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“Shouldn’t his capacity for love, which was the essence of Christ’s gospel, have earned him a modicum of credit with god?”
What does god have to do with a person’s capacity for love? Everything, suggests Jonathan Franzen in his 2021 novel Crossroads. It is not always devotion that opens up a believer’s heart to love, but also the fear of god’s anger and damnation. It concocts a curious mix where base desires are pitted against the higher, nobler expectations of faith. For instance, what does one do when they are tempted to commit adultery? Do they stay true to their vows out of obligation to their spouse or because they fear god’s disapproval? Or, should one share their wealth from a sense of familial affection or because they have been coaxed to adopt god’s charitable ways?
By asking these questions through an ordinary, small-town, Christian Midwestern family, Franzen inspects the deep impact of religion in personal relationships and the extent one goes to hold up the facade of faith in times of hardship.
A crisis of faith
In the early 1970s in New Prospect (a fictional town in the Chicago suburbs), the Hildebrandt family is challenged with a constant shift in reality. Devout Christians and adequately religious, the answers to their problems are hard to find in the familiar framework of faith. The stirrings of new feelings, pangs of puberty, and ghosts from the past loom large on them. The family of six, in addition to a perennial financial difficulty, is suddenly facing a crisis of faith.
Russ, the patriarch of the family and an associate minister at First Reformed Church, has quite frankly fallen in love with Frances, a widowed parishioner. On top of that, he has been kicked out of the church’s youth group, Crossroads, for being too old-fashioned for the new generation. Rick Ambrose, much younger and handsome, with whom Russ used to lead the group, has been able to retain his position, leading to a serious case of self-pity and hatred in Russ. Through his work, he has been able to portray himself as a useful supporter of the Blacks and Indians – he has marched for justice and extracurriculars at the church often involve physical labour at coloured settlements. An affair with Frances is his only way out of his drudgery at home and work. His faith in God has all but disappeared, and more damningly, he has admitted to a 17-year-old girl in the youth group that he has “no sex life” with his wife Marion.
Marion, on the other hand, is plagued by a spiritual crisis of her own. Despite her daughter Becky’s decency, they have never really bonded as a mother and daughter. Ever since she married Russ, Marion has played the devoted wife to him and has uncomplainingly written his sermons and defended his hostile feelings for Ross. No longer boasting any charms from her youth, Russ’s disinterest in his wife also stems from her lack of physical beauty and her exceedingly matronly mannerisms.
When she suspects Russ of violating the sanctity of their marriage, Marion secretly starts seeing a psychiatrist. She constantly reminds herself about how expensive her experiment is and the comicality of seeking psychiatric counselling in a dentist’s office. (Midwestern America of the 1970s is not the most liberal of places.) It is through these conversations with her psychiatrist that the reader is exposed to Marion’s dangerously troubled youth. Her secret life comprises an unhappy childhood, abusive sexual encounters, and a painful spell at a mental hospital. She almost nurses this trauma zealously, knowing that nothing else will bring her the manic high of being “bad” and reckless.
At first, the couple locks horns not in confrontation but by evading each other to the point where entire days go by without them seeing each other or knowing about the other person’s whereabouts.
A moral crisis
While the husband and wife come to terms with the death of their marriage, three Hildebrandt children tackle moral crises of their own. (The youngest, Judson, is only nine and untainted by whatever’s going on with the rest of them.) Clem, a college student, is uncomfortable with his student deferment to the war in Vietnam. He feels responsible for causing grief to the less fortunate boy who will be sent in his place. Academically gifted, Clem has an insatiable hunger for sex, which becomes a noose around his neck when his girlfriend declares her love for him. The only atheist in the family, Clem’s moral compass comes not from god but from political movements of the time that declared wars as immoral and cowardly. The only way to repent is to serve his time, which until now, he had been told he was too precious for.
Becky, popular and beautiful, is in luck when a dead aunt leaves her with a handsome inheritance of $13,000. She suspects discord in her parents’ relationship and stops herself from getting sucked into it by embarking on a journey of her own. She falls in love with a co-member of Crossroads (also a deeply devout Christian) and sees god after a productive session of smoking marijuana.
And yet, it is 15-year-old Perry who puts the family through its most challenging crisis of faith. A consumer and supplier of first weed and later hard drugs, Perry’s freefall into destruction so early in life will propel the estranged couple towards each other while their other children are ejected out of their orbits. In caring for Perry, Russ and Marion betray Clem and Becky’s trust as they expound on the importance of family and sharing without really compromising on anything in their own lives. Though the parents repeatedly claim to love their children equally, Becky, especially, is unforgiving of them when she’s made the sacrificial lamb to compensate for her brother’s godless and wasteful ways. Like her mother, her youth is short-lived but unlike Marion, Becky forges her relationship with god and marriage on the foundation of love.
Crossroads is a 600-page question about the vitality of faith and its ability to persevere through moral predicaments and absolute corruption. The Hildebrandts, who consider themselves painfully alienated from each other and their community, are in fact, simply grappling with the philosophical confusion that humans have confronted since the beginning of time. With Franzen throwing questions about god, marriage, war, race, justice, addiction, pleasures of the self, and honouring commitments, Crossroads becomes a rare contemporary novel that is as philosophically curious as it is emotionally resonant.
Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen, 4th Estate/HarperCollins.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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