Art & Culture

Book Review: Zermatt

By Frank Schaeffer
Caroll & Graf, $25, 248 pages

Reviewed by Joshua Anderson
03/04/04

Frank Schaeffer's new novel, Zermatt, is the second entry in a promised trilogy that began with Portofino, and represents a pioneering effort in the so-far-unmined genre of comic Reformed Presbyterian coming-of-age literature. Written as a first-person narrative of Calvin Dort Becker, the novel follows the misadventures of his American missionary family, as they minister among the Swiss during the 1960s and vacation in their customary low-budget Alpine ski hotel for a winter holiday from the Lord's Work. In case you haven't yet made the connection, Frank Schaeffer, son of the oft-knickered Reformed theologian Francis Schaeffer, was also the youngest son of an American missionary family ministering to the Swiss in the 1960s. It's unclear how far the parallels continue after that, and the reader is left to draw his own conclusions.

Calvin's parents, Ralph and Elsa, are fundamentalists of the most fundamental sort; they do daily battle against the "papists" and wonder if there are any "Real Christians" left (even most other Protestants don't count). They sigh at the guests who smoke and take wine with their dinners and panic when they discover that their low-budget hotel has acquired an electric guitar and drum set in the last year, leading, they rightly fear, to mixed dancing. As Calvin recounts, it's somewhat difficult to tell who's a "Real Christian," after all.

Real Christians were "Kindred Spirits," as opposed to "just nominal Christians." So many people who seemed at first like Real Christians turned out not to be. In fact, who was and who was not a Real Christian was something that had to be closely watched. Anything could get a person demoted from the A list to the B list, from being Kindred to being "merely saved," from being merely saved to "not even a Christian at all." A drink of alcohol, a mention of jazz or rock and roll in some casual way that betrayed an "overfamiliarity with the World," a "dubious theological opinion," even an "inappropriate joke" about the Things of the Lord, even what someone wore, what their wife wore, any kind of opinion that deviated from what the Lord had laid on Mom's heart concerning the "direction of the Lord's Work" and the "Lord's leading," all this and more could lead to a "break in fellowship." Few were called and even less were chosen. Other than our family, God, in his wonderful plan for mankind, had apparently decided to save very few people.

Needless to say, Calvin is not exactly enamored by his family's lifestyle or beliefs. Before the vacation, he spends hours searching newspapers for descriptions of recent movies so that he can pretend he has seen them, if asked by some "real people." He hides copies of MAD magazine in the attic to furtively read in his more rebellious moments. And like most boys in the beginning throes of adolescence, he is mostly obsessed with only one thing. Girls.

No matter what I was doing, even while singing hymns in the Monday morning Bible study, I was thinking about the girls around me. I liked the smell of them, warm and sweet, something like melting butter and my pet cat's tummy back when she was a kitten. Girls loomed up in my mind a lot, or at least certain parts of them did. But the girls at the mission were not the sort who let you kiss them. They had come to learn about Jesus and were all much older than I was, mostly in their twenties, and mostly dressed in a godly way that hid everything I longed to get a better look at.

Calvin is an amusingly honest, sympathetic and, most of all, believable character. His consuming sexual curiosity is not exactly innocent, but the blame for its dysfunctionalism largely rests on his parents' lack of parenting. His only sexual instruction seems to have come from one conversation with his mother when she related the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, instructed Calvin to "reserve himself until after marriage," and warned him to report to her if he ever thought of sex before then. Ralph and Calvin evidently never discuss the matter. Needless to say, Calvin's curiosity was not sated. One of the book's funnier moments comes when Elsa discovers Calvin spying out at his sisters' laundered bras, which are hung to dry deep within a maze of sheets precisely so that he won't see them. Calvin attempts to talk himself out of trouble by explaining that he was eyeing the undergarments because he is curious about exactly how the Church is the "Bride of Christ" and positing that since God is sovereign over all things, it must have been His will for him to examine the underwear. "Calvin!" yelps his mother. "[It] sounds to me like you're being dreadfully levitous about the Things of the Lord!" "No, I'm not," the innocent Calvin answers. "I just wanted to ask about predestination and bras."

At first glance, Ralph and Elsa have a reasonably strong marriage and seem quite sure about their beliefs. But as the book goes on, it turns out that things aren't quite as peaceful as they seem. Indeed, as Rachel, Calvin's truly angelic older sister confesses to him, "It's hard to be a Real Christian."

Elsa is often frustrated by her husband's poor table manners and lack of social graces, especially his "dreadfully working-class upbringing.” She doesn't hide it very well, by turns scolding and praying out loud for him. Ralph is a classic passive-aggressive husband, as he quietly rolls his eyes at his wife's constant posturing. When she begins talking of God's great blessings on their missionary life, he sarcastically remarks that the reason they're stationed in Switzerland instead of India or the Congo, "eating lice on a stick," is not the will of God but rather the fact that Elsa's uncle is on the mission board. After his wife leaves in a huff, Ralph tells the stunned children, "See, Elsa likes to pretend that everything is just so great, so special! But there's a real world out there and I get sick of all her pretending."

Much to Calvin's dismay, it turns out that there aren't any girls his age at the hotel this winter, but he quickly discovers the more mature charms of the 35-year-old Swiss waitress, Eva. Their daily flirtations quickly become more serious, and the tensions in the Becker marriage come to a head when Calvin's sexual experimentations are discovered by his parents. While Elsa dissolves into righteous hysteria, Ralph suddenly realizes the superficiality and hypocrisy of the religious morality he's been living by, and his son is (albeit sinfully) rebelling against. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suffice to say that things begin to get pretty crazy (in a fundamentalist sort of way) after that.

Schaeffer's novel succeeds because its characters are all effective caricatures of actual people, ones we likely almost know, but he is not content to leave them there. Instead of slipping into a mockery of conservative evangelicals, those caricatures become believable and sympathetic characters--ones we care about and whose adventures instruct us. Zermatt also succeeds because it is genuinely funny--Schaeffer knows his subject, the tensions of modern Christianity, well, and it shows in his playful and witty treatment of it. Instead of the forced and contrived drama of most contemporary Christian literature, Zermatt dodges into the gritty realities of religious life and, through truly delightful comedy, helps us rediscover one of the essential paradoxes of our faith; the weakness of the vessels God has chosen to work through. That said, Zermatt does contain fairly explicit (though adolescently comic) depictions of sexuality and is certainly an "adult" book. For better or worse, this fact, along with the brassiere-clad bosom that adorns the book's cover, will probably keep most conservative evangelicals from reading Zermatt. Which is a bit of a shame, because they're the ones who would probably most enjoy it.