Crossroads (2)

I don’t even know if I would have read Crossroads were it not for the setting. I’m not a reflexive Franzen reader, but as soon as I got a hint of the landscape: 1970’s Christian youth group – well, I was in.

There are differences, of course. I’m (ahem) a bit younger than the focal youth cohort in the Crossroads group – I was 11 in 1971. I was (am) also Catholic, not mainstream midwestern Protestant. But, folks, this still rings true:

The air was blue with tobacco smoke, the walls and the ceiling vaults covered with hand-painted quotations from e.e. cummings, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, even Jesus, and with more inscrutable, unattributed lines, such as Why guess? Get the facts. DEATH KIILLS….

…Crossroads didn’t look religious – there was nary a Bible in sight and whole evenings went by without reference to Jesus – but here again Tanner had been right: simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality. She could feel herself vindicating Clem’s long-standing faith in her as a person of substance.

Were you there? I was, sort of, if not in exact detail – we had more Jesus, less Dylan and far less smoke (in religious activities at least – there was still an approved smoking area for seniors at my Catholic high school in 1978, something my kids just cannot believe – and I barely can either) – but at least in let-it-hang-loose-God-in-the-casual- spirit, yes.

So what we have here is a youth group – Crossroads – in a Congregational (UCC) church. Russ, our hapless central character, is the associate pastor, and he’s been supplanted in popularity by Rick Ambrose, the very with-it youth minister.

More plot detail here.

Franzen does a fantastic job with this, partly, I’m sure, because he lived it in a way, as he’s described in autobiographical essays.

What I particularly appreciated seeing – even though Franzen is not as scabrous as I would be (am) about the whole scene – is a frank assessment of the matter of emotional manipulation.

Ambrose took him back into the smoke-filled room and interrupted regular programming for one of the plenary Confrontations that were at the heart of Crossroads praxis. The issues at hand were alcohol use, respect for one’s peers, and self-respect. Kids Perry barely knew addressed him as if they knew him very well….The thing went on and on and on. Although in some respects Perry had never experienced anything more horrible, he was also thrilled by the quantity and intensity of attention he was getting, as a sophomore and a newcomer, just for having drunk some gin. When he broke down in tears, weeping with shame, authentically, the group responded in a kind of ecstasy of supportiveness, advisers praising him for his courage, girls crawling over to hug him and stroke his hair. It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public displays of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.

Later:

While Laura Dobrinsky, now seated at the church’s baby grand piano, belted out a Carole King song, he returned to the crowd and maneuvered through it, stopping for a hug from a Crossroads girl who’d confessed to being awed by his vocabulary, and a hug from a girl who’d challenged him to be more emotionally open, and a hug from a girl with whom he’d improvised a skit about the hazards of dishonesty, to much approbration, and a hug from a girl who’d vouchsafed to him, in a dyad, that she’d gotten her first period before she turned eleven, and then a thumbs-up from the boy who’d helped him with the concert posters, and a friendly nod from no less an eminence than Ike Isner, whose face he’d once palpated, while blindfolded, in a trust exercise, and whose blind fingers had then palpated his own face. None of these people could see inside his cranium, all had been fooled into applauding his emotional candor and collectively propelling him, with a kind of gently pulsing group action, like macroscopic cilia, in the direction of belonging to the Crossroads inner circle. The hugs in particular were still pleasant, but the edge of the crater was creeping up on him again, now taking the form of a classic depressive question: What was the point? The inner circle had no actual power. It was merely the goal of an abstract game.

I have written about this a lot, in essays, blog posts and fiction, and it probably informs my current cynicism more than I can say, and definitely shapes my suspicion of any religious leader or influencer who centers emotion and personal experience as gauges of spiritual authenticity.

How much of the time what hit you as an amazing spiritual experience when you were fifteen – you look back and think – wow – covering the clocks, depriving us of sleep, leading us on walks blindfolded – manipulation much?

But we cried! So much!

From Crossroads:

“I liked the intensity. Not everyone does. There were people who got fucked up by it.”

“Like who?”

“Like Brenda Maser. She had a nervous breakdown on the spring retreat.”

“She had a freakout,” Tanner said, “because Glen Kiel dumped her for Marcie Ackerman the day before the retreat.”

Laura asked Becky if she could imagine someone bawling for twenty hours straight. “It started with a screaming exercise,” she said. “You scream and then you stop, except that Brenda didn’t. I was in Ambrose’s car with her on the drive home. You could hug her, you could leave her alone, it didn’t matter. We ended up just sitting there listening to her cry. Kind of wanting to strangle her to make it stop. We got to her house , and Ambrose took her inside and handed her off to her parents. Like, here’s your daughter there seems to be a problem, uh, we don’t know anything else about it.”

That’s a great element of Crossroads. I suspect, though, that Rick Ambrose is a little more nefarious than we’re told in this first volume of the promised trilogy, and that More Shall Be Revealed.

It wouldn’t surprise me, would be par for the course and the most realistic road to take, to tell the truth.

It’s a period and a scene – even as it extend to the present – that isn’t written about as much as it should be, for all the impact it’s had.

Also quite good is the way Franzen gradually circles around the tension between Ambrose and Russ. It’s not exactly a Rashomon approach, but the way that the onion skins are pulled back is quite fine – we think it’s obviously Russ’s fault – oh, but maybe it’s Rick? Well, maybe they’re both – huh.

So yes, Franzen’s exploration of this moment in time – when youth culture was starting to dominate church life and spiritual authenticity defined by emotion and relationship – is excellent and still timely.

But of course, Crossroads isn’t just a youth group. It’s a point in a person’s life in which they’ve got decisions to make and roads to choose. Which – as outlined in the last post – is where all of our main characters find themselves at the moment we meet them.

And they find themselves at these crossroads as either people of faith or people who have been shaped by people of faith and religious institutions.

Now, as I started to think about this post, I will admit to you that the first comment that popped into my head was rude:

Maybe the novel would be more interesting if Franzen had picked a less boring religion for his characters’ dark nights.

I mean – mid-century Congregationalism might not beget the most intense struggles. Even Marion, Russ’s wife, compares the pastor’s sermons to Rod McKuen poems.

That said, Franzen presents some interesting interior faith tensions – although some, like Russ’s – don’t seem as intense as they should be, given what he’s considering (adultery with a parishioner) and given what’s at stake (marriage, family, church, soul, etc.).

As this reviewer notes:

 Franzen is not interested, here, in why bad things happen to good people. He is interested in why people perceive themselves as good or bad, often despite ample evidence to the contrary, and why people who are at least intermittently trying to be good do terrible things.

…Franzen is not Dickens, which I mean here as a compliment; he does not do moral pageantry, doling out impossible quantities of virtue to some characters while withholding it entirely from others. Instead, in “Crossroads,” the desire to be good is broadly shared but alarmingly ephemeral, dissolving with equal ease in the face of forces as potent as addiction (for Perry), as insidious as self-pity (for Russ), and as trivial as a traffic jam (for Marion). Yet it is also strangely persistent, readily rekindled by an encounter with another person, an experience of the ineffable, or the banked heat of some mysterious inner fire. This combination of fragility and tenacity renders the old-fashioned question of virtue interesting again, by rendering it suspenseful. Like real people, the characters in the book go to therapy every week and attend worship services every weekend because their will to be good is in constant need of renewal, which is to say that it is in constant jeopardy.

And that’s the question every character deals with – they do something bad, recognize it, sense the impulse to change and do good instead – but then grapple with a couple of strange truths: they wouldn’t be at the point of encountering the Good unless they’d said yes to the Bad – and that the Good might actually bring them closer to that other Bad Thing they are desiring.

It’s knowing and true.

I just think – per the last post – that the power of it is diluted by Franzen’s chosen structure and the length of these setpieces.

A final point, and an important one:  remarkably enough, on the way, several characters have serious and unironic spiritual encounters. I emphasize the “unironic,” because honestly, I kept expecting the irony to burst through, it never did, and this is something else in a culture in which the most acceptable depictions of Christian faith in art are, indeed, ironic and dismissive, convinced that those fairy tales are only for the ignorant and the bigoted.

But not here:

When the next evil wave welled up in her head she peered down and saw beneath it, not a bottomless blackness, but a kind of golden light. The wave was transparent, the evil insubstantial. The golden light was the real, substantial thing…..Goodness was the best thing in the universe, and she was capable of moving toward it…With a sob more like a paroxysm, an ecstasy, she opened her eyes to the cross above the altar.

Christ had died for her sins.

And could she do it? Could she cast aside the evil in her, cast aside her vanity and her fear of other people’s opinions, and humble herself before the Lord? This had always seemed impossible to her, an onerous expectation with no upside. Only now did she understand that it could bring her deeper into the golden light….She ran up to the cross, dropped to her knees on the altar carpeting, closed her eyes again, and put her hands together prayerfully….

Oh, I have quibbles. I think that there could have been a little more theological contextualization – no, not an in-depth excavation of mid-century Protestantism with footnotes pointing to Barth and Niebuhr – but honestly, in a 600-page book, you can spare a page or two for a wry look at what, besides his personal experiences, formed the raised-Mennonite Russ in the anodyne, undernourished faith that he struggling with – not very valiantly – there on Christmas Eve.

I also have questions about how Russ’s four children came to be in the varied spiritual places they’re resting in when we meet them. We have some sense, but the life of a PK – Preacher’s Kid – is intense and strange, with expectations abounding and faith journeys being all bound up in family dynamics. It enters the picture, but I think that in most families with Professionally Religious parents, it’s stronger and more fraught than Franzen gives us here.

But all that aside, it’s refreshing to see a contemporary novel that’s weaving faith into the lives of its characters, and giving them plenty of space to contradict themselves and muse over the quandaries, just as we do here, outside the pages:

Ever since that revelation, and beginning with the sharing of her inheritance, she’d endeavored to be a good Christian, but the paradox of doing good was that she felt even prouder of herself. It was as if, although the terms had changed, she was still pursuing superiority……