Adam Begley

God is everywhere, sometimes in strange guises, in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads

A protestant minister clings to prayer and the gospel; his wife and daughter have visions, while his son believes himself to be the Supreme Being

Jonathan Franzen. [Getty Images]

Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and aggressively clever, the novel did more than display its author’s spiky brilliance. A stubborn moral core, in the person of the ailing patriarch of the Lambert family, and a tangled web of fierce emotion binding him and his wife and three children, gave it powerful resonance. Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, presents us with another patriarch and another set of dysfunctional family dynamics. What has changed in the past two decades? Now less inclined to show off, Franzen is more assiduous in his excavation of character. We get less dazzle and a deeper dive.

It’s Christmastime 1971, and Russ Hildebrandt, the junior minister of a protestant church in New Prospect, Illinois, not far from Chicago, has a problem: ‘He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad.’ He doesn’t yet know about his other problems. Marion, his wife, is far more complex and unhappy than she lets on. Their eldest son, Clem, has just renounced a draft deferment, which makes Vietnam his likely fate. Their hitherto flawless daughter Becky is learning to despise her father and embrace hippie ways. And a middle son, Perry — conspicuously brighter than the rest of the family — is abusing drugs to battle depression. This is a family careening towards catastrophe.

Already humiliated even before we meet him, Russ has been ejected from the church youth group, Crossroads, which he used to run, because of his uncool insistence on prayer and gospel and an icky attempt to ingratiate himself with a pretty teenage girl. The ethos of the group, now in the care of his nemesis, is that

God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation and unconditional love.

The saga spins out and away from its small-town setting with forays to New Orleans, Los Angeles, a Navajo reservation in Arizona and a subsistence farm in the High Andes.

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