In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.
That’s Perry Hildebrandt in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I do love a Franzen novel, and this was no exception. But I don’t recall the last time I read a book that was more enjoyable and more . . . hopeless.
Perry’s thought continues:
On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.
Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequalae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities.
It is this—the perpetual chasing of all our moral ontological/epistemological lives in our over- (and yet also under-) conscious brains—that ought to be understood as the focus of Crossroads. Certainly, for almost all of us, it will never be the cocaine-driven godlike forethought and planning that follows this particular one of Perry’s ceaseless moral deliberations, nor the more natural, cocaine-less deliberations of the Hildebrandt’s that make up the 580 pages of the novel. But for anyone honest enough to look, Franzen holds up a mirror to all the self-justification that takes place in any given home or church or on any given street on any given day.
Not having any idea what Franzen’s religious experience is like, it does seem to me that he has managed to describe the moments of religious insight throughout the book with genuine feeling, so much so that I imagine Franzen going over and over removing any hint of narrative sarcasm. This is, I think, quite an achievement.
And yet…as far as I can remember in reading Franzen over the past week, all moments of grace, every last one, if and where they appear, seem most certainly to terminate in the self involved in that grace. It is perhaps true, however—and only really true in hindsight—that what does exist for the reader (at least for this reader) is a grace for certain characters at certain times when those characters are not the mind being narrated—and, equally important, this does not occur in the mind being narrated either; it just sort of slips in. And that seems important.
Christian Wiman, on the complexity of the definition of “joy”:
Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word “soul.” That sensation more exalting than happiness, less graspable than hope, though both of these feelings are implicated, challenged, changed. That seed of being that can bud even in our “circumstance of ice,” as Danielle Chapman puts it, so that faith suddenly is not something one need contemplate, struggle for, or even “have,” really, but is simply there, as the world is there. There is no way to plan for, much less conjure, such an experience. One can only, like Lucille Clifton—who in the decade during which I was responsible for awarding the annual Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry for lifetime achievement was the one person who let out a spontaneous yawp of delight on the phone—try to make oneself fit to feel the moment when it comes, and let it carry you where it will.
Grace may also be something like this. But if grace finds its way into Crossroads at all, it seems to do so without even the sort of preparation for unexpected joy that Wiman refers to. Somehow, it seems to me that grace simply doesn’t exist for most of the characters throughout most of the book. But it most certainly can exist between the reader and those characters. In the middle of all the self-justifying and moralizing, grace, like joy, just sort of slips in from somewhere outside. I could be wrong, but this seems to be almost in spite of Franzen, as it is so often for most of us in spite of ourselves.
As much as I’d like to agree with Ruth Graham’s assessment of the “sincerity” of Christian experience in the book—and I want to see it—I just can’t. In Crossroads, God seems to exist only in the psyches of each character, which might itself be a reality difficult for any of us to disentangle from. But more importantly, with perhaps one exception in the book (and it’s an exception that Franzen has always proven quite good at relating: the hard and painful reconciliation of partners), God or the experience of God or the thought of God never quite rises to a shared experience, is never quite something beyond the self.
I was reading Rowan Williams’s Tokens of Trust just after reading Franzen. It was not quite planned, but for this believer quite helpful for my own psyche.
Only when the last traces of self-serving and self-comforting have been shaken and broken are we free to receive what God wants to give us. Only then shall we have made room for God’s reality by disentangling God from all—or at least some—of the mess within our psyches. Prayer is letting God be himself in and for us. . . . And because the reality is so immeasurably greater than any mind or heart or imagination can take in, we must let go in order to make room. (emphasis added)
No, we probably never achieve a full disentangling (“What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasurable. . . . I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.”), and thankfully we do not have to. But after almost 600 pages of what can only be described as inner turmoil, however alluring the prose, who could not be hungry for this freedom, hungry for a silence that let’s God do something, anything? Somehow, I see Crossroads as both an excellent mirror for all the self-justifying we are all so prone to, and yet also as falling utterly short of the self-forgetfulness that we all experience and (can) know as the grace of God.