After being the popular girl in everyway, yet holding herself chaste, she finally experiences feelings for Tanner, a folksy rock singer at her place of employment, a coffee shop called the Grove. Becky, an eighteen year old high school senior, is having her own crisis of faith. Russ’s solution is to hotly pursue carnal knowledge of young widow Frances Cottrell, with whom he imagines all will be made wonderful, and he’ll get his mojo back.Ĭlem is a first year undergrad at university, when as a result of conversations during his first intense relationship with a sexual partner, feels he is a hypocrite to claim a student deferment and avoid the Vietnam draft, and decides to head home at Christmas break to tell the folks he is declining that deferment.
Russ looks at Marion, now dumpy mother of three, and wonders how he got stuck. In fact, the teens despise him, finding him too pious, with a perv vibe. Not yet a full pastor and feeling a bit of a fraud as his wife essentially writes his sermons, Russ is out of touch with the young members of his teen fellowship group, Crossroads. This was the time when he met Marion, and all life choices were made to bring him to his current situation. Son of a Mennonite family, he chose his faith and career after alternative service during World War II at a Navaho reservation. Russ is assistant pastor at First Reformed Church, who, at 47, feels unfulfilled in career, marriage, and life.
Meet the Hildebrandt family, Russ and Marion, and their children Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson, living in New Prospect, ILL, fictional suburb of Chicago. He sets out to examine the cycles within families, reoccurring patterns influenced by some combination of nature and nurture, the telling and retelling of family stories, and how traits, quirks, and tendencies repeat with their own twists. Set in the early Seventies, when I was a tween, this is the first of a proposed trilogy of novels by Franzen.
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