Frustrating? A bit sexist? Maybe – but Franzen is still a riveting chronicler of God-fearing America

Crossroads is set in 1971, so it is really a historical novel, just as a novel written in 1971 and set in 1921 would be. Fifty years ago, America was still sending her children to fight the war in Vietnam. At home, it was a time of bell-bottoms and bandanas and clumpy Dr Scholl’s shoes, of the civil-rights movement and student protest, of campfire singalongs to You’ve Got A Friend, of soupy poets such as Rod McKuen and cod philosophers like Carlos Castaneda.

This was the America of Jonathan Franzen’s early adolescence: he was 12 that year. America was then, as now, a much more religious country than the UK. In an autobiographical essay published in 2005, Franzen (right) wrote of his early involvement in a local hippydippy Christian youth group called Fellowship, which came under the wing of the more orthodox First Congregational Church.

Fellowship was so popular among the more rebellious teenagers that parents who would normally have rejoiced that their children were growing up Christian were concerned at their enthusiasm. Might it be a cult?

It was led by a charismatic, longhaired pastor called Bob Mutton, who, Franzen recalled, ‘in poor light was mistakable for Charles Manson’. He held his 250 young followers in his thrall. ‘Mutton’s blue-collar background and his violent allergy to piousness made him a beacon of authenticity… In his simmering and strutting and cursing, he personified the adolescent alienation that nobody else over 20… seemed to understand.’

Mutton stood for a new approach to Christianity: direct, streetwise, more interested in ‘personal growth’ than religion. ‘He wore an army jacket and talked like a p **** d-off tough guy himself. You made yourself look childish, not cool, if you defied him.’

Franzen has now fictionalised Bob Mutton, transforming him into Rick Ambrose, the charismatic leader of a Christian youth group called Crossroads. Ambrose has long hair and a beard and, in a poor light, might be mistaken for Charles Manson.

Fifteen years older than the go-ahead Ambrose, and full of resentment towards him, the stuffier, more agonised pastor Russ Hildebrandt is unhappily married to chubby Marion and increasingly at odds with their four children.

This is a long (just under 600 pages) and intricate novel about the stresses and strains of family life at a time when formal rules are no longer respected. It is set just before Christmas 1971. Things are falling apart. Poor old Hildebrandt is on non-speaking terms with the trendy Ambrose and shunned by Ambrose’s youthful followers. Meanwhile, Hildebrandt has fallen in love with a flirtatious young widow, and out of love with his own wife, who describes herself as ‘the fat little humiliation he’s married to’.

Russ Hildebrandt is one of the most uneasy, conflicted figures in modern literature. In a marvellous scene, both funny and sad, he tries cannabis for the first time. It fills him with paranoia. ‘It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored.’

Fuelled by self-loathing, Hildebrandt is also increasingly irritated by his children, whom he suspects of aligning themselves with Ambrose simply to get their own back on him. He discovers that his younger son, the 15-year-old Perry, is already dealing in drugs. Despite himself, Hildebrandt can’t wait to tell poor Marion. ‘He could already taste the cruel pleasure of informing her that Perry was a drug-user, of rubbing her nose in what her coddling had wrought.’

His other children are in various stages of losing their old sense of respect for their father. ‘Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?’ asks his eldest, Clem, who, only a few years before, looked upon him as Atticus Finch.

Sickened by the way middle-class white Americans are getting out of fighting in Vietnam by attending university, and thus sending poor black Americans to die instead of them, Clem has given up his place at college and has posted a letter to the draft board, saying he is now available for service.

Back in 2010, Time magazine placed Jonathan Franzen on its cover, under the headline ‘Great American Novelist’. Ever since then he has been viewed through this random prism, his books either over-praised or over-scorned, according to whim.

In many ways, his strengths as a novelist consist of the solid, understated virtues of craftsmanship, good plotting and an ability to create a wide range of characters. His prose may have none of the meticulous beauty of Updike, or the furious energy of Roth, but it does its job well.

But what gives his writing its edge also makes it uneven: sometimes he seems to bristle with Kingsley Amis-style irritation at the petty absurdities of his own creations, and then, without warning, he starts viewing them with sympathy, seeing the world through their eyes.

Thus, he first introduces Hildebrandt’s cookie-crunching wife with merciless comic precision. ‘As soon as people had met her and identified her position in the community, situated her at the Very Nice end of the all-important niceness spectrum, she became invisible to them. Sexually, there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle.’

This sort of thing has made Fran

zen unpopular in some liberal circles. Unsurprisingly, he has been dismissed as a sexist. Yet he can abruptly change tack; by the end of the book, Marion has become her own woman, sympathetic and heart-rending, freed from the dual scorn of her fellow characters and their creator.

Sometimes, this unevenness in Franzen’s writing can be more frustrating. He will devote pages and pages to stodgy descriptions of humdrum activities, such as catching a bus or going shopping, but then, a few pages later, he will summarise a much more crucial episode in just a few crisp sentences, almost as though someone had told him to get a move on. This meant that in Crossroads, as in his other novels, I found myself feeling riveted, then slightly bored, then riveted, and then slightly bored once again.

Though he is a good, old-fashioned storyteller, withholding and revealing information at just the right moments, Franzen is essentially a novelist of ideas. This makes his work easier to admire than to enjoy.

Others have found fault with Crossroads for its characters’ all-consuming interest in God. Everyone in the Hildebrandt family is busy trying to balance their own appetites and needs against the ethics of the Christian faith. They are happy to talk about angels and devils, about evil spirits and prayer and redemption. They feel God’s presence, or they yearn for it. Franzen devotes pages to intense theological discussions between ordinary people. Even the otherwise comical Marion is seriously obsessed with the nature of sin and its place in modern society. ‘She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed... was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God. He’d seen her eat six sugar cookies, and the name of her sin was gluttony.’

This emphasis reveals a cultural divide. To a British readership, faithbased discussions are not commonplace. They may possibly seem implausible or irrelevant. But even now, 50 years on, most Americans are still profoundly influenced by the Bible, and alert to its calls. On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, there are still angels and devils, and Franzen is among their sharpest chroniclers.