![]() ![]() Jonathan Franzen’s wonderful sixth novel, surely his best, funniest and most fully realised, is the first in a trilogy called, with a slightly ominous nod to the damaging pedant Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch, “A Key to all Mythologies”. He also wants to spite his father.īy the end of the first chapter we’re already fully immersed in the minutiae of family life. Even worse, Russ’s teenage children, Becky and Perry, have joined the group, thereby wounding him deeply, and his oldest son, Clem, is threatening to go to Vietnam – anathema to Russ’s pacifist convictions, though Clem sees it as a moral choice to join up in place of someone less privileged than himself. ![]() Ambrose’s way is less God, more sensitivity session, and it goes down a storm with the kids. Important facts become quickly apparent: Russ resents his long-suffering wife, Marion, and he has suffered a humiliation at the hands of Rick Ambrose, the groovier pastor (“a little black-moustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves”) who leads Crossroads, the church’s youth group. ![]()
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