“A profound and sometimes painful look at the challenges of practicing faith, and a lot
of fun to read.” —Washington Times

Calvin Becker is back in a timely, timeless story about the volcanic sexual curiosity of a fourteen-year-old boy born into a fundamentalist family so strict that he has never seen a movie, watched television, or danced (and has to hide his five copies of Mad magazine in the attic). It is 1966, and Ralph and Elsa Becker, Reformed Presbyterian missionaries from Kansas, are stationed in Switzerland, and on a modest ski vacation with their three children: tyrannical eighteen-year-old Janet, angelic Rachael, and our narrator, the irrepressible Calvin. But then, while at the Hotel Riffelberg, high above Zermatt, the fourteen-year-old falls into the hands of a waitress who, while bringing him his breakfast each morning, initiates him into ecstasies he can barely begin to comprehend.

“Told with warmth and humor.” —Library Journal

Frank Schaeffer is also the author of the two other novels in the Calvin Becker Trilogy, Saving Grandma and Portofino, as well as the nonfiction titles Faith of Our Sons, Voices from the Front, and, with his son John, Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps. He lives in New York City and Massachusetts.

Letter from a Reader

Feb. 12, '06

Dear Frank,

     Hello!  I wrote you about a year ago when I had first read your three novels and found them so refreshing.  I've just finished re-reading them and I want to thank you for your lucid, brilliant,  puncturing of the absolutist-we-know-everything-evangelical balloon that denies so much of life.  (I speak from personal experience having converted into Plymouth Brethrenism as a teenager.)
     
     I came away from this second reading more and more in love with Jesus, and freed from the plastic "gospel" that portrays its adherents as having no genitals, and heads buried in the sand.  There is a hypnotic appeal to being part of a group that has all the answers but the price of  membership is too high.
  
     What a relief to know people like me are neither God-haters nor hell-bent sinners.  What a relief to be refreshed in your writings by the portrayal of Jesus as Himself.  My faith is encouraged by your work.
 
     Your questions in the 22nd chapter of Zermatt:

"Janet, have you ever wondered who decided what was supposed to be in the Bible and what got left out?  If our faith is based only on the Bible, like Mom says, then what did the Early Church believe in, you know before the Gospels and Epistles got written?  And if there were no Real Christians before the New Testament got written, then who was Paul writing to in his Epistles?" -- is the most amazing bunch of questions I've ever heard in my 40 years as a Christian, and ones I am going to explore.
    
     Although, to say I've been a Christian for 40 years may not be accurate, after reading your work.  I was baptized at 3 in the Anglican Church and I can't help wondering if THAT was my entry into Christendom.  How can I say that religious rite was useless?  I'm a Christian!  Before I could speak well enough some other adults spoke for me denouncing the devil and all his works, and here I am living that way.
      
     Thank you for your clear work.  You are offering hope to thousands of evangelicals who know some of their beliefs don't hold water and then blame themselves for this doubt by confessing the various "sins" they've committed with their sex organs or their voices.
     
     You have brought new light into my world and I thank you profoundly for doing so.  (P.S. I've also introduced your work to my three grown children, and their two husbands, and will do so with my four grandchildren when they can read.)
    
     Blessings on you, Frank,
    
     Mary Gretsinger

Book Review: Zermatt

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

Reviewed by Joshua Anderson
Thursday, March 4, 2004

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.

(From The Washington Times Review:)
Religious readers — and the more traditional the better — should not shy away from this book. It is a helpful tale of how not to deal with others who don't think the same, offspring or not. Nonreligious readers will benefit from understanding the insecurities and alienation that sometimes lurk within those who grew up in hyper-religious families. 

"Zermatt" is not a knock against Christianity, but rather against those who seek to hijack it for their own personal agenda. It is a profound and sometimes painful look at the challenges of practicing faith, and a lot of fun to read. 
     
Jon Ward is a reporter on the metro desk of The Washington Times.

In the sequel to his critically acclaimed novel Portofino, Frank Schaeffer’s appealing, hilarious and ultimately moving narrator returns, in a coming-of-age story which takes readers deep into the heart of the tortured Becker family.

Calvin Becker is back in a timely, timeless story about the volcanic sexual curiosity of a fourteen-year-old boy born into a fundamentalist family so strict that he has never seen a movie, watched television or danced (and has to hide his five copies of Mad magazine in the attic). It is 1966 and Ralph and Elsa Becker, Reformed Presbyterian missionaries from Kansas, are stationed in Switzerland, and on a modest ski vacation with their three children: sadistic eighteen-year-old Janet, angelic Rachael, and our narrator, the irrepressible Calvin, a fourteen-year-old who puzzles over his sisters’ bras, as they hang on a line hidden away “so that I could not get a good look unless I ducked under the sheets… to the feminine heart of the laundry maze.” But at the Hotel Riffelberg, high above Zermatt, Calvin falls into the hands of a young waitress, who, while bringing him his breakfast each morning, serially initiates him into ecstasies he can barely comprehend. The resulting family crisis triggers a larger crisis of faith in his fundamentalist father, leading to a climax which rips Calvin out of his childhood. With echoes of Irving and Roth and its own uniquely human voice, Zermatt is a coming-of-age gem.

• Portofino sold over 80,000 copies in the U.S., has been translated into seven languages (selling another 70,000 copies worldwide) and, with Saving Grandma, is still in print, eleven years after publication.

• Zermatt explores religious fundamentalism in a very human, sometimes comic, and very timely fashion.

Praise for Frank Schaeffer’s Portofino:

“Poignant and hilarious... Schaeffer, by turn, is sentimental, celebratory, evocative and very funny, but we are never far from a sense that harshness and violence are real; we are never really entirely sure how things will turn out.” —Richard Eder, the Los Angeles Times

“Not since Huck Finn has American literature been graced with a character as irresistible as Calvin Dort Becker...” — Andres Dubus III

“Beautifully written...great insight and unselfconscious humor.” — Publisher’s Weekly

• National radio exposure

• Six city tour

Frank Schaeffer is the author of two novels, Saving Grandma and Portofino, as well as, with his son John, of Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story about Love and the United States Marine Corps.

Carroll & Graf
October
Fiction
Cloth, 6x9
$24.00 ($39.95 Cdn)
304 pages
0-7867-1259-7
Rights: World English

“Now we will all die because of the filthy Roman Catholics,” said Janet. “This would never happen in Vaud.”

“Valais is a dark place,” said Mom and sighed.

“Typhoid in Switzerland, unbelievable,” murmured Rachael gloomily.

“Catholic Switzerland,” said Dad, as he turned another page of his big old Bible with a swish-slap that made Mom wince. “Where there’s superstition there’s corruption. And where there’s corruption there’s dirty water. In Vaud they may all be liberal Protestants but at least there is enough of a memory of the Reformation so that they wouldn’t hide a broken sewer pipe so as not to scare away the tourists!”

“I’m just so thankful we’re going straight up to Riffelberg this year and not spending the night down in the town,” said Mom. “That was very clever of you, Ralph; I mean the way you figured out all these train schedules so we could make it up to Riffelberg in one day. And you were so perceptive to ask about the water supply! How marvelous that the hotel has its own spring so we don’t have to worry!”

“Don’t try and butter me up, Elsa!” Dad snapped.

“All those people want to be down there because they play jazz at the Hotel Zermatterhof. Now look, they’re dying!” said Janet with grim satisfaction.

“They’re not all dying,” whimpered Rachael, with a quiver in a voice as gentle as the cooing of a slightly depressed wood pigeon, “The conductor says most of them are just sick. All the cases are in one hotel where the water got contaminated he said.”

“And dying!” snorted Janet.

“Anyway, I’m just thankful that we’re going to be staying above all that,” Mom added primly.

“I still would like to have had our usual night at the Hotel Zermatterhof,” I mumbled. “No one is sick there, are they?”

“Calvin Dort Becker, you only want to be down there because of the jazz!” said Janet. “I saw you dancing last year!”

“I was not. I just tapped my foot,” I muttered.

“You moved your legs, and stood right next to the orchestra. I saw you!”

“Well, no one is dancing now,” said Mom. “I only hope that the typhoid has made some of them turn to the Lord.”

“Maybe we should go down there to witness to them,” said Rachael. “I mean after we’re settled.”

“Are you crazy?!” exclaimed Janet, “We’ll catch it!”

“We’re supposed to be missionaries,” said Rachael.

“We’re on vacation,” snapped Dad.

“Poor, poor people, they’re so lost, so confused,” said Mom.

“But most of them are Church of England, the skiers, I mean,” whispered Rachael, “not Catholics. Dad said most of the skiers are English so maybe they’re not all lost.”

“Yes,” said Mom, “But C of E is just as bad. They call communion ‘Eucharist’ and believe in the ‘real presence’ just like the Catholics. I don’t believe there’s a Real Christian anywhere in England these days, unless you count a handful of small Reformed Presbyterian churches in Scotland, and I’m not even sure about them.”

“They’re all in the same boat,” said Janet. “All dying.”

“Or just very ill,” whimpered Rachael.

“Filthy water, bad theology. I can’t think of a Roman Catholic country where you can safely drink the water,” said Dad.

He glared at us, then looked back down at the enormous Bible on his lap, turned a page hard, started reading again and marking passages with his fountain pen. It was clear that Dad did not want to talk anymore.

So the rest of us kept quiet.

Usually we spent the first night in Zermatt, then the next morning took the cog railway up the mountain to where Hotel Riffelberg -- the alpine lodge we always stayed in on our annual ski vacation -- was perched high above the town. When Dad learned there was an outbreak of typhoid in Zermatt, he told Mom to cancel our vacation. But once it was established the typhoid was only in the main town and that due to a new train schedule we would not need to spend the night there but could just change trains and go straight up to Riffelberg, Dad relented.

To the south, Hotel Riffelberg overlooked the cliff, the Matterhorn, the Zermatt Valley, and a range of peaks ringing the town. To the north, the hotel faced a steep snowfield perfect for skiing which swept up for a mile or more to the top of the Riffelhorn and, beyond that, kept going for another few miles to the summit of the Gornergrat Mountain.

We stayed at the Hotel Riffelberg because it was less expensive than the hotels in town and also because we would not be corrupted by the lures and wiles of the après ski nightlife. As Mom said, “There will be no smoke-filled taverns for this family! We have come here to ski and enjoy the wonders of God’s creation!” Even the old farmhouses, naked fields, and leafless orchards were barely visible through the swirling gossamer mist of snow stirred up by the rushing train. The familiar mountains that I knew were towering above me were hidden in the clouds. Only the dark pine forests on the lower slopes remained visible. I glanced at Mom sitting next to me and at Dad and my two sisters, Janet and Rachael, across from me. Janet was staring accusingly. I had not done anything in particular to annoy her. That was the way she usually looked at me. Rachael smiled sweetly and reached out to give my hand a friendly squeeze.

In the winter of 1966, Janet was eighteen years old, stocky and dreadfully strong. Rachael was sixteen, slender, with wrists almost as thin as bread sticks. I was fourteen and at last taller than both of my sisters.

Janet had Dad’s olive complexion. Her brown eyes were dark and peered suspiciously out on the world. She wore her plain brown hair pulled back in a ponytail tied with a rubber band.

Even when Rachael shouted she was quieter than Janet talking in her normal voice. Rachael’s hair frizzed out around her head in a little halo above soft gray-green eyes and skim-milk pale skin.

Mom was a very pretty woman with high cheekbones and she called a “trim figure.” She had bright sparkly blue eyes. Although she was forty-six Rachael said Mom looked more as if she was a “young thirty” and she was right. Her teeth were white and straight and smiled most of the time to “show forth Christ’s love.”

Dad had not had “the privilege of good dental care,” Mom said when I asked her why Dad did not smile as much as she did. His teeth were somewhat crooked and stained by tea he drank all day. He had a square jaw and dark eyes, which Janet said, were “a little closer together than is comfortable to look at.” This was especially so when he was glaring at you. Those deep-set eyes under a big forehead, made even bigger looking by his receding hair-line, gave him an angry look even when he was not in a Mood. Dad had heavy powerful shoulders and hands with short fingers sprouting from wide palms that made getting a spanking from him a serious business. He was six feet tall but seemed to walk as if he was carrying a weight which sometimes seemed to stoop him right over. He looked a lot older than Mom even though they were the same age. Mostly he just seemed tired.

I was sort of in between the rest of my family. I had Dad’s build in the strong legs department and could hike in the mountains above our village for hours without resting. Rachael said that with my shirt off I looked very manly. But Janet’s forearms were thicker than mine and when she hit me I stayed hit! I had Mom’s straight nose and her eyes which, according to Janet made me the “fortunate one in the looks department.” On my most recent birthday -- September 3, 1966 -- Dad measured me and marked my height on the inside of his cupboard door where he kept all of our heights. I was five foot ten.

Jennifer Bazlinton said, “Calvin Becker you’ve become rather handsome.” Jennifer was my beautiful friend from England, whom I met every year in Portofino. She was my age and always stayed, along with her parents at the same pensione we stayed at. Jennifer and I had played together every year on the beach ever since we were both little. She let me kiss her during our last summer vacation. That was during the same vacation she called me handsome. So I guess she meant it. I liked that kiss a lot.

I had never kissed a girl before (not counting my Mom and sisters, but it was not that sort of a kiss). Jennifer only kissed me once. I had been thinking about it ever since.

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 their skin, warm and sweet, something like melting butter and my pet cat’s tummy back when she was a kitten. Girls loomed up into 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, mostly in their twenties, and mostly dressed in a godly way that hid everything I longed to get a better look at…

I caught Janet’s smirk. She always seemed to know what I was thinking about. I hastily turned to the large plate glass train window and stared at the white blur of flying snow.

I sighed. Dad shot me an angry look. I saw his grimace reflected in the window. I tried to smile at him in a way that would let Dad know that mine was a genuine unplanned sigh, not one of Mom’s. It did no good. But he looked down again too quickly to catch my friendly nod and went right back to staring at his open Bible.

As we shot around a bend in the track I heard a rattle. I glanced at our five pairs of skis swaying in the rack at the back of the train car, including the new ones I had gotten for Christmas. I cheered right up. However strange my family was, I had ten days to be normal!

I loved our vacations. The summer vacation was a twelve-hour train trip away in Portofino, Italy. We took our winter vacation in Zermatt. We had been going to both places since I was five. This meant that every September and February I was able to slip away from my parents and sisters for a few glorious days. I would walk to Portofino by myself and either visit the Italians I had gotten to know over the years, or talk to someone I might meet on a ski lift. I would tell these strangers -- I thought of them as the normal people -- that my dad was a teacher and that we lived in America and were just regular tourists. They might ask what programs I liked on TV “back home” or what movies I had seen or where I went to school. I tried to play along by making things up and hoping they did not guess that I had never been to a movie, that my family did not have a TV and that I was home-schooled and had not even lived in my own country since I was three years old, when my parents were called by God to save European youths from papacy, secularism, liberal theology, and Roman Catholic superstition.

If the normal people figured out that I was part of a family of missionaries -- or, worse yet, if Mom and my sisters got to them first and explained about how we Beckers were trying to keep ourselves “apart from the world” and how we were “serving the Lord” and did not want to “defile ourselves with worldly entertainments,” or by listening to Catholic teachers who might try and turn us into a papists (that is why I got home-schooled) -- then the normal people got a horrified look on their faces. When I saw that look, I knew that soon the normal person would drift away as fast as they could without actually running. I poured over scraps of Swiss newspapers to find out about movies so I would have something to talk about to normal people. I looked at maps of the USA to see where I was from in case they asked. My most treasured possession was five old copies of Mad Magazine. I received these from the son of a visiting pastor from Muskegon, Michigan, and kept them stashed up in the attic. I studied the yellowing pages to learn about things American kids my age were interested in such as barbecues, high school proms, cheerleaders, two-car garages, band practice, football, “hotrods,” “nerds,” “jocks” and chest-expanders you sent six cereal box tops in for -- at least you could send them in if you lived in America -- as well as jokes about braces getting locked when teenagers kissed after “dates.”

Gathering worldly information was particularly difficult. My home schooling had not worked out. I still did not read well even though I was on “the threshold of manhood” as Mom put it. Sometimes I asked Andy Keegan (the son of one of Mom and Dad’s co-workers), to read difficult words to me. Sometimes I risked asking Rachael to read something. Rachael would laugh at some of the jokes in Mad, and then she would blush because she had laughed. Rachael once told me that it was hard to be a Real Christian and she had to admit that she, too, was “tempted by worldly interests.” If she deemed the newspaper or magazine was “too worldly,” then Rachael would begin a lecture that always started with: “Calvin Dort Becker! Where did you get this unseemly trash?” But she never told on me.

My middle name, Dort, was for a town in Holland where theologians got together during the Reformation to decide on the Five Principals of Calvinism, upon which our Reformed Presbyterian denomination was founded. I was also named for the Swiss Reformer John Calvin. I hated my stupid names but I guess that I was fortunate that I did not get called Guillaume Farell after another of Mom and Dad’s favorite Reformers…

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