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Deborah Treisman
Fiction editor
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In 2021, Jonathan Franzen published his most recent novel, “Crossroads,” the story of a weekend in the life of a complicated family, the Hildebrandts, in 1971. He announced it as the first book in a trilogy titled “A Key to All Mythologies,” a self-directed joke, referring to the pedantic and unfinished work of Reverend Casaubon in “Middlemarch.” “A Talent for Seeming,” Franzen’s story in this week’s Fiction Issue, gives us hope that the punch line of that joke will not, in the end, land.
Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi
Adapted from the opening pages of the second book in the trilogy—still a work in progress—“A Talent for Seeming” features not the Hildebrandts but a new character, a teen-age girl named Adele, growing up in Butte, Montana, in the nineteen-seventies. Adele’s mother—widowed at twenty-four—takes up with a former rodeo rider, and exhibits little to no interest in her daughter: when, later in life, Adele “encountered the term ‘attention deficit disorder,’ she misunderstood it as a descriptor of her childhood.” Adele counters her mother’s behavior by becoming a devout born-again Christian and a first-rate student. Then, when a hippie from San Francisco is put in charge of her twelfth-grade English class, something shifts: she discovers both the opposite sex and her gift for acting. What follows is a continual struggle between the attractions of church and stage, virtue and desire, serving others and serving herself.
In an accompanying Q. & A. about the story, Franzen explains, “My previous novel was populated by Christian believers who, by and large, didn’t lose their religion. This seemed like a good time to write a character who does lose her religion—or, more precisely, finds a new one to replace it with.” Later in the book, he promises, Adele will cross paths with a Hildebrandt, though the full arc of the novel is “still far from finished.”
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