Faith is not incidental in Jonathan Franzen's new novel. It is a matter of constant reckoning in the world of Crossroads, where the family portrayed by Franzen this time is that of a Protestant minister. Russ Hildebrandt is an associate pastor in the suburbs of 1970s Chicago. He lives there with his wife Marion, and their four children, Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson.
II.
Reverend Hildebrandt is originally from a Mennonite background in rural Indiana. How he comes to meet and marry Marion, a woman from California, is just one of the engrossing passages in Franzen's narrative. When the novel begins, though, the woman that most preoccupies Russ's eros is not his own wife. Russ has instead become infatuated with one of his parishioners. Frances Cottrell is newly-widowed, pretty, and some years younger than Marion. Regarding his marriage, Russ feels too that it has become a "miserable thing, held together by habit and vow and duty ... his complaint with Marion was that she was heavy and joyless, unexciting to him". <1> Exciting to Russ the attraction to Mrs. Cottrell - even as its unrequited nature is agonizing. Combined with the various issues he has with his growing children, and as well, his work and identity as a pastor, Russ's soul is increasingly restless and troubled.
Before and now during her marriage, Marion Hildebrandt has deliberately kept certain details about her past from her husband. These secrets involve her history of mental illness. As a young woman, Marion did spend "fourteen weeks in a mental hospital in Los Angeles in 1941, following a severe psychotic episode". Her secret past has taught her that "Satan wasn't a charmingly literate tempter, or a funny red-faced devil with a pitchfork. Satan was pain without limit, annihilation of the mind." Mrs. Hildebrandt can only look on with worry and dark foreboding now, as her teenage son Perry begins to show signs of mental illness.
Perry Hildebrandt is brilliant and precocious, and well-aware of his intellectual gifts. At a neighbourhood party, he furtively drinks himself into the "possession of a satisfactory buzz", and initiates a dialogue with a Lutheran minister and a rabbi. " 'I suppose what I'm asking,' he said, 'is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.' Reverend Walsh and the rabbi exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old." Confident that his assertions are being considered seriously by learned adults, Perry continues. " 'My question,' Perry said, 'is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. ... If you're smart enough to think about it, there's always some selfish angle.' " In his teen years, Perry will go on to settle the question of God. "The solution was that he, Perry, was God." By that time, though, Perry has added drug dealer to already being a drug addict, and will come to a full stop with a mental breakdown. <2>
A cheerleader at her school, Becky Hildebrandt is known at New Prospect Township High for her "aura of singularity, a force at once attractive and unapproachable ... a kind of expensiveness that had nothing to do with money". Becky grapples with managing the peer and family expectations that come with such perceived exceptionality. When she joins "Crossroads", a Christian youth fellowship group, for example, she knows it is strongly against her father's wishes, as Rev. Hildebrandt has parted company in a very personal way with Crossroads leader, Rick Ambrose. But then, Rebecca Hildebrandt is realizing, in all sorts of ways, that the "forbidden [was] often precisely what the heart most wanted".
Among his siblings, Clem Hildebrandt has had an especially close relationship with his sister Becky. Now that he has begun college, however, Clem develops a close relationship of a different kind with another young woman. Sharon is a fellow student at the University of Illinois, and it is with her that Clem has his first encounter with physical eros. The experience is absorbing. "Clem would later come to see the wisdom of parietal regulations, which, outmoded norms of behaviour aside, served to keep undergraduates from falling into a pit of pleasure and neglecting their studies". <3> He not only neglects his studies, but leaves them behind entirely - giving up a student deferment - to be ready to serve in the Vietnam War. Rev. Hildebrandt is appalled by his son's decision, which he attributes to youthful immaturity. "[T]he crazy talk of Vietnam, had reeked of adolescent moral absolutism. Clem was too young to understand that, although commandments were important, the callings of the heart amounted to a higher law. This had been Christ's revision of the covenant, his message of love".
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Along with family, matters of faith are indeed crucial to a consideration of Crossroads. Franzen is never heavy-handed or crude with this, the Hildebrandts's Christian faith. The interplay between the personal and the public that he has been exploring since his very first novel (The Twenty-Seventh City <4>) continues here with subtle complexity. Moreover, there is the humour in the novel, with scenes and observations that are quite funny, and sometimes, downright hilarious. Probing into the circumstances and souls of his characters, the writer builds an intimacy that can be startling. Crossroads is a work of serious fiction that is also a great read, made so by Jonathan Franzen's sublime language and storytelling gifts.
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<1>Franzen, Jonathan. Crossroads (2021). Bond Street Books: Penguin Random House Canada.
<2>There was another, non-fictional brilliant son of a minister who came to be known for his declarative assertions, and who eventually experienced a mental breakdown. Nietzsche.
<3>A twinkly bit about Plato has it that no undergraduate young adult should have sex without first having had a proper introduction to Plato's thought. In Love and Friendship (1993), Allan Bloom tells us of delivering a lecture at Cornell University, where the students had put up the banner, " 'Great Sex is better than Great Books' ". Bloom's reply: "Sure, but you can't have one without the other."
<4>Late in the novel, Clem receives a letter from Becky on March "twenty-seventh". A few pages later, Clem is in conversation with Morton, a salesman, who tells Clem about a certain message he once received, on June "twenty-seventh".
