She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over…and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away.” This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. “This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. Marion tells Russ: “I’ve seen the face of God.” Becky, the “undisputed queen of her senior class,” joins Crossroads (lured by a boy), smokes some dope and sees God twice, first when she’s stoned and then again in a church pew on the morning of Palm Sunday: Perry, in the grip of drug-fueled delusion - “overindulgence had shattered his lambent rationality into myriad splinters” - realizes that he himself is the Supreme Being. God is everywhere in these pages, sometimes in strange guises. But New Prospect remains the novel’s ground zero, Vietnam-era malaise its vibe, and the Crossroads triad - honesty, confrontation, unconditional love - its unspoken motto. Heavy-duty themes emerge: institutional racism, environmental depredation, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the dawning of women’s lib. The time frame stretches to accommodate multiple backstories, plunging us into Depression-era San Francisco and a Mennonite community in rural Indiana during the second world war.
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. This is a family careening towards catastrophe. And a middle son, Perry - conspicuously brighter than the rest of the family - is abusing drugs to battle depression. Their hitherto flawless daughter Becky is learning to despise her father and embrace hippie ways. Their eldest son, Clem, has just renounced a draft deferment, which makes Vietnam his likely fate. Marion, his wife, is far more complex and unhappy than she lets on. 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.
What has changed in the past two decades? Now less inclined to show off, Franzen is more assiduous in his excavation of character. Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, presents us with another patriarch and another set of dysfunctional family dynamics. 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. Though cruel and funny and aggressively clever, the novel did more than display its author’s spiky brilliance. Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen.
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