Yet his professional humiliation looms balefully over the rest of the novel, his failure a sin that poisons his children’s lives. Russ is not the sole protagonist of Crossroads, which is concerned with both family and nation. He barricades himself in his office in wrathful self-pity, mourning his lost edge, resenting the wife and children who he believes are the reason he lost it, and ashamedly lusting after a lovely young widow among his parishioners. So now Russ, unable to control the kids around him, has been pushed out of Crossroads, the church youth group that he helped found. Moreover, they can smell his weakness how much he longs for their approval, how eager he is to please them.
They think the way he showers attention on the church’s teen girls is creepy. “But to the kids who now thronged the church’s hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas,” Franzen writes, those bona fides “signified only obsolescence.” The youth of Russ’s church consider him helplessly dorky, old and out of touch beyond redemption. He lines the walls of his office with proof of his progressive bona fides and good taste.
He likes Dylan Thomas and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the blues. He’s a former Mennonite turned associate minister at a suburban church in 1971, but before he moved to the suburbs, he lived in New York. Russ Hildebrandt, the patriarch at the center of Jonathan Franzen’s excellent new novel Crossroads, has been humiliated.
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