Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“CROSSROADS”  by Jonathan Franzen (Harper-Collins, $NZ35)

I have just finished reading a novel that is 580 large pages long. I am not at all afraid of novels that long. Some such novels are among my best friends. But the sheer length of this novel is symptomatic of a tendency among American writers to make everything big: do not say anything in 200 pages if you can extend it to blockbuster length.

Crossroads is the sixth novel by Jonathan Franzen. I have to admit that, while I had heard much about him, I had never previously read any of his novels. In fact the only work by Franzen that I had read hitherto was his very brief polemical essay What if we stopped pretending? in which he presented the very unpopular argument that catastrophic climate change is inevitable now, so we’ll have to get used to living on a hotter planet. (On this blog, you will find comments on it tucked under a review of Simon Winchester’s Land.) I had to do some quick research (i.e. a squizz at Wikipedia) to discover that all Franzen’s novels are long; that he tends to focus on family situations; that he became famous with a novel called The Corrections, which was apparently a take-down of American capitalism; that he had been on the cover of Time magazine; and that he was often regarded as “controversial”. Also, to the dear man’s credit, that he wrote an influential essay arguing that postmodernist novels were sheer obfuscation and he was deliberately reasserting the value of more traditional narrative forms.

While Crossroads can be read as a stand-alone work, it is apparently intended as the first part of a trilogy which will have the modest title A Key to All Mythologies. Franzen has said that he is going to take most of this decade writing this masterwork. It is important that Crossroads is set in the early 1970s, with the Vietnam War winding down. The following novels will presumably take its protagonists through the next few decades. In effect, Franzen is aiming to write a “state of America” chronicle, showing how mores and values have changed over the last fifty-odd years.

 

In my usual laborious but necessary way, allow me to set up the novel’s situation.

Russ is the father of the Hildebrandt family. He is a not-very-successful pastor at the First Reformed Protestant church in America’s Midwest. Its theology is vaguely liberal. Russ is subordinate to an older pastor and is chafing at his lower status in the church’s hierarchy. His marriage to Marion is going bung. He lusts after a divorcee in his congregation, Frances Cottrell. In typical pastor-ish fashion, he tries to justify his feelings for her. Half the time he feels guilty and damned, and half the time he rationalises his interaction with Frances by telling himself that he is counselling her and being compassionate and helpful. But his  insecurity about his social status is still affecting him when he listens to Frances: “Russ should have been glad that she was opening up to him, but all he could hear was that she commanded the attention of test pilots and heart surgeons. He was an associate minister with a wife, four kids, and no money. What had he been thinking?” (p.194) In a sense, he is seduced by her apparent affluence. Eventually his lust is so extreme that he merely has to see the type of expensive things she gives her son and “he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. It swept away his equanimity, exposed its falseness, stopped his breath. He was going to have her.” (pp.400-401)

If this is one major strand of his emotional life, the other is envy and sheer jealousy of Rick Ambrose, a charismatic younger man who runs the church’s youth programme called Crossroads, where teenagers sing, have counselling and therapy sessions, “open themselves” to others etc. Russ feel that the charisma of Rick has side-lined him and pushed him into dealing only with a handful of older parishioners.

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The eldest of Russ and Marion’s four children is Clem. He is at university and has clearly lost all religious feeling, partly disillusioned by seeing how badly his father handled the youth group before he was usurped by Rick Ambrose. Clem is the family’s atheist and morally struggling over the draft and the Vietnam war.

The one girl of the family, Becky, seems the model church-going, virginal  good girl, and in the main she really is. But she is aware of her overweening pride as the desirable high-school queen for whom boys long. Intelligent enough to be understand her own shortcomings she “felt guilty enough for caring little about the church and even less about oppressed people.” (p.52) She is looking for some certainty which she cannot really find in either Crossroads or First Reformed, but sometimes in church “she caught a strange flashing glimpse of a desire, buried somewhere inside her, to belong and to believe in something…” (p.83). Liberal theology doesn’t do the trick.

The real problem child of the family is the younger son Perry. Though still at junior high-school, this younger teenager obviously has great intelligence. Perry is clearly his mother’s favourite. She thinks of him as a genius.… but he is also a manipulative sneak and has become a drug-dealer peddling marijuana to high-school kids, getting into other criminal activities and (as the novel progresses) moving into harder drugs and personal destruction.

There is also a youngest son, Judson, who is nine years old and plays little part in the novel. He is merely noted as the youngster, although  doubtless he will play a bigger part in the following fat tomes that Jonathan Franzen intends to write.

To put it all into one sentence, then, Crossroads – all 580 pages of it – is about a pastor’s marriage under stress while his children face various crises and the Earth turns.

The blurb says each member of the family is looking for “freedom”. It would be closer to the mark to say that each is looking for meaning, an existential quest.

 Franzen structures this long work in what amount to discrete slabs of narrative as he moves from one member of the Hildebrandt brood to another. About a quarter of the way through the novel we get the long backstory of Marion’s turbulent younger years, which she has concealed from her husband – her father’s suicide, her mother’s lack of love, her affair with a married man, the abortion she had and the atonement she sought by becoming, for a short time, a Catholic… though this experience has given her a unique perspective when she considers First Reformed and her husband’s theology.

As a sidelight, I can’t help wondering whether Russ is not only weak of will but also incredibly stupid  - he falls so easily for the lusted-after Frances Cottrell’s flirting and dead-obvious come-ons; he seems to know nothing about his wife’s background. Sure, Marion had deliberately concealed it from him, but in their twenty-plus years of marriage, hasn’t he once questioned her or looked into her past or wanted to know about her family? Instead of being a man-of-religion struggling with his conscience, he too often comes across as somebody who chooses not to look closely into things and prefers to have grudges against others rather than examining his own failings.

Other discrete slabs of narrative deal with of each of the family’s members [apart from little Judson]. There is Clem having an intense affair with a girl called Sharon. There is Becky veering off the path of “righteousness” but then reaffirming her essential beliefs. There is Perry sinking further and further into criminality and delinquency, despite his declared intentions to smarten up his act. There is a long re-cap on Russ’s first meeting with Marion and how he remembers her as the woman he once loved. And of course there is a long section on Russ’s strict Mennonite childhood and upbringing, and how he had fallen away from such strictness and into the more watery approach of a liberal church.

There is no doubt that Franzen takes seriously the various theological concepts that the novel often raises. They are not merely a means of characterising the pastor’s family. The very title Crossroads points to them. Not only is Crossroads the name of the novel’s youth programme, but it suggests both crisis points in its characters’ lives as they search for which direction they should go and the traditional Christian concept of bearing a cross through life. Franzen connects the lives of his characters with religious seasons. Note that the first 370 pages of Crossroads are called “Advent”, leading up to Christmas, and the remaining 218 pages are called “Easter”, leading up to [apparent?] redemption.

The novel also explores the way a liberal church can sink into offering little more than  modish psychotherapy. When Rick Ambrose takes over the church’s youth wing, his approach is that “the idea was 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.” (p.32) This approach rapidly turns into teenagers feeling intense about each other, forming pairs, vying for the convenor’s attention and approval and basically adopting an approach that is more secular than religious. Whether it was Franzen’s intention or not, the sum effect is to show us that the more secular a church becomes, the more it sinks into irrelevance.

Related to this phenomenon, clapping, singing and “relating”, religion becomes a mental buzz, a “high” like taking a drug or having sex. There is nothing objective in this religion. Basically it is a form of self-gratification where intense feeling is confused with revelation. The non-believer Clem feels fulfilled and uplifted when he swyves his girlfriend Sharon… and then deserts her. Russ feels that God is working in him when he finally swyves Frances… except that it doesn’t end well.

Even if she is unhappy, confused and seeking quick remedies, Marion, the spurned wife, is capable of much complexity of thought. “She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society.” (p.129) Much later, when she is arguing with her husband over his lust for Frances, she says to him “You’ve got your liberal religion… you’ve got your second floor office, you’ve got your ladies on Tuesdays, but you have no idea  what it means to know God. No idea what true belief is like…” (p.365)

A real philosophical question is thrown in the works when precocious drug-dealing Perry has a conversation with a minister and a rabbi on whether goodness can ever not have an element of self-gratification. Do we do good things so that we can feel better about ourselves? Of course it’s an adolescent question, but still a real one in the context of this book. It connects with the emotional highs that its characters seek when they believe they are looking for God. A particularly gross example comes when Frances Cottrell attempts ineptly to be Lady Bountiful in wanting to look after a black kid in a black church to which she and Russ make pastoral visits. The black minister and the kid’s drug-addled mother object to Frances’ approach, seeing it as patronising, while Frances herself is clearly seeking gratifying applause for her apparent concern.

Thus for the novel’s substance and style, but in the end what of its worth?

Jonathan Franzen is an acute observer of many things. He tracks the mores of a particular time and place with precision, making many shrewd comments on 1970s American habits and on religious scruples. But parts of Crossroads are overblown and sometimes melodramatic. Especially in the conjunction of God and sex, characters’ reactions are extreme to the point of unconscious parody. The characters often emerge as both neurotic and hysterical and we plunge into soap-opera territory.

Worse, in the novel’s length there is a loss of real focus. Franzen sets too many hares running as he adds issue after issue. For example, only very late in novel do we come to a totally new topic of Russ’s interactions with the deprived and exploited Navajo people, as if Franzen is now beginning to address matters of social justice. The net is cast too wide - God and sex; the flaws of liberal theology; the Vietnam war; indigenous rights; even pop culture and pop music, developed in a plot concerning Becky’s boyfriend and his musical ambitions.

So I am left torn between seeing this as the titanic book it aspires to be, and seeing it as a windy narrative which bites off more than it can chew. I keep thinking of that awful word “sprawling” that is often found in the cliché-filled blurbs for blockbuster American novels. “A sprawling saga of a family’s struggles” etc. etc. You know the sort of thing.  Crossroads truly sprawls. It misses every possibility to be more tightly composed – to make its points with concision rather than adding detail upon detail – to stick with the point. In a word, it’s too damned long.

Crossroads ends unresolved, despite all that has happened to this family and despite apparent reconciliations. There is a sense that more disruptions lie ahead. But then this could be called being true to history, which has the nasty habit of never ending. And we have to remember that this is the first part of a proposed trilogy.