It led to 20 years of “playing Whac-a-Mole with a force that there was no defeating, really. Jonathan Franzen in 1988, from the cover of his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City. Nixon is president and we know where that’s heading, the Vietnam War is chuntering towards its endgame, First Nations people need greater help than visits from well-meaning students, and the generations are at loggerheads. Except between Rick and Russ, who don’t, at all.
It’s the sort of place where there is a lot of hugging, a lot of truth-telling and a lot of talk. The youngest sibling, Judson, shares a room with Perry, but plays a peripheral role compared with the others.Ĭrossroads, which ends at Easter 1974, is not only a metaphorical state it is the church’s youth group, run by the charismatic Rick Ambrose, a holy hippy who “thought kids could relate to the name of a rock song”. Perry is the hyper-intelligent dope-smoking third child worried about the state of his soul, and heading for disaster. She has been left a sum of money by her aunt, but this leads to rancour and division. Unhappy Marion is distressed by her weight and a secret that is gnawing at her mental stability.īecky is 18 and has never been kissed by a boy – but early on meets the “passive” singer-songwriter Tanner Evans, a sort of James Taylor-light, who could be the one. His roving eye has landed on Frances Cottrell, a gamine, recently widowed parishioner. Russ is an associate minister at a New Prospect, Illinois church who has grown weary of his wife, Marion. ” )Ĭrossroads focuses on the fractious and fracturing Hildebrandt family at Christmas 1971, that is where they’re at. (Yes, a riff on the book the ghastly Edward Casaubon is trying to write in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “It’s an ironic slash joke slash tempting fate kind of title. But when things calm down and the tree ferns outside stop shaking like manic metronomes, we turn our attention to Crossroads, his sixth novel and the first part of a trilogy to be called A Key to All Mythologies. If you’re going to get deflected from your topic, an earthquake takes some beating. Despite having spent many years in California, and despite having written a novel about earthquakes and seismology, it was only last year that I felt my first earthquake, and it wasn’t nearly as strong as yours.” Later by email he tells me “watching that earthquake hit you yesterday was incredible.
“I saw it, I saw it, I saw even after the big jolt, the camera was going like this ,” he said. Australia is geologically one of the most stable continents on Earth,” he pointed out.Ībsurdly, I apologised for the interruption – as if it were my fault.
0 kommentar(er)
