Franzen contrasts the young minister's office with the one occupied by Russ:
The group is led by Rick Ambrose, with “stringy black hair and the glistening Fu Manchu.” Russ hates Ambrose for his youth and his unbridled kumbaya approach to faith. She’s also stuck in the backwash of America’s cultural revolution: too young for the minister’s musings about pre-war causes and too old for the hippies who populate the church’s youth group known as Crossroads. The office also holds old 78 rpm records of jazz and blues greats, something Russ wants to share with Frances, who feigns interest in these ancient anthems of angst. The good minister’s office is adorned with images of bygone glory from a time when he was infinitely cooler: posters of Charlie Parker, a framed photo of Paul Robeson, a blown-up image of himself and two Navajo friends on a church retreat in 1946 (Russ was a conscientious objector during World War II). To sleep with her would be the carnal apotheosis he’s been waiting for. He wants one last shot at virility, and he’s found it in the flirty Frances Cottrell, a widow. It’s the early 1970s, and Russ, who has four children and an increasingly distant wife, is straddling the line between relevancy and cultural and religious obsolescence. The church, First Reformed, is located in a Chicago suburb known as New Prospect, where Russ Hildebrandt, the family patriarch, is a minister with a crush on an attractive parishioner in her late 30s. That ride begins in a chilly church parking lot before Christmas (the novel is centered around Advent and Easter). It’s not pretty, but it’s one hell of an interesting and telling ride. Get ready for a massive national comeuppance as Franzen holds a mirror to the Great American Dysfunction of the past five decades. Crossroads, therefore, is the first of a trilogy. Franzen’s fictional family, the Hildebrandts, has so many issues (neuroses, sexual hang-ups, religious quirks, drug addictions), the author has said it will take more than one book to cover everything. And I imagine anyone who picks up Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Crossroads, will have a similar feeling. Can’t you tell they have issues?”īut I couldn’t stop. She would lean over and whisper into my ear, “Stop staring at them.
They were punks dragged to a holy tea party. When I was a child, huddled in a church pew with my parents and sister on a Sunday, my mother would catch me gawking at a family with unkempt teenagers who displayed all manner of social disdain.
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