This section was cut from The Corrections. It was originally in a get-to-know-your-character draft. I cut it because it wasn’t really pertinent to the story and was too similar, in any case, to the consumerist ruminations of a character in my second novel, Strong Motion. —J.F.

 

Ever since her divorce, Denise had been looking for a dining-room table. It shouldn’t have been so hard to drive out to Plymouth Meeting and buy a halfway adequate table at Ikea, but when she considered settling for approximately what she wanted, she realized that the sheet of varnished green Ping-Pong-table particle board that she’d been using for the last three years was itself approximately what she wanted. It was flat, horizontal, abusable, stable: a table. Of course, she hated it. It was ugly and an affront. It provided a reminder, every time she walked into her dining room, of how provisional her life was. It was like a sore. An ulcer in her home. But it did have the great advantage of already being in …