When Jonathan Franzen’s Purity was published some seven years ago, I expectantly looked forward to his next. Crossroads was well worth waiting for, Franzen moving beyond his usual cerebral examination of his characters finding heartrending and redeeming qualities in the Hildebrandt family, set mostly in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois during the early 1970’s Vietnam War era.
It is a multigenerational work, Franzen reaching back into the past of the two main characters, Russ Hildebrandt who is an associate pastor of the First Reformed Church, a liberal Protestant church probably not unlike the Congressional church in which Franzen was a youth and Union Congressional Church in which I was raised (although I long, long ago dissociated myself from that or any other religion). His wife’s (Marion) past is also carefully scrutinized by Franzen, revealing secrets that rupture into the plot.
Their children’s stories and their interaction between each other, their parents, and “Crossroads” a church youth group first headed up by Russ, but later displaced by the more charismatic (and less religious) Rick Ambrose, are central to the novel.
The oldest child, Clem, at first has a close relationship with his younger sister, Becky, but as the novel evolves, Clem is off to college, and his first intense sexual relationship with another student, Sharon. The consequences of that relationship have a lifelong impact on him.
Becky, in turn, becomes attracted to Tanner Evans, a young folk/rock singer whose group has a lead singer, Laura, perhaps modeled after Janis Joplin. Becky is one of those young women considered cool and attractive, a cheerleader. She joins Crossroads, as does her younger brother, Perry, brilliant but manipulative. Rounding out the family is the youngest, Judson, who at this stage is the least examined character by Franzen (who envisions this novel as the first of a trilogy, so figure that Judson’s turn will come later).
His last novel was concerned with the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and this one is focused on the “nuclear” Hildebrandt family. Franzen treats the family like a slow moving suspenseful but inevitable explosion, with religion being the main control rod in the nuclear family reactor.
His ability to mix the psychological development of his characters with an element that has been dormant in my own life, religion, is striking. This novel awakened those recollections of my own teenage religious training. The confluence of religion, family scars, drugs, and sexual exigency move this novel into the pantheon of an American classic.
“Crossroads” goes beyond the usual youth church group, at least the one that existed in my time which was every Sunday night, a chaperoned social mixer (Coca Colas only), dancing to songs like “The Theme from Summer Place” and an occasional theatrical production in the Church’s auditorium (the only stage performance of my life besides playing the piano, “singing” Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” outlining a fence beginning with the second beat in the measure (imagine, remembering that moment from more than 60 years ago, probably a testament to the stage fright I experienced).
When Russ was in charge of the youth group, it probably resembled more of the one I was a member of so, so many years ago, with the notable exception of a once a year trip Crossroads would go on for a week to a Navajo reservation in Arizona to do Christian good works, building or improving whatever facilities are needed. There the kids would interact with the local cultures.
Russ named the group after Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” one of Russ’ favorite musical genres. Later in the novel, as he pursues a widowed parishioner, one he has intense fantasies and feels guilt about, she plays the record at her house while they attempt to get it on with marijuana. He comes to the realization he’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he. Social commentary is yet another dimension to the novel and his feeling as a fraud pervades the novel.
The reason for choosing the Navajos for such an annual project was Russ’ work there as a conscientious objector at the end of WW II. There he made friends and his religious devotion was deepened by ties to that community.
Franzen’s dissection of Marion’s and Russ’ failing marriage is extraordinary, its rise, fall, and its resurrection. His writing encapsulates the guilt which overhangs much of the action in the novel, leavened by religion. Russ thinks about his now middle-aged wife: It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty.
But Marion, emboldened by her work with a therapist, Sophie (“the dumpling” as she thinks of the therapist in her mind, confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions), stuns her husband later in the novel about his affair: “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.” The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her. “It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”
When Russ loses control of the Crossroads group to Rick Ambrose, that coincides with significant developments in the novel, both Russ and Marion having realized or fantasized affairs, and the cocaine addition of their son Perry erupting into a disaster on the Navajo reservation and his having to be institutionalized.
That incident – again God’s will – ironically brings Russ and Marion together in a competition of guilt: “I was committing adultery while our son tried to kill himself!” “Oh dear. I’m sorry.” “You’re sorry? What is wrong with you?” The ground beneath her was firm. She was secure in God’s punishment. “I’m just thinking how terrible that must feel. If the two things really did happen at the same time—that’s terrible luck. No one deserves that.” “Terrible?” He staggered to his feet. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s beyond redemption. There’s no use in praying—I’m a fraud.”
Meanwhile, Becky becomes estranged from her once close brother, Clem, and her parents as well as she become Tanner’s lover, and then wife.
Clem and his father Russ grow apart, Russ hardly realizing the extent of Clem’s contempt until they have a face to face confrontation, Clem saying “Because I’m so fucking sick of you.” “And I am sick of your disrespect.” “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?” “I said that’s enough!” Clem would have welcomed a fight. He hadn’t thrown a punch since junior high. “You want to hit me? You want to try me?” “No, Clem.” “Mister Nonviolence?”
Clem has an epiphany, a moral, not a religious one, realizing that his college draft deferment and low draft number is the reason why a less advantaged young man is being sent to Vietnam. This realization is ironically prompted by his girlfriend Sharon who is devastated by Clem’s informing his draft board that he will not return to college and therefore can be reclassified 1-A, in his mind righting that wrong. His parents in their deep religious state are similarly shocked. Ultimately, he is not drafted but winds up in a long labyrinth to Peru as a laborer, an education which ironically turns him, the non believer, into a sort of a Christ figure, finally returning to the conundrum of his nuclear family, fittingly (and not fully conscious to him) at Easter.
The concepts of free will and determinism are constantly being tested in the novel, with the latter on the wings of religion generally winning out. At one point in the novel Becky has a confrontation with Laura who had been Tanner’s girlfriend. It becomes ugly, Becky pleading Laura to do one more performance with Tanner as a booking agent was there to see both in action. At first Laura declines. But the inevitability of her relenting is mired in a series of events as if, to Becky, they were directed by God…
The fact that Laura, after a moment, made a petulant, hand-flinging gesture of assent—the fact that she would never have done this if she hadn’t hit Becky, which wouldn’t have happened if Becky hadn’t fallen to her knees to pray, which wouldn’t have happened if the spirit of Christ hadn’t brought her to Laura’s apartment, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t found God in the sanctuary, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t smoked marijuana—seemed to Becky, as she followed Laura down the snowy stairs behind the drugstore, the most beautiful proof of God’s mysterious workings. She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward. She could feel a whole new life, a life in faith, beginning.
His novel, Freedom,
explored similar territory, sans religion.
Stylistically, Franzen weaves these interrelated stories back and forth, time periods as well, retrospective view or present, but at the heart of the writing is deep psychological insight and compassion. Unlike his previous novels, I hardly met a character I couldn’t empathize with in some way. His writing is a throwback to the American realism of a Sinclair Lewis or a Theodore Dreiser, but with deep psychological roots. This is literature to think about, indeed a worthy successor to Updike and Roth. Bring on the second of the trilogy!
