Jonathan Franzen. “I have fallen in love with many Catholic women.”

In CrossroadsThe first installment of a trilogy, Jonathan Franzen chooses to once again stage an American family in existential turmoil. But unlike the Lamberts Corrections – which sold more than three million copies and made the writer or the Berglunds famous Freedom – which earned him the cover The time The Hildebrands still share the same roof, and it is the parent-child and sibling relationships that interest the author; Cleanlinesswhen his predecessors were often an excuse to hold up a mirror to a disinherited nation.

Also leaving the modern era in the 1970s, the writer explores and with his usual virtuosity crosses the views of Russ Hildebrandt, a pastor who confronts both his lust for one of his parishioners and his jealousy of a young and popular man who threatens to take his to the head of the created association, Crossroads ; the role of Marion, his wife, who hid her traumatic past to become a colorless husband devoted exclusively to his family; older son Clem is off to college while the Vietnam War continues to mobilize; Becky, a high school student who seems to succeed at everything; and Perry, a gifted teenager who recently switched from drinking to selling joints. Five characters for an author in crisis at the top of her game who draws us into her characters’ dilemmas with unparalleled evocative power.

“False Vision of Freedom”

Miss Figaro. –Why did you decide to set your novel in the early 1970s?
Jonathan Franzen. – Because I’ve never done it before, and I hate repeating myself, but also because it was an extremely formative decade for me. I wrote about Russ and Marion’s marriage, and the strain this decade put on their union as I watched my parents’ marriage tested in those years, with my mother trying to lose weight like Marion when couples were everywhere. I was getting a divorce… But what I really know is what it was like to be 15 years old in the early 1970s. I had a mine of memories at my disposal that was never tapped. I knew what games young people played back then, what music they listened to, how they dressed and talked… I knew it from the inside, not nostalgically, but as someone with a young brain knows, sharpens and records every detail. And I had a lot of fun bringing it all to life.

I was of the opinion that there was a false vision of freedom prevalent in the United States, and I wanted to criticize that falsehood…

Jonathan Franzen

Would you say that one of the central motifs of the book is the question of what it is to be a good person?
I think like a playwright, and if you think about dramatic scenes in real life, the difficult decisions we have to make, the question of what to do often comes up. The moral questioning is actually a consequence of trying to create characters who all face a crisis. Although Perry thinks a lot about goodness and virtue, I’d like to say more generally: you don’t need to start with a theme, it will come if you pay enough attention to your characters and their dramas. Of course I wrote well Cleanlinessbecause I was horrified by the empowerment of the idea of ​​purity, of religious purity, manifested through Isis (“Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria, editor’s note ), terrorism in general, and ideological purity, particularly on the left, but also on the right. The same applies FreedomI was of the opinion that there was a false vision of freedom prevalent in the United States, and I wanted to criticize that falsehood…

“I need something specific”

And for Crossroads ?
I had a conceptual framework that has to do with faith and irrationality, or more broadly, the idea that what people think is essential and that structures their lives is based on something that cannot be proven. This applies to those who believe in a God who obviously cannot be proven to exist, but also to progressive politics, such as those based on commandments that seem right without the possibility of scientific proof again… This is one. the reasons why I decided to start my project with Christianity, which obviously consists of a series of myths, but ultimately no more than any other system of thought.

What people consider essential and what structures their lives are based on something that cannot be proven.

Jonathan Franzen

But while a book may start with a concept, it only comes to life when you flesh it out.
It works. I have to imagine a specific church, a specific pastor and a pastor’s wife with strong Catholic leanings, but with this strange idea that she is a sinner anyway, that she likes to sin and is going to sin… something specific, a specific time is needed. and setting and characters that represent nothing but themselves. They are my best attempt at putting lives on paper that have the texture of reality and in which any reader can recognize elements of their own. I will add that my previous books have some science fiction, like this strange cure for the brain; Correctionsor major events such as the war in Iraq Freedomor billionaires like Cleanliness. Back CrossroadsI wanted to know if I could write a novel without any of these gimmicks, any of these crutches, just based on ordinary and yet fascinating characters.

The stamp of religion

Has religion influenced you?
Yes, I went to church as a child and teenager, I was part of such a union Crossroads I fell in love with many Catholic women… But I never had faith, I was too rationalistic. It weighs, even when one leaves religion, its imprint remains. If Salman Rushdie rejects Islam, he knows it, and it enriches him as a writer, because he heard many religious myths growing up, and they are part of him as an author. It’s the same for me with the Bible. I don’t believe there are miracles, whether God spoke to Abraham or Moses, but they are good stories that transcend clichés and always seem to taste the unexpected.

Even when we leave religion, we retain its imprint

Jonathan Franzen

What do you mean?
Can we imagine that God tells you to sacrifice your only son, and it is even more unimaginable that you obey him? And this idea that it is better to be poor than rich. here is a counterintuitive paradox worthy of a novel. The Bible invites us to see the world differently, and that’s exactly what we try to do as artists. It is a source of extraordinarily powerful stories rooted in the human psyche. In the New Testament, the obsession with sin does not come from nowhere. As for the idea of ​​a fall from Eden, with the world irreversibly transformed by the entry of human knowledge, it will resonate strongly if you’re an environmentalist. You don’t have to believe to understand that religious myths contain truth and can be just as fascinating as works of art.

intersection,By Jonathan Franzen, Ed. de l’Olivier, 704 p., €26. Translated by Olivier Deparis.