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...
The person he feared he wasn’t fooling was the one whose approval really mattered to him, Rick Ambrose. He admired Ambrose for, among other things, his intellectually plausible faith in God. Perry himself had yet to hear from God; maybe the lines were down, or maybe there was simply no one at the other end. One boring summer afternoon, he’d gone through one of his father’s religious magazines with a ballpoint and replaced every reference to God with “Steve,” for the hilarity of it. (Who was Steve? Why were otherwise sane-seeming people going on and on about Steve?) But Ambrose had an idea so elegant that Perry wondered if there might be something to it. The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love. Ambrose had a way of talking about this stuff that didn’t seem insane. He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life; they find they know who Steve is. Perry was altogether fascinated by Ambrose, and he felt that his own singularity entitled him to a place near his side, and so he was disappointed that Ambrose, after the night of gin, had seemed to shun him. He was forced to conclude that Ambrose detected the fraudulence in his playing of the Crossroads game and didn’t trust him. The other likely explanation—that Ambrose was sensitive about encroaching on the Reverend’s family—had been demolished by the visibly close attention he’d been paying to Becky since she’d joined the group.
And now the dangerous lottery system, for which Perry had unwisely voted, had thrown him together with her. Being a furtive and curious little worm, he knew every nook in First Reformed. In the function hall, behind a door that looked locked but wasn’t, was a spacious coat closet into which, as the other “dyad” partners dispersed around the first floor of the church, he led his sister. They sat down crosslegged on the linoleum beneath rows of empty wooden hangers. A bare overhead bulb lit a dusty punch bowl, packages of waxed-paper cups, two orphaned umbrellas.
“So,” he said, his eyes on the floor.
“Yeah, so.”
“We could use some sort of system of marking slips to avoid this.”
“Agreed.”
Grateful that she agreed, he looked up at her. She didn’t have a Crossroads wardrobe yet, no overalls, no painter’s pants, no army jacket, but she was wearing an old sweater that at least had some holes in it. He still couldn’t believe she’d joined Crossroads; it upset the natural order of things.
“I really admire how smart you are,” she said in a rote kind of tone, not looking at him.
“Thank you, sister. And I admire, I really do, how sincere you always are. You’ve got a lot of phony friends, but you’re not phony. It’s actually kind of amazing.” Seeing her mouth harden, he added, “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to criticize your friends. I was trying to say something positive about you.”
Her mouth remained set.
“Maybe we should move right along to the barriers,” he said. “I suspect it’s more fruitful terrain.”
She nodded. “What is a thing I’m doing that’s a barrier to you getting to know me better.”
Perry realized that the wording of the exercise left something to be desired. It presupposed, for example, that he and Becky wanted to get to know each other better.
“I would say,” he said, “that the fact that you don’t seem to like me, and always seem vaguely pissed off with me, including right now, and haven’t tried to have a personal conversation with me in the last three or four years, at least not one that I can remember, despite our living in the same house, could be considered something of a barrier.”
She laughed, but in a shaky way, as if a sob had also been an option. “Guilty as charged,” she said.
“You don’t like me.”
“I mean the part about us never having a personal conversation.”
Her face, which he took this unusual opportunity to observe from up close, was faultless. One’s eye sought for a blemish (he himself had several raging) or some underlying feature that detracted, a thinness of lip, a squareness of jaw, a defect of nose, and found none. Same thing with her long, straight, shining hair, which was of a richer color than the slightly false-seeming yellow of his own: she had the platonic teen-girl hair to which other girls compared their own invidiously. Perry could see why the world considered Becky attractive, but also why it was wrong to. An absence of negatives wasn’t necessarily a positive. It could be a thing that merely offered no resistance to the eye, like an invisible balloon on a string. Maddened by the sight of a taut vertical string that ended in nothingness, people followed it around and concluded, from their following it, that it must be highly desirable.
He didn’t like her either.
“So it’s something I’m doing,” she said. “Is that the idea?”
“In this half of the exercise, yes. I’m naming what appears to me to be a barrier.”
“Well, one thing that’s kind of a barrier for me is the way you speak. Are you aware of how you sound?”
“Let the character assassination begin.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. The way you just said that. Like you’re an English aristocrat.”
“I have a Midwestern accent, Becky.”
The flaw of redness entered her face. “How do you think it feels to the rest of us to be around a person who’s always looking down on us, like we’re funny to him? Who’s always smirking like he knows something we don’t know.”
Perry frowned. To object that he didn’t look down on Judson, except in the most literal physical sense, would have conceded her larger point.
“Who acts like I’m mentally deficient because I got a B in chemistry.”
“Chemistry isn’t a subject for everyone.”
“But you’ll get an A-plus in it, won’t you. Without even trying. Without even giving a shit.”
“It could happen. But you could have done it, too, if you really wanted. I don’t think of you as dumb, Becky. That’s just false.”
He could feel himself becoming sentimental, and there were no points to be scored for it here, in the privacy of the coat closet, with his sibling.
“I’m talking about my feelings,” she said. “You can’t say a feeling is false.”
“Yes, true. So, you’re saying you feel that my being good at school is a barrier.”
“No. I’m saying I don’t feel like you’re even there. Like you’re a thousand miles away from all of us. I’m saying that doesn’t make me want to get to know you better.”