Crossroads
- Автор: Франзен Джонатан
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Crossroads». Краткое содержание книги:
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in *Crossroads* , has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its...
By the spring of 1969, the group was so large that two chartered buses were waiting in the church parking lot on the first afternoon of Easter vacation. Two separate work camps were planned for Arizona, and it would have made sense to divide the group by destination. Instead, as quickly became clear, there was a cool bus—identified as such when Ambrose dropped his luggage next to it; promptly mobbed by the Tanner Evans crowd—and an uncool bus, with Clem and his father and the squarer kids from First Reformed. For Clem, a bus was only a means of transport to the thin air of the mesa, the smells of pinyon pine and frybread, the chance to haul rocks and pound nails for a people his country had robbed and oppressed. The whole notion of coolness was puerile. Nobody in New Prospect was more socially desirable than his sister, and he knew for a fact, from the stories Becky had told him, that popular kids had no more substance than unpopular ones. Because he had Becky, he’d never gone out of his way to make friends at school, and the few good friends he did have were not in the fellowship, but he was on friendly enough terms with many of the square kids. Even the sour fat girl, even the compulsive punster, even the immature blurter had interesting things to say if you put them at ease and took the time to listen. This was what Jesus would have done, and Clem felt good about doing it.
His father, however, seemed restless and distracted on the square bus. Their driver was a little slower than the other driver, and his father sat directly behind him, ducking his head to peer down the road, as if he were anxious about falling behind. Clem went to sleep early. When he woke up in the night and saw that his father was still peering through the windshield, he put it down to excitement, anticipation. The real situation didn’t become clear until morning, when their bus caught up with the Ambrose bus, at a Texas Panhandle truck stop, and his father made Ambrose trade places with him.
Theoretically, there was nothing wrong with this. His father was the leader of the group, and it was arguably correct to share his ministerial presence with the other bus. But when Clem saw how eagerly his father bounded onto it, without a backward glance, something shifted inside him. He sensed, in his gut, that his father hadn’t switched buses because it was right. It was because he selfishly wanted to be on the other bus.
That evening, when they rolled into the town of Rough Rock, Arizona, Clem’s instinct was confirmed in the awfulest of ways. In the dark, in a dust cloud lit by headlights, there was a melee of baggage handling as the group sorted itself into the half that would stay in Rough Rock, with his father, and the half going on to the settlement at Kitsillie, up on the mesa, with Ambrose. Weeks earlier, when everyone signed up for one location or the other, Clem had chosen Kitsillie because its primitive conditions suited him, but most of the kids boarding the Kitsillie bus had chosen it because of Ambrose. Among them were Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky, their musician friends, and the group’s cutest girls. The bus was fully loaded and ready to go, missing only Ambrose, when Clem’s father climbed aboard with his duffel bag.
There had been, he said, a change of plan. It would be better, he’d decided, if he led the Kitsillie contingent and let Rick stay in Rough Rock, where there was dormitory housing. After a moment of stunned silence, the bus erupted with cries of protest from Laura Dobrinsky and her friends, but it was too late. The driver had already closed the door. His father took the aisle seat by Clem and clapped him on the knee. “This is great,” he said. “You and I get to spend a whole week together. It’s better, don’t you think?”
Clem said nothing. From farther back in the bus came urgent, angry female whispering. His father had trapped him in the window seat and he thought he might die if he didn’t get away. The shame of being the son of this man was new to him and searingly painful. It wasn’t that he cared how he personally looked to the cool kids. It was how weak his father had made himself look to them, by abusing his petty authority to commandeer their bus. And now his father was using him, being all fatherly, so as to pretend that he’d done nothing wrong.
The pretending continued on the mesa. The old man seemed willfully blind to how much the Kitsillie group resented him for taking Ambrose’s place. He didn’t seem to realize that he was nearly fifty, twice as old as Ambrose, not interchangeable. Yes, he was stronger and more skilled than Ambrose, and, yes, he was full of energy—returning to the mesa, reconnecting with the Navajos, walking the land he loved, always fired him up. But every morning, when he organized the work crews, no one volunteered to be in his. When he went ahead and selected a crew, and busied himself with tools and supplies for the day, a funny thing happened: every girl in his crew who was friends with Laura Dobrinsky traded places with someone from a different crew. He had to have noticed this, and yet he never said a word about it. Maybe he was too cowardly to make an issue of it. Or maybe he didn’t care what the girls thought of him. Maybe all he’d wanted was to prevent them from spending the week with their beloved Ambrose.
Clem was a crew leader himself, the only non-adult to whom his father gave responsibility. A year earlier, this expression of trust would have thrilled him, but now he was merely grateful that he never had to be in his father’s crew. During the day, hard physical labor dulled his fear of returning to the schoolhouse where the group was camping out, but the shame was always waiting there at dinnertime. He felt obliged, by his principles, to eat with his father, who was otherwise shunned, and to submit to his fraudulently hearty talk about the trench he was digging for a septic line. Seeing his peers all laughing and eating together, Clem felt uniquely cursed and isolated. He wished he were the son of someone—anyone—else.
It was a fellowship tradition to gather as a group around a single candle after dinner and share thoughts and feelings about the day. Every night at Kitsillie, there was a wall of stony silence from the cool girls. Late in the week, his father went so far as to ask the prettiest of them, Sally Perkins, if she had anything to tell the group. Sally just stared at the candle and shook her head. Her refusal to speak was so pointed, the tension around the candle so high, that it ought to have triggered a full-on confrontation, but Tanner Evans knew exactly when to strike a chord on his twelve-string and lead the group in song.
If Clem’s father was relieved to avoid a confrontation, he shouldn’t have been. The explosion that followed ten days later, at the first Sunday meeting after the Arizona trip, was more violent for having been suppressed. The evening was unusually hot for April, the fellowship meeting room as airless and rafter-smelling as an attic. Everyone was in a hurry to get downstairs for activities, and most of the room quieted when Clem’s father stepped forward to deliver his opening prayer. He glanced at Sally Perkins and her friends, who were continuing to talk, and raised his voice. “Heavenly Father,” he said.
“This room could sure use an air conditioner,” Sally remarked, loudly, to Laura Dobrinsky.