FRANZEN’S INDULGENCE
Is, finally, our indulgence in a book called Crossroads, following backstory and run-up to the Hildebrandt family’s major catastrophes in present day, 1971.
Crossroads is a novel written in two sections. In ‘Advent’, section first, the workings of Russ Hildebrandt’s passion and obsession with Frances Cottrell, a young woman under his ministry, a widow whom Russ wants. So badly does he want her, he ignores many of the signs of his children falling apart in their own distinct ways, with exception of their youngest, Jordan, an intelligent person we seem to watch the novel through out of the corner of our eye to see he isn’t somehow getting it as badly as his siblings. His siblings all retain many of their parental dirty laundry through, it seems, genes. Perry Hildebrant, a sixteen year old in the throws of experimentation with mind-altering substances can’t seem to keep his head out of ambition to make money cornering a specific drug market in a small Chicago suburb. God, for Perry remains an intellectual game as much as his interactions with peers and the youth group Crossroads, where he finds mediocre highs manipulating the group at first, to varying degrees of success, some undone by his social and ‘beautiful’ sister, Becky; eventually using the group’s yearly outing to the southwest to facilitate his highest ambition: to corner the peyote market in his small town. He is heavily addicted to cocaine at the point of his narrative departure. In Becky, a need to win the heart of a young man in the Crossroads group leads to her first horrific experience on pot bringing her to her knees before Christ on His crucifix, seeing God, and honing in on Tanner’s heart by sticking with him through his initial, promising music career. Clem, the eldest of the bunch, cooly rejects his first love after becoming overwhelmed by her, fearing she’ll trash his grades through her neediness, then giving her and school up to eventually give up the idea of her (spawned by his mother) a second time, and resuming his life in Texas working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Before Marion and Russ meet in Flagstaff and are married, Marion’s early obsession with a married man surfaces an uncanny likeness to her daughter’s dogged pursuit of Tanner (Marion’s obsession with over-eating sugar cookies is also Becky’s obsession); Marion’s addictive and restrictive personality sheds a husk and becomes the more brilliant in Perry’s drug-addled energy, near frenzy, to seek adjustments chemical and spiritual; Clem’s coldness and eventual abandoning of his family, near one-to-one Marion’s forestalled return to the married man she fell in love with in a prior life, whose rejection led her to a psychiatric ward, to her lowest, basest version of ‘evil’, and in a way kept her from ever finding solace in Russ, a man with whom she raised a large family and maintained the rôle of minister’s wife for thirty years. So, what comes of this close character study of Marion, whom we know has been harmed, will harm, and seeks to resolve her issues from the past in her near-future? Is Marion our main character? Is Marion our cool-handed protagonist as the book jacket says?
In Russ Hildebrandt, we know a young man who once had the courage to travel alone at night through a rocky reservation land, who took warning after warning from an elder not to go, and found out what he really wished to find: a spiritual awakening through a prolonged and intense experience with the Navajo, a people at once accepting, confusing, and ‘plangent’. In his soul-seeking and attempt to make himself known unto God, a reluctance to heed warning, he very nearly dies of dehydration, but comes to epiphany in a sexual revelation within a small dwelling he will return to thirty years later in its battered, undone, and unusable form. Get the picture? Very soon after his epiphany he meets, in Flagstaff, a young Marion fresh from her travails in a psyche ward, newly divorced (though she won’t tell him this until they’ve consummated their aggressive passion) and soon as stickily in love as we have known her to be in obsession. In their eventual marriage we learn of a dire shift in Russ, almost upon marriage, he loses the joy he knew after finding himself with the Navajo, joy in Marion. He and she are now trapped in a joyless marriage having child after child, not knowing the way ahead but that their God will guide them.
Interestingly, it is God who seems to lead them to their least complicated selves. I hadn’t expected this from the first half of the novel, but in our embrace of Franzen’s close-third, his adeptness at keeping a character’s voice ‘on’ while narrating their shifts and reversals, we see a very clear distinction, a clarity, in how each character chooses to use God as their propulsion-pack through the murk and drear of suburban Chicago in 1971, a time when it was clear a shift in society was leading to a powerful undermining of the value of faith, the family unit, and justice. For Franzen, it seems, even the thought of Clem giving himself to the draft board is met with a shift and reversal. The shifts through society, church, self, and government have wrought in stone the epidemic of ‘me’, ‘I’; where once ‘we’, ‘us’ had brought home Russ’s generation from war, and accepted the complacent motion of family building and society engagement. It is a moment of psychiatry, psychology, and a turning away from the church to therapy. We see Marion falling into her own therapy hole with a therapist who seems to set Marion off on a rambunctious course of action. It must be understood here, Russ is from a strong Mennonite background forging ties with God and family, but in their stricture he lost a key figure, his grandfather, to an affair Russ will ultimately revise and imitate. Marion is from a mixed Catholic and Jewish background, her father a non-practicing Jew who leaves her early, and her mother an arm-pinching Catholic. She must hide her mental illness and therapy from the Hildebrandts. Marion is sheltered after her catastrophe in young adulthood by her gay uncle and his partner, Antonio. I believe it is through them, as a lens of contact, we begin to see Marion’s shift toward her better self, near thirty years after her horrible experiences, and through her initial contact with Russ we see Russ’s ‘beginning to accept gays’, a kind of subtle undertow of a better culture to come unburdening Russ and Marion of certain types of hate and exclusivity. Marion comes to believe she herself is incapable of healing. “Potentially irreparable,” she believes she has dirtied Perry, her most disturbed child, through her own disease. We are fastened in from the moment we read the narratives of these characters chasing one another through the streets of New Prospect.
Anymore, we are a simple-natured beast when it comes to narrative design, and much of our reading of Franzen’s work has been grouped in with contemporary, big, social novels. I stress that this is an historical novel, new as it is for Franzen, his reining in of his own particular list of interests should be understood as personal development of a novelist seeking an acute and sophisticated form within a historical context and characters requiring as much research as rendering. In a moment of character portrayal early on I found Franzen’s best-portrayed character of the novel, who came across as quick and as graceful as he was gone, a south-sider preacher, Theo Crenshaw.
“He was dressed in a saggy velour pullover and ill-fitting stretch trousers. He seemed immune to the vanity that had led Russ to wear his favorite shirt and his sheepskin coat for Frances. The poignancy of an urpan preacher, beloved on Sundays to the women of his congregation but otherwise so very alone in his church, with no support staff, no associate, his annual salary paltry, his primary sustenance spiritual, was especially keen on a raw December evening.”
Franzen has many excellent portrayals and moments of high prose in Crossroads. That this is the easiest to access and describe should say something about the inter-meshing of characters’ insights and awareness of others. Franzen nails some Chicago truths in passages we should expect from a researched novel, like Mayor Daley’s racist city works, the ill-functioning child-protection system in Illinois; all as some kind of dreary backdrop for the Crossroads group to be a sanctuary. In the youth group we find a key antagonist to Russ, whom we must eventually accept as our protagonist (though we can see Marion as central if we tilt our heads to listen), and in Rick Ambrose we find a near chemical opposite to Russ. Rick is with it among the youth of New Foundation, and the youth group, where Russ had been voted out in an embarrassing show of hands. Rick speaks in particularly damning truths to all, the while Russ squirms under Rick’s power. In scene after scene between the two we understand a prior deep friendship that went sour between them, turned hateful and ultimately resolved in a now known hatred between the two men, but not before we witness the height of Franzen’s novel, wherein hate mounts to a point of verbal and near physical blows interrupted, to the nth breathless degree, by Rick leaving the room and returning with a collection pate. He will wash Russ’s feet. It is a defining scene from a strong first novel of a tryptic Franzen intends to construct in the coming years. Undoing his commitment to steer clear of historical fiction, mainly, I believe, inspired by his encounter with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, and the energy he found in the Patrick Melrose novels, Franzen returns to us with a historical novel in a dialect shifting from character to character high to moderately high, in a book we anticipate will set off a great trilogy.
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