![]() My father was not happy to see me drop out of Boy Scouts. ![]() I was a Cub Scout then tried Boy Scouts in 7th grade and I hated it so much, I couldn’t bear to go. Q: You were part of a Christian youth fellowship.Ī: And it was formative. The following interview with Jonathan Franzen, conducted on the phone from his home in Santa Cruz, California, is a shorter version of a longer conversation, edited and condensed for clarity and length: The questions facing them in 1971 - can you live a moral life if you’re registering your goodness? What are the blind spots of a well-meaning conscience? How can you act as a good person? - ripple on. Presumably, new installments of the trilogy will trace the moral life of the Hildebrandts to today. But though it’s set in the 1970s, it captures how the social upheavals of the ‘70s didn’t continue into the ‘80s but found a wormhole to the 2020s. The father is a pastor, the mother is pulling away, the kids are drawing apart, to religion, drugs, purpose. It tells the story of the Hildebrandts of fictional New Prospect, Illinois. ![]() ![]() “Crossroads,” both familiar and a leap ahead, is Franzen first period piece. Jonathan Franzen at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Oct. ![]()
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