Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Q: For the first time, you have a pastor main character.
I have never been very religious. But recently, in Berlin, an interviewer pointed out to me that the three precepts of Crossroads, the youth ministry group in my novel, are at the heart of my activity as a writer: honesty, confrontation and unconditional love. Honesty is a corrective to the comfortable lies found in the media. The confrontation is to seek the most dramatic way, the conflict. Unconditional love is more difficult for me. But that was my goal with Crossroads, trying to find a way to love all my characters. I’ve been thinking about it for decades, but it’s only with Crossroads that I got there.
Q: Why did you get there now?
It coincided with reaching the age that my parents were when I really knew them, teenager and young adult. They got me late, so that was when they were in their late 50s, early 60s. I obviously rebelled against my parents, I chose a career they disapproved of, I was sure they were completely wrong. At 63, I realize how right they were on many counts. They were not religious, but went to church out of faith in the community and because they found New Testament ethics to be correct. Kindness was their religion. With, in my father’s case, brutal honesty.
Q: Indeed, in recent years, you have made the headlines by comparing the environmentalist movement to the Puritans and by affirming that you prefer a spirituality closer to Francis of Assisi with your passion for birds.
It is hard not to notice how America, in abandoning Christianity, has adopted several dogmas which resemble the ethics of liberal Christianity. The feeling of guilt is always at the center of these dogmas.
Q: In your last four novels, you could say the patriarch fails.
I would rather say that in CrossroadsRuss is weak and feels inferior. [Longue hésitation.] I have always been interested in stories of fathers and sons. My father scared me. He spanked us. He was extremely intelligent, got angry quickly. But underneath, he was very lonely and insecure. He was a second child, he was not the favorite, but he never rebelled. Such men try to be good, to conform to masculinity, even if they are full of doubts. I have such characters in all my novels.
Q: How important is doubt to you?
A writer will never be very good if he does not doubt. The work involves doubting, being skeptical of one’s own certainties and those of others. It is very different from religious doubt, which wonders why God has abandoned it. In literature, doubt leads to truth.
Q: What about guilt?
I don’t find that to be a very useful concept. That’s why I’m closer to harder versions of Christianity, like Catholicism. It is assumed that everyone is guilty. If we consider that we must act in order not to be guilty, as in the environmental field or race relations, often we will make the wrong decisions. Or we are going to make aggressive those whom we designate as the culprits, but who do not really see how to get rid of their guilt.
Q: Your novel has a character of a woman haunted by an abortion and the French translation appears right after the judgment Dobbs of the Supreme Court invalidating Roe v. wade.
I wrote before Dobbs, obviously. Two of the six main characters in my novels had an abortion, it’s almost realistic. I am not commenting on the matter, although I have my own review of Dobbs and of Roe v. wade, both of which are problematic. I distrust extremes. We can all agree that infanticide is wrong, but most reasonable people have no problem with the morning after pill. So we can think that abortion is delicate if we approach viability. Most countries in the West have managed to find a balance, but not us, because of our toxic political environment.
Reference to George Eliot
The subtitle of the English edition is A Key to All Mythologieswhich is the title of a book written by a character from Middlemarchfamous novel by George Eliot. A Key to All Mythologies is a never-ending project of recension of the mythologies of the world by the character Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch. “It’s a joke, it refers to the fact that religion has been evacuated from American public life, while replacing it with other mythologies, says Jonathan Franzen. It is, as in Middlemarch, a project that will never end. This character is my favorite Middlemarch. One of my problems with Eliot is that she is judgmental. But she doesn’t treat Casaubon like that. He’s not good or bad, he’s just a sad character. Me too, I don’t judge my characters, I simply represent them. »
Crossroads
Jonathan Franzen
Editions of the Olivier
801 pages