Step by step, the book's narrator sets about correcting the errors, investigating the deceptive but appealing Wesley Sultan by way of the lives he touched and often manipulated: his wives, his siblings, his girlfriends, his children. Each chapter reprints the obituary but with one new handwritten amendment -- correction piling upon correction until the original has been effectively demolished. It seems that businessman Wesley -- handsome, dapper, flirtatious, and ambitious -- lived a far more tangled and ambiguous life than the one he presented to the world.

Written with humor and lyrical dash, A Few Corrections is both a psychological detective story and an epitaph for a vanishing figure -- the gallant, sports-car-driving, local Romeo who flourished in mid-century throughout small-town America.