family's acceptance of his decline.

Alfred dies at the nursing home, and Enid experiences both grief and an unexpected sense of hopefulness.

The Corrections follows the dysfunctional Lambert family as their aging patriarch Alfred's Parkinson's disease forces a reckoning with years of emotional distance and denial. Enid Lambert obsessively tries to gather her three adult children in St. Jude for one last Christmas, even as each child is consumed by their own private crisis. Chip flees to Lithuania on a fraudulent business venture, Gary wages a secret war against depression and his rebellious wife, and Denise loses her high-profile restaurant job to a ruinous double affair. Alfred's deteriorating condition reaches a breaking point when he falls from a cruise ship, an accident that finally jolts the scattered family into action. The children converge in St. Jude, where Chip — Alfred's unlikely favorite — is the one who persuades his father to accept a nursing home. Alfred's eventual death leaves Enid with a surprising sense of relief and the freedom to become a more open, accepting version of herself.

The central story of the Lambert family's unraveling and reunion.

Alfred insists on keeping his beloved blue lounge chair, which Enid banishes to the basement to preserve her decor.

Enid confesses to Denise that she has kept the Axon Corporation's offer hidden from Alfred against his wishes.

Chip finds Eden Procuro's young daughter coloring pictures on the only copy of his screenplay in Eden's Tribeca office.

Gary and Denise attend the Axon Corporation shareholders meeting where the Corecktall brain treatment is officially introduced to investors.

Gary injures his hand drunkenly trimming a hedge and spends a sleepless night hiding the wound from Caroline.

Alfred departs for an eleven-day Erie Belt railway inspection without saying goodbye to Enid after their argument about investing.

Alfred gives his neighbor Chuck Meisner an insider tip about the impending Erie Belt and Midway railway merger.

Enid silently prepares a Dinner of Revenge — liver, bacon, and rutabaga — after Alfred's cold outburst leaves the family estranged.

Enid receives an unapproved antidepressant called Aslan from the cruise ship's opportunistic and fraudulent doctor.

Enid befriends fellow cruise passenger Sylvia Roth and hears the story of Sylvia's daughter's unsolved murder.

Robin Passafaro's adopted brother Billy assaults the vice president of the W—— Corporation, a company linked to her husband's fortune.

Brian Callahan financially backs Denise's new Philadelphia restaurant, the Generator, and later joins her alone on a trip to Paris.

Chip is ambushed by gangsters posing as police in Lithuania, robbed of nearly all his cash, and forced to walk to the Polish border.

Gary finds Alfred's loaded hunting gun in the St. Jude basement but decides to leave it there.

Enid ends her long friendship with neighbor Bea Meisner after Bea makes an anti-gay remark during a bridge game.

Behind the main plot of The Corrections lies a web of significant events that reveal the full texture of the Lambert family's dysfunction. Enid and Alfred's domestic struggles — from the symbolic battle over a blue chair to Alfred's cold rages and Enid's financial scheming — illuminate decades of resentment at the heart of their marriage. Gary's professional world intersects with his family life at the Axon Corporation shareholders meeting, while his private self-destruction plays out in a drunken hedge-trimming incident. On the cruise ship, Enid forms an unexpected friendship with a grieving woman and acquires an unapproved antidepressant that briefly transforms her mood. Denise's trajectory is shaped by the troubled history of the Passafaro-Callahan household, whose dynamics pull her into a destructive double affair and ultimately end her career in Philadelphia. The novel closes with quiet acts of acceptance and severance, including Enid's decision to end a long friendship over a single anti-gay remark.

The supporting moments that shape the Lambert family's private lives.

Chip is expelled from D—— College after his affair with the manipulative student Melissa destroys his academic career.

The Axon Corporation CEO rebuffs Gary's request for more shares but invites Alfred to join the Corecktall drug trial.

Gary's sons confirm Caroline has been calling their father depressed, and Gary resolves the next morning to do absolutely nothing.

Alfred smashes Enid's jam jars with a hammer in the basement, revealing the depths of his repressed rage.

Alfred discovers the electroplating concept that will eventually become his patent while experimenting alone in his basement chemistry lab.

Alfred finds Chip asleep at the dinner table after the family has scattered and quietly carries the boy to his bed.

Alfred and Enid argue in bed at night; Alfred declares he will go to the grave before revealing his unhappiness.

Denise calls off a near-intimate encounter with Brian in Paris, overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts and visions of his wife Robin.

Denise tells Robin Passafaro she is gay, lowering Robin's guard and drawing the two women into a deepening friendship.

Denise discovers evidence that Brian and Robin are still physically intimate and pulls back sharply from the affair.

Chip realizes while stranded in Lithuania that his screenplay was a thriller when it should have been a farce.

Denise learns from a confused remark by Alfred that Don Armour confronted her father about their teenage affair, forcing his early retirement.

Denise finds the unsent Axon Corporation letter hidden in a kitchen cupboard and confronts Enid about why it was never mailed.

Chip meets and falls in love with Alison Schulman, Alfred's doctor at the nursing home, beginning an entirely new chapter in his life.

Alfred begs Chip to end his suffering; Chip refuses, marking his full transformation into a devoted and present son.

The Corrections is propelled by a series of revelations that quietly shift the ground beneath its characters. In flashback, the novel reveals how Alfred's emotional repression poisoned the Lambert household and how his solitary experiments in the basement lab set in motion a chain of corporate intrigue decades later. Chip's expulsion from academia is the first of several humiliations that will eventually strip away his pretensions and force a genuine reckoning with who he is. Denise's complicated desire for both Brian and Robin Passafaro exposes the central mystery of her identity, and a chance remark from her confused father finally unlocks the long-hidden truth about her teenage affair with Don Armour. The novel's final act in St. Jude brings a cascade of confrontations and refusals, from the discovery of the unsent Axon letter to Alfred's desperate plea to Chip. Each turning point dismantles a family member's illusions, leaving them — for better or worse — with only the truth.