Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads

Multi-award winning American writer Jonathan Franzen is back with an epic novel about family, religion and culture.

Crossroads is set in the 1970s and focuses on the Hildebrandt family - father Russ, a pastor, his wife Marion and their four children.

The novel is the first of a proposed trilogy, primarily set in the hippy-ish parish youth group called Crossroads, which three of the Hildebrandt teens are involved with.

Franzen is the author of six novels, most recently Purity published in 2015, before that Freedom in 2010 and The Corrections in 2001.

He has also published five works of nonfiction, including The Discomfort Zone, Farther Away, and The End of the End of the Earth.

His latest novel started with a character, he says, rather than a desire to write about a particular time.

That character is Clem one of the Hildebrandt children who clashes with the patriarch Russ.

“I began in this case with a character who I could picture pretty well in the present day, that is the 2020s, at the age of 75.

“And in the course of figuring out his story, where it came from, I found myself in the early 1970s. And then I found myself, so happy to be in the early 1970s that I set a whole novel there.”

It was only when he started writing that he realised the 1970s, the most important decade in his life, was an untapped store of memories for him as a novelist, Franzen tells Kathryn Ryan.

“It was all at my fingertips. All of these memories I've done nothing with, including the character types, the stoner types, the smart stoner types, the popular girls.

“I knew what games people were playing. I knew what the music was. I knew what everything looked like, I knew their clothes. And it was so fun to draw on that body of submerged memory that I let myself do a whole book there.”

It was a time of social fissures in America, the counter culture was challenging traditional American values.

These tensions were present in Franzen’s own family, he says.

“My parents were very old fashioned, they really almost felt 19th century to me. And it was inevitable that when my brothers got drawn up in the late ‘60s culture, that there would be conflict and there was particular conflict between my father and my middle brother Tom, who was born in 1950.

“Some of that was political, but a lot of it just was style; long hair, the music, the bell bottoms, the unshaveness. All of that was just a horrid to my parents.”

This all came to a dramatic head, he says.

“I didn't have any traumas in my childhood. But the closest thing to a trauma was the giant fight my father and brother had in the middle of the night, that resulted in his running away.

“He and I were very close and that happened in 1970, so a little earlier than this [novel]. But that became the event for me of the ‘70s.”

Not that it was a total disagreement, Franzen’s father came from a Christian, non-conformist background.  

“The one thing they didn't disagree on was their opposition to the Vietnam War.

“My father, from a Swedish family that had originally come to the US to escape military service, was completely against violence of all kinds, and he was behind my brother’s wish, absolutely not to serve in a war they both they also saw as unjust, unjustified.”

In the novel Clem is in a “moral, psychological struggle” with his father Russ, Franzen says.

“His father is not easy to beat because he's a big, strong man physically very capable, and has such sound Christian ethics, and such a commitment to social justice, that it's not easy for Clem to see, how am I going to beat this guy?

“But there is the matter of the student deferment, which was, frankly, was a scandal at the time, white, middle class kids going to college, were immune from the draft as long as they stayed in college.”

This allowed suburban white kids a way of avoiding the draft not possible for black Americans and native Americans, he says.

“What's striking to me in hindsight is no one I knew was ever talking about the immorality of those student deferments, how outrageous and racist it was that poor black kids, poor Native American kids, were going off to fight while the white suburban kids got to go to school. And that's what Clem sees as this is my way to get one over on Dad.”

Russ is a liberal, protestant pastor, Franzen says.

“When I started creating problems for him, like his having been rejected by the young people in the church, and his pursuing this young widow in his flock, I realised the only way to make this guy sympathetic is to make him a comic character.”

Russ is a “creature of his time,” Franzen says.

“He's the patriarch, and even if you're not particularly suited to be a patriarch in 1971, it's what everyone did, and the wife is going to be invisible. She's going to be supportive and invisible.”

Russ’ wife is Marion, he says.  

“I had to invent her out of nothing. She was invisible to me, the way she was to her husband and to her children, until I started out writing her story.

“And it was a process of discovering a character there.”

Terrible things happen in her childhood, he says, and she turns to Catholicism for solace.

“Once I had that framework where we get the entire story of her past through her own perspective.

“And once there was that framework of herself as sinner, somehow everything fell into place.

“And that was the real way that that God came into the book, there's no theology in the book, but there's a lot of intense religious emotion in the book, and she was the portal to all that.”

Religion in this era in the United States was very different to today, he says.

“Because in the early ‘70s there was still a progressive wing of the Christian church and it was involved in protesting Vietnam, it was deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement.”

There is no personal nostalgia in the novel, Franzen says, his own teenage years were “self-conscious and shame-riddled.”

“I was just a very, very, very sharp, unselfconscious and immature kid who blurted things out, everything that came out of my mouth, I immediately regretted.

“I didn't want to be a kid, that was my big problem, and I carried the shame of being young really, it's weird to admit that, but I think that's the case.”