Marked Safe from Franzen

on Youth Group Novels

I’ve kept a five-year diary, a very Paper Source practice, for almost two years. When my wife and I retire for the night, I turn on the bedside lamp, peel off my clothes, and sit naked on the edge of the mattress using a pillow for a desk. I’m worried about the shape my body makes while sitting like that, so I scribble quickly while Mal does her bathroom routine. I’m not crafting prose, I’m dashing off a recap on where I went and who I talked to. I’ll flag noteworthy events, what I’m reading and writing, and sometimes throw down one thought with depth, but often not. They don’t give you much space to write; five entries have to fit on each page.

After logging 365 days, entries from one year prior appear. The point is to see yourself change or not change; to notice progress, regression, stasis, or loops. I bet the loops are most common. I’ll report back after racking up more years.

The other day, the diary told me it’s been a year without my music industry job. I noted it to Mal, and she went: “FUCKING FINALLY. Can we stop talking about it now?”

I, too, am bored with the retiring agent bit. I’m changing my bio from writer, editor, and ex-agent to simply: Adam Voith, Novelist.

I did not plan this, but on the one-year anniversary of going music-biz free, I sent my novel to a batch of early readers. The book’s not done done, but it’s basically done, and a grip of folks need to read it and tell me if I can use their real names. I’ve passed it to friends and family, too, along with people I admire who were instrumental in the book becoming the novel that it is. I’m stoked that a small group gets a draft with the names as I’d like them to be. I see no world where everyone lets me leave them unchanged in the published version.

Like many fellow Americans, I’ve been trying to lose the same 10-15 pounds for 10-15 years. If I weren’t colorblind, I might not wear these weights on my wrists while walking the neighborhood. I can’t be sure, but think they’re pink and neon green. I believe they were marketed to ladies in the early 2000s. Now that the heat broke in Nashville, I’m wearing them while walking and listening to audiobooks, waving my arms around, doing curls and flys. They’re 2 lbs each. Very wimpy.

During a brief period early in the pandemic when I made low-stress exercise my full-time job, I achieved relative comfort with going shirtless on the streets of Green Hills. I noticed my neighbor Marty doing the same while walking his dog, possibly emboldened by my own bravery, because when I got back into cookies and candy and put the shirt back on, he was fully clothed again, too. There’s a new shirtless guy on the street this year who walks endlessly, putting my Covid strolls to shame. He’s lean, has a nice tan, and watches TV holding his phone sideways while he goes. I’ve gone past this guy hundreds of times, both on foot and in the car, and he’s never once waved, nodded, or even looked up.

I’ve been walking and listening to long books, most recently, Crossroads. Nagel read The Corrections, freaked out in the 3-Piece group chat, then jumped immediately into another Franzen. Kyle was psyched that Mike was going in. I believe Kyle’s read them all, but said Crossroads was the masterpiece. He’d read it twice already and said he would do it a third time if we wanted to join him in the fall, so now I’ve read my first Johnathan Franzen novel.

When we were in the car recently, heading for Illinois for readings, Kyle heard a few seconds of my Crossroads at 1.7x when CarPlay randomly started it from my phone. He was disturbed and called it my psychopathic trait. I said: THESE VOICE ACTORS ARE GOING SO GODDAMN SLOW. Also you’re 10 years younger, you read in high school, in college, and in the military. I’m playing catch-up, and I hear a ticking clock.

Surprise! Crossroads is great. I’m often ready to be done with characters even when I love them, but found myself slowing down to 1.5, 1.4, 1.3x as I got to the last hours with Hildebrandt & Co. I was going to miss these people, and I was still building rationale for my gripe with the book.

Crossroads is a Midwestern Youth Group Novel, so I was trepidatious having just finished my own book, which is The World’s First Christian Rock Novel. Mine is not fully youth grouped out, but it’s youth group adjacent and Midwestern. I was worried I’d find similarities and go: Oops, one of the best doing this stuff already did this. Of course, I found some overlap. I don’t know how you write a book about American Christianity without a scene in a chartered bus going to a youth retreat, but in the end my manuscript is marked safe from being obsolete. Crossroads shook my confidence in the quality of my own writing (plenty of books I read do that) but aside from a few similar scenes and vibes, I don’t really recognize the Midwestern Christian world in Crossroads. I’m surprised by the progressivism, the intellectualism, and the street smarts. This family, this church… nothing like my Indiana life just two decades after the events in Franzen’s Chicago suburb. Really, neither book is directly about religion. In Crossroads, Franzen’s concern is how to be good, not necessarily how to be godly. My book is about Christian Rock, so it’s about business more than Jesus.

One of the challenges in my book was writing a narrator who knows nothing after the late-’90s. The book is not aware of the current climate or what American Evangelicals look like today. There were hints to where things were headed, but I don’t believe my characters would have been tuned in and able to identify them, and nary a prophet is found in my pages. It was difficult to unthink what I know and tempting to sneak in judgements, warnings, or anachronistic moralizing.

With Crossroads, I could not forget that it was the 21st Century, that it was a book published in 2021. I can accept that there were hippie dippy, liberalized churches in the Midwest in the ‘70s—the Jesus People were going strong—but the book seems to know too much. I checked out Franzen on The New Yorker Radio Hour from October 2021, just after the release of the novel. He’s asked by David Remnick about writing Navajo and Black characters.

“And the way I negotiated that was to give Russ something like a contemporary sensitivity about cultural divides and then have him play off against somebody who didn’t get it.

And really the effort there was to demonstrate that I’m not unaware of the problem. And that—not by way of virtue signaling, but just to try to make the reader feel less uncomfortable. I don’t want to make—I don’t want readers thinking about anything but the characters.

And if they start thinking about, whoa, you know the author has waded into this, then I’ve—then I have failed.”

It’s not a failure. The book is awesome and my gripe about whether this kind of Christian ever walked the Earth aside, its central question is wrestled with to satisfaction for this reader. That said, I absolutely thought about things other than the characters. That doesn’t seem so bad to me—I want books that make me do this—but I did not want to be doubting the social awareness of Christians in 1970s Illinois.

Also, the cussing. I’m calling bullshit on the cussing. Even the leadership at Jesus People USA, freaks in rock bands running the radical Christian commune in Chicago, were not cussing. Cussing didn’t come into the mix until 1998 at the earliest.

Here’s the Radio Hour audio with more context around the quote.

In a different interview included at the end of the audiobook, Franzen says the next book in the planned trilogy jumps forward decades in time and we get to know more about the grandchild born at the end of Crossroads, and yes I am worried that little shit will start a Christian Rock band, sign to Tooth & Nail, and have a transcendent set at Cornerstone ‘95.