Fighting parents, theologically

ZERMATT

By Frank Schaeffer

Carroll & Graf, $25, 248 pages.

REVIEWED BY JON WARD

It is clear from the second page of Frank Schaeffer’s novel “Zermatt” that the Becker family, the protagonist unit from Mr. Schaeffer’s two other novels, is near collapse. Rachel, the 16-year-old middle child, says the family should proselytize to others at a ski resort in Switzerland.

“We’re supposed to be missionaries,” she says, prompting a quick reply from her father Ralph.

“We’re on vacation,” he growls.

Mr. Becker is badly in need of a vacation from his problems, the biggest of which is that he’s married to a religious fanatic.The book is a tale about the couple’s son, Calvin, a boy whose sexual awakening brings the simmering tension between his parents to a climax. The result is not pretty, but it is very funny.

Mr. Becker is constantly reminded of his blue-collar roots by his wife, Ulsa, who is descended from artistocratic missionary blood. It is through her family’s connections that the fundamentalist Presbyterian Beckers are stationed in Switzerland, instead of in India, “looking for toilet paper,” as Mr. Becker puts it. The Beckers go to Zermatt each year for a ski vacation.

Yet Mr. Becker has come to resent his wife’s thinly veiled manipulation of the family through her endless religious jingos and textbook answers to every problem.

“See, Elsa likes to pretend that everything is so great, so special! But there’s a real world out there and I get sick of all her pretending,” he tells his three children early in the book. As the story progresses, Mr. Becker’s stewing resentment explodes into a full-throttled rage, leading to a crisis point for the family.

It is Calvin’s sexual escapades with a hotel maid at the resort that precipitate this. Calvin has never been allowed to dance, and he yearns for a taste of “worldly pleasures” despite, or perhaps because of, all his mother’s indoctrination — she hides his sister’s bras on the laundry line between hanging sheets and tells him not to even think of sex until after he is married.

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