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Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy

By Dwight Garner

• Published Sept. 27, 2021 Updated Sept. 30, 2021
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Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “ Crossroads ,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

And yet here’s the novel itself, and it’s a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. “Crossroads” is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations.

“Crossroads” is a big novel, nearly 600 pages. Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events — a car wreck, rape, suicide attempts, adultery, drug deals, arson — that arrive only slowly, as if revealed in sunlight creeping steadily across a lawn.

The novel is set in suburban Chicago. At its center are the Hildebrandts, another of the author’s seemingly solid Midwestern families — like the Probsts in “The Twenty-Seventh City” (1988), the Hollands in “Strong Motion” (1992), the Lamberts in “The Corrections” (2001) and the Berglunds in “Freedom” (2010) — with eggshell foundations.

This is a novel with strong religious themes. In Franzen’s fiction, families are their own form of religion, with options for salvation and purification, and just as many for apostasy. Perhaps the biggest danger, in his families, is to misread one’s position in them.

The title, “Crossroads,” refers to the name of a popular youth group at a local church, but it’s got a second meaning. The family patriarch, Russ Hildebrandt, is also the church’s idealistic associate pastor and an unreconstructed blues fan, and he lends his Robert Johnson records to a younger, adorable, widowed church member he’d like to sleep with. (Russ is married.)

You know the legend about Johnson: He met the devil at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, Miss., where he exchanged his soul for mastery of the guitar. Throughout this novel each of the major characters — Russ, his wife, Marion, and three of their children, Clem, Becky and Perry — suffer crises of faith and of morality. They stand at their own crossroads and study what the devil has on offer.

For Russ, who has suffered a variety of professional humiliations, the crisis is one of authenticity. His potential lover puts Johnson on the turntable (“I went down to the cross road, babe, I looked both east and west / Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, babe, in my distress”), and the sound plunges Russ “into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it.”

When younger, Russ had marched with Stokely Carmichael; he’d helped desegregate local pools. But in his suburban church he fears he’s “a latter-day parasite — a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he.” His kids, increasingly, view him with disgust. Clem asks, “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?”

Like Franzen himself at times, in the public arena if not on the page, Russ is so intolerable and so uncool, such an ungainly apparition from an earlier era, that you sense him on the verge of redemption, of coming out the other side. Franzen’s cultural situation these past two decades sometimes reminds me of Orson Welles’s comment to Kenneth Tynan: “My trouble is that I exude affluence. I look successful. Whenever the critics see me, they say to themselves: It’s time he was knocked — he’s had it too good for too long. But I haven’t.”

The Hildebrandt kids are all right, or so they seem at first. But Clem, who’s gone off to college, is returning with news (he’s volunteered to fight in Vietnam) that will gravely wound his pacifist father. Becky is a strait-laced high school social sovereign — everything she does is front-page drive-in news — who discovers the counterculture degradations of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, albeit not in that order. Her younger brother Perry is a high-I.Q. misfit and drug dealer. He’s like a bowling ball spinning, at velocity, toward some unknown target.

Franzen threads these stories, and their tributaries, so adeptly and so calmly that at moments he can seem to be on high-altitude, nearly Updikean autopilot. The character who cracks this novel fully open — she’s one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction — is Marion, Russ’s wife.

When we first meet her, she’s a frump, virtually a nonentity, an overweight pastor’s spouse, invisible except as a “warm cloud of momminess.” Russ, who puts people in mind of Atticus Finch and a young Charlton Heston, is embarrassed by Marion and “her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress.”

Marion is another of Franzen’s awkward, mortified women, like Enid Lambert and Patty Berglund, who come full circle. Franzen methodically begins to peel back the layers of Marion’s life, layers that are largely unknown to her husband and family: her months in a mental hospital when in her 20s, her doomed affair with a married car dealer out West, an abortion available only at the mercy of a man who rapes her repeatedly over many days.

Marion, in mid-novel, wakes up. “She was a mother of four,” she realizes, “with a 20-year-old’s heart.” She’s not a good person, she tells herself. She lies; she steals jewelry. Later in the novel she punctures whatever is left of Russ’s vanity. Sometimes, only the devil’s logic seems to apply to her. She can resemble a character out of Muriel Spark’s fiction, a thwarted girl of slender means who becomes an unlikely heroine.

The action in “Crossroads” flows and ebbs toward several tour-de-force scenes. One occurs at a cocktail party; another on Navajo land in Arizona, where the youth group has gone on retreat.

The Franzen-shaped hole in our reading lives is like a bog that floods at roughly eight-year intervals. This time that bog is shot through with intimations of light.

Flannery O’Connor spoke of the “moment of grace” that appears in many of her stories, “a moment where it is offered, and usually rejected.” Franzen’s novel is flush with such moments. It’s about tests most of us fear we are not going to pass. “It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins,” Russ thinks. “None was deadlier.”

Dwight Garner has been a daily book critic for The Times since 2008. His most recent book is “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.”

Crossroads By Jonathan Franzen 580 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

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by Jonathan Franzen

Reviewed by caroline tew.

After the six-year hiatus, to say Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads was highly anticipated is something of an understatement. Some eagerly awaited the nearly six-hundred–page novel, others wondered what Franzen had left to say about middle American families and their struggles, while a final camp lamented how much attention this one book was getting. To my delight and surprise, I found Crossroads —the first in a trilogy archly titled A Key to All Mythologies , in reference to George Eliot’s decrepit scholar Edward Casaubon—to be an improvement on Franzen’s earlier work. Mainly, in his ability to write about women.

Crossroads follows the lives of the Hildebrandts, a family of six headed by Russ, the pastor of a run-down suburban church. While Russ pursues one of his parishioners, Frances, his wife Marion begins dissecting her own trauma in therapy. Meanwhile, their eldest son Clem has come back from college to fight in Vietnam, their daughter Becky has found God (and rock ’n’ roll), and another son, Perry, is forming a drug habit; their youngest, Judson, looks helplessly on as his family falls apart. The family members are too caught up in their own troubles to take much notice of one another, yet Franzen does an excellent job of tying together the disparate inner lives of the Hildebrandts. This behemoth of a story feels cohesive and propulsive.

Franzen’s decision to set Crossroads in the seventies, rather than defaulting to the present as he usually does, may have to do with his intention of writing an intergenerational trilogy. But mostly, I suspect Franzen wanted to put his finger on the pulse of a unique moment in American history. This book investigates the complicated feelings of people like Russ, an activist during the civil rights movements of the sixties, now watching his children join the counterculture movement of the seventies. Father and son argue over the merits of patriotism versus passivity. Clem is severe on the pacifist Russ: “[W]hen it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, you don’t see any problem with me being in college and letting some Black kid fight for me in Vietnam.” And the eponymous Crossroads youth group—helmed by Russ’s archenemy Rick Ambrose, a foulmouthed young man with a gift for connecting with teenagers—has a uniquely seventies atmosphere. Within the cauldron of Christian values and free-loving counterculture, Perry quickly learns that a “public display of emotion purchase[s] overwhelming approval.”

While some of the more humorous moments of the novel take place in the strange world of the Crossroads group, ultimately the novel’s strength lies not so much in its period detail as in its ethical ponderings. In fact, the most interesting plot lines of Crossroads revolve around religion; Franzen’s concerns could work, quite frankly, in almost any era. There are the obvious struggles Russ faces, as he pursues Frances and as he tries to reconcile his self-image as a hip liberal with his inability to connect with the youth group. But it’s Perry, the teen drug addict and slacker-genius, who poses the book’s most interesting conundrum:

My question … is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself … If you’re smart enough to think about it, there’s always some selfish angle.

Perry can’t get out of his own head—even his acts of kindness are tainted by ulterior motives, whether that’s “the feeling of being righteous” he derives from them or the promise of “eternal life.”

Franzen has long been criticized for not writing (or talking about) women very well, and it does feel as though he’s taken some of the criticism to heart this time around. Although Crossroads is far from perfect, Marion does give Russ a piece of her mind: “Oh dear … You want to argue with me? I wouldn’t recommend it.” Franzen still has a long way to go, though; Marion believes herself to be fat at only 140 pounds (a sentiment the narrator seems to share), and Becky comes off as the archetypal It Girl and teen rebel.

Sometimes, too, Franzen’s impulse to narrate every detail works against him. The sex scenes are particularly painful, although in some cases rightfully so. Certain moments, such as Russ’s unholy lusting after Frances, are purposely unsettling: Russ had “never profaned the church by abusing himself in his office, but he was so deeply in the thrall of Frances that he was tempted to do it now.” Yet every sex scene, illicit or otherwise, is so crudely described that it’s difficult not to be thrown violently out of the narrative by a heightened awareness of Franzen’s choice of words. “He caught an exciting, catfoody whiff of degraded semen” stands out as a particularly damning example.

Those who bemoaned the release of a new Franzen novel may be pleasantly surprised by Crossroads . It’s a promising start to what sounds initially like a pretentious undertaking. However, those expecting the next Great American Novel may wish to temper their expectations. While worth the rather long read, it’s by no means as earth-shattering as the hype implies.

Published on February 3, 2022

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Jonathan Franzen’s Best Book Yet

At last he’s put aside the pyrotechnics and gone all in on his great theme: the American family.

J onathan Franzen writes big books about small lives. This may sound like a curious characterization of a writer who has sweated to position himself as an encyclopedic chronicler of wide-scale cultural change in each of his five fat novels to date, the shortest of them clocking in at 517 pages. Yet his fiction is typically set in claustrophobic enclaves. His characters don’t hail from New York or Los Angeles, or even Boston or Minneapolis, but from the margins of already marginal cities. The protagonist of his debut, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), languishes not in the eponymous city of St. Louis but in the unassuming suburb of Webster Groves, where Franzen himself grew up. The Corrections (2001), the book that launched him to celebrity, centers on the fictional midwestern suburb of St. Jude. In keeping with his commitment to the local, his latest novel, Crossroads —which is nearly 600 pages long and is only the first installment of a trilogy, the rather grandiosely titled A Key to All Mythologies —unfolds in the township of New Prospect, outside Chicago proper.

In fact, the real province of Franzen’s work is even more narrowly circumscribed. His true territory is the quietly disintegrating household—and his most consuming interest is the existential distress that so often molders within it. In The Corrections , the winner of the 2001 National Book Award , his subjects were Alfred Lambert, a retired railroad engineer, and Enid Lambert, a disaffected housewife intent on enticing her three unhappy offspring home for Christmas. For all Enid’s attempts at cheerful decoration, the once-tidy rooms of the Lambert residence are in revolt against her fantasy of order. Detritus accumulates, canned food succumbs to rot, and Alfred, who suffers from Parkinson’s, has been urinating in stray coffee cans. The portions of The Corrections that follow the Lambert brood of Baby Boomers in their anxious adulthood take place in the late 1990s, but much of the novel dips back into the ’70s of their youth, before the advent of the internet afforded them the sort of global perspective we now take for granted.

Franzen also locates the Hildebrandts, the clan at the core of Crossroads , in the ’70s—and they, too, live in strained and stifling circumstances. Russ, the patriarch, is an associate minister consigned to what his drug-addled teenage son derisively calls “the Crappier Parsonage,” a building “more in need of razing than of renovation.” The same could be said of Russ’s job at the church, where he spends his days steeped in resentment of the charismatic pastor who has succeeded in winning over the hip adolescent members of the youth group from which the novel takes its title. The same could also be said of Russ’s relationship with his wife, the restlessly depressive Marion, who is roiled by her own resentments. As Russ becomes infatuated with a recently widowed member of his congregation, he and Marion take to sleeping not only in different bedrooms but on different floors altogether. The four Hildebrandt children, saintly 9-year-old Judson excepted, are likewise siloed in self-absorbed worlds. Yet for Franzen, if not for his characters, an inward focus is the ticket out. It is by way of smallness that he at last achieves monumentality, by way of entrapment that he at last promises escape.

Still, a reader may well wonder why Franzen has returned once again to such well-trodden terrain. Why the promise of a trilogy rooted in generational portraiture that his publisher says will “trace the inner life of our culture through the present day,” a description that could apply in large part to any piece of his oeuvre from The Corrections onward? By now, even Franzen himself has chafed at the cramped contours of life on the American periphery. In an interview in The Guardian in 2015 , he confessed that he was stunned by the success of The Corrections precisely because “it was small, and I was embarrassed to have come from the innocent Midwest.” Elsewhere, he has suggested that the parochialism of towns like St. Jude can be morally corrosive. In an essay in his 2018 collection , The End of the End of the Earth , he warns against yielding to the lures of the prosaic, insisting that narrow preoccupations can obscure the collective responsibilities engendered by global catastrophes.

You might wake up in the night and realize that you’re lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there’s no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions.

Perhaps Franzen’s desire to engage with “the bigger questions”—including the fate of the planet and the fate of American society—can explain why he has so often resorted to grandiloquent contrivance. Almost all of his novels thus far have led uncomfortably dual lives. On the one hand, they are family epics, yet on the other, they are exercises in what the critic James Wood has called “hysterical realism.” That is, they are sprawling and bombastic, prone to introducing conspiratorial subplots and desperately kooky coincidences.

From the October 2010 issue: B. R. Myers on Jonathan Franzen’s “juvenile prose”

Like the characters populating his novels, who are terrified of their own irrelevance, Franzen has a habit of proffering bells and whistles as compensation for the modest scope of the domestic sagas that engross him. Hence not only his urge to create characters who function as avatars of broader cultural tendencies, but also his compulsion to grasp at larger-scale historical signposts. The Twenty-Seventh City follows members of an Indian American crime syndicate who descend upon St. Louis in a bid to gain financial control of the city, while The Corrections features a washed-up Lithuanian politician who defrauds credulous Americans by selling them parts of a “for-profit nation-state.” In Freedom (2010), the story of the unraveling Berglund family is nearly crowded out by anecdotes about crooked arms deals, environmental disasters, and endangered birds. Purity (2015), Franzen’s fifth novel and Crossroads ’ immediate predecessor, is the worst offender of all : It is an incongruously cosmopolitan novel starring a deranged feminist recluse and a murderous celebrity hacker. Franzen knows better than anyone that even a pinprick on the map can swell into a spiritual universe—yet he has always had trouble resisting the allure of the sweeping systems novel, set everywhere and, therefore, nowhere.

Until now, that is. In Crossroads , Franzen is unabashed about bearing down on dramas with human dimensions—dramas that play out again and again in each subsequent generation. He reframes his abiding theme in newly timeless, even religious, terms. “My question … is whether we can ever escape our selfishness,” 15-year-old Perry, the Hildebrandts’ precocious third child, muses. “Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life.”

Crossroads is a rejection of Purity ’s empty expansiveness on almost every front. Its protagonists could not be less glamorous, its intrigues less international. Its action is concentrated within a crumbling community, its focus trained on a family’s everyday recriminations. Though its stakes are high, psychically speaking, its core predicament is modest and emotional. Here we wonder not whether a bird species will go extinct, but whether any of the Hildebrandts can shed their selfishness and muster some measure of goodness.

Long a connoisseur of male myopia, Franzen is more acutely ruthless than ever in his portrayal of Russ, whose moral waffling he tracks in his close and merciless third-person narration. Outwardly virtuous but inwardly self-pitying, progressive in principle but regressive in practice, Russ is prone to failures of empathy; he has particular difficulty believing that women have inner lives. Upon glimpsing his extramarital love interest in her house for the first time, he is assailed by “an unsettling strong hit of her reality —her independence as a woman, her thinking of thoughts and making of choices wholly unrelated to him.” Because he is in the business of penitence, Russ cannot avoid the certainty that he is a sinner, but he is also so constitutionally self-congratulatory that he finds a way to savor even his moral decay. Like a worm writhing in the mud, he luxuriates in his guilt: “The feeling of homecoming in his humiliations … was how he knew that God existed.”

More surprising to Franzen’s detractors, who often accuse him of writing flat female characters , will be the extent to which Marion crackles with humanity. She is the most memorable Hildebrandt, if not the most vividly living of all Franzen’s creations. In The Corrections , the Lamberts tried, with mixed success, to conceal their wretchedness beneath a polite veneer. Marion, in contrast, becomes openly and extravagantly deranged. In her early 20s, she had a disastrous affair that landed her in a mental hospital, and many of her most extreme habits of mind return as her marriage splinters. At the height of her madness, she “felt trapped in a metal cube that was filling up with water, leaving only a tiny pocket of air at the top to breathe. The air was sanity.” In her life with Russ (who relies on her to rewrite his sermons), she is initially suffocated but soon becomes irradiated with rage, toward both him and her own pliancy in the face of his demands and extortions. “Remembering how it felt to want to murder someone, she thought, she might yet become a women’s libber.” When she finally explodes at Russ and begins chain-smoking at a crazed clip, her gloriously justified fury brings as much relief as a fever breaking.

For the most part, the Hildebrandt children are on the cusp of comparably drastic crises. Perry, who has a sense of irony so well developed that it would befit a Millennial, might have been lifted from the ranks of brilliant teens who populate the more contemporary world of Infinite Jest . Blessed with an IQ that has “been measured at 160” and cursed with a growing drug addiction, he is not dependent on any particular substance so much as on the habitual relief of plunging into the nearest abyss. For a brief period, Perry staves off his demons by participating in Crossroads, almost certainly modeled on the youth group Franzen attended as an adolescent, in which a “public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.”

Ultimately, however, feel-good platitudes are not mind-melting enough for Perry, as he graduates from pot and quaaludes to Dexedrine, then finally lands on cocaine. Some of the finest passages in Crossroads , which brims with agile writing, evoke Perry’s intensifying quest for oblivion. He is such an acolyte of extremity that, by the end, he cannot even conceive of a quantity of cocaine vast enough to satisfy him: “If three canisters was excellent, how much more excellent six would have been. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. Was there a multiple of three of whiteness large enough to permanently set his mind at rest?”

College-age Clem, the eldest Hildebrandt brother, is not an addict, but he, too, struggles to retain control over his own life. Though he is a pacifist and a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, he agonizes over the deferment he secured in order to attend college, while those without access to higher education are shipped off to fight in his stead. Yet for him, Oedipal struggles take precedence over political forces. Clem is striving above all to distinguish himself from “his father, who merely professed to have sympathy for the underprivileged.” Crossroads is a testament not to the singularity of the ’70s but to the decade’s continuity with our own. The novel’s emotional dishevelments—and its aura of apprehensive urgency—feel viscerally contemporary. If not for the resounding absence of the internet, we could almost forget that the year is supposed to be 1971.

Insofar as Crossroads contains anything like Franzen’s habitual gesture toward a grand system, a global frame is to be found in the Church. At Crossroads meetings and in Russ’s self-serving prayer sessions, the rituals of religion serve mostly to numb. Yet they intermittently rear up into something more numinous, wrenching the Hildebrandts out of the particular and hurling them toward the universal. “To love God even a little bit … was to love Him more than she could love any person, even her children, because God was infinite,” Marion reflects as she reminisces about her youthful experiments with Catholicism.

At the same time, the religious elements in Crossroads work to ennoble the minutiae that Franzen embraces at last. To God, even the tiniest trivialities—even outposts like New Prospect and sniveling sinners like Russ—are potent with import. Indeed, Russ, who was born into a rural Mennonite community, grew up feeling “closer to God” in the kitchen, where he watched his mother performing her roster of daily chores. “According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment,” he thinks, “but the moment seemed spacious.” Ephemera swells into eternity, and smallness wells up into enormity.

Marion comes to a similar realization when she begins to recover from what looks like a relapse into mental illness and reflects that “tiny treats, an air-conditioned car, a drink by the pool, an after-dinner cigarette, could get a person through her life.” Whether this insight and others like it are evidence of maturity or resignation, I am not sure, but I know that it is one of many tiny treats that add up in the end to a marvelous novel—and sometimes even offer the thinnest glint of grace.

This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline “Jonathan Franzen Finally Stopped Trying Too Hard.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads is an opus on humiliation. It’s very good.

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Share All sharing options for: Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads is an opus on humiliation. It’s very good.

Russ Hildebrandt, the patriarch at the center of Jonathan Franzen’s excellent new novel Crossroads , has been humiliated.

Russ used to be cool. He’s a former Mennonite turned associate minister at a suburban church in 1971, but before he moved to the suburbs, he lived in New York. He marched with Stokely Carmichael. He likes Dylan Thomas and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the blues. He lines the walls of his office with proof of his progressive bona fides and good taste.

“But to the kids who now thronged the church’s hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas,” Franzen writes, those bona fides “signified only obsolescence.” The youth of Russ’s church consider him helplessly dorky, old and out of touch beyond redemption. They think the way he showers attention on the church’s teen girls is creepy. Moreover, they can smell his weakness; how much he longs for their approval, how eager he is to please them. It only makes them more contemptuous.

So now Russ, unable to control the kids around him, has been pushed out of Crossroads, the church youth group that he helped found. He barricades himself in his office in wrathful self-pity, mourning his lost edge, resenting the wife and children who he believes are the reason he lost it, and ashamedly lusting after a lovely young widow among his parishioners.

Russ is not the sole protagonist of Crossroads , which is concerned with both family and nation. Yet his professional humiliation looms balefully over the rest of the novel, his failure a sin that poisons his children’s lives. We won’t find out the details for hundreds of pages, but it’s clear that, like Franzen himself, Russ has found that he cannot be both a hip young outsider and the embodiment of the patriarchy. The world will no longer allow such a thing. And so Crossroads becomes a portrait of America on the brink of turning away from the well-meaning white male preachers of the world, an America on the brink of recognizing other voices.

Crossroads is the first of a planned trilogy that Franzen, channeling Middlemarch ’s windbaggy Casaubon, has titled A Key to All Mythologies. It loosely follows the same structure that Franzen first developed in 2001’s Corrections and reprised in both 2010’s Freedom and 2015’s Purity : a set of interlocking novellas, with different members of the Hildebrandt family taking over in each section.

Of the four children, the two eldest, Clem and Becky, are like their father: born rule followers whose only big questions are whose rules to follow. Clem, newly escaped to college, is considering dropping out to join the Vietnam War in an act of protest against his own unearned privilege and his parents’ pacifism. Becky, a senior who reigns over the high school’s popular crowd with an easy and instinctual callousness, is considering getting very into Jesus; she’s also considering getting very into sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

Both Clem and Becky are disgusted by their father after his exile from Crossroads, and they understand themselves to be enmeshed in a familial war, the aims of which are obscure. Clem has long felt himself to be allied with his mother against his father, and Becky, generally a daddy’s girl, is considering switching sides to join her brother. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son?” Clem asks Russ.

Franzen is having fun with the Clem and Becky sections, their self-consciously square vocabulary, their earnest striving, the intensity of their small ambitions. But it’s with the two black sheep of the Hildebrandt clan, Perry and Marion, that Crossroads crackles to vicious, blazing life. (The youngest child in the family, Judson, does not get a section to himself.)

Perry, a sophomore in high school, is highly aware both that he is the smartest one in his family and immediate social group, and that he is not a very good person. His quest to self-betterment, interspersed with frequent attempts at self-medication, winds around and around itself in long circulatory sentences so delighted with their own cleverness that they delight you, too, as you read, almost as much as they sting you. (Perry, it almost goes without saying, is firmly allied with his mother against his father.)

Perry’s obsession with becoming a better person also gives Franzen a chance to lay out most clearly one of Crossroads ’ biggest thematic questions: namely, whether improving oneself purely and without self-interest is even possible.

“My question,” Perry asks a rabbi and a priest at a climactic cocktail party, “is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you’re smart enough to think about it, there’s always some selfish angle.”

Then the party’s hostess busts him for sneaking alcohol and monopolizing the grown-ups.

Meanwhile, Marion, our matriarch, hides behind a frumpy cloak of preacher’s wife anonymity when everyone else is narrating, only to come screaming out in a vicious blast of rage the second we get to hear her voice for ourselves. Rage at herself, her family, the world: Marion is, frankly, over all of it.

Franzen’s name has become synonymous with the foibles of white male writers across the world at their most smugly blinkered, partly because of his deeply cranky nonfiction and partly because his work is often given the kind of critical attention rarely lavished on authors from more marginalized backgrounds . But with Marion, he reminds us that he’s actually one of our great novelists of female fury. Marion’s self-effacing self-loathing is a protective bandage over deep wounds of trauma, and in her sections of Crossroads , Franzen peels away the layers to show us all that seethes below. By the time she’s finished with Russ, his first humiliation seems lenient.

Yet despite Marion’s fury, there is a surprising tenderness to this novel. Franzen is known for his acidity, for his willingness to delve into the least attractive parts of his characters’ psyches. Crossroads is certainly unsparing toward the Hildebrandts, but it is also empathetic. Even awful, dorky, self-pitying Russ is allowed moments of surprising grace. This is a big, ambitious novel that aims to say big, ambitious things about America, and the church, and familial power dynamics; about what happens to families and countries after the patriarch has been deposed; about how we strive to be good and whether we ever can be. But it is also interested in the possibility of redemption after a great sin — or a great humiliation.

Jonathan Franzen’s outsize reputation as a crank means that to his critics, he’s come to seem like a walking chain email on the evils of social media, and it has often tended to occlude his equally outsize reputation as a great writer. So loud is the conversation about him that it is sometimes hard to see the forest for the Franzenfreude .

Crossroads is good enough to overwhelm that conversation. The book is deceptively simple, merciless without being cruel, and thrilling in its sheer fury.

Haters and his own often-insufferable public persona be damned: Jonathan Franzen really is one of the great novelists of his generation. Crossroads stands ready and willing to prove it.

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Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads Takes Us Back to When Christianity Met the Counterculture

The novel is post-Manson Family and pre-Watergate, when Jesus was groovy and Nixon’s America teetered beneath the stresses of Vietnam.

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Few Gen Xers and zero millennials will recall, but there was a moment—call it 1971–when Protestant Christianity met the counterculture, when teenagers brimmed over with faith, hope, and love while wearing bell-bottom jeans and beaded necklaces, strumming guitars, even cursing and drinking beer. I’d just entered grade school when my cousin was called to serve as youth pastor of my Baptist church in Tennessee. He founded a ministry known as “God’s Minority,” which traveled each summer to disadvantaged towns in West Virginia and Connecticut. The men would labor a week, perhaps two, mixing concrete to erect prefab chapels while the women taught Vacation Bible School. Evenings teenagers would gather, singing folk-music hymns with spooky minor chords: We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord./And we pray that our unity may one day be restored.

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

In his late 40s, Russ Hildebrandt is the financially strapped associate pastor of First Reformed and New Prospect, in an affluent and very white suburb of Chicago. Pious and self-regarding, Russ holds himself aloof not only from his wife, Marion, who ghost-writes his sermons, but also from their children: Clem, a sex-addled University of Illinois student; Becky, the queen bee of her high school; sophomore Perry, an existentialist weed dealer whose IQ rides high in the 160s; and the angelic nine-year-old Judson, oblivious to his family’s impending doom.

Franzen begins in media res: a few years earlier Russ, in charge of Crossroads, the youth outreach program, was tossed over for the younger, hipper Rick Ambrose, following a disastrous annual mission to a Navajo reservation in Arizona. Russ has nursed a grudge ever since. Crossroads is the heart of Crossroads , a mesh of bad boys and mean girls, adolescent ids and adult egos, striving to save souls while getting some on the side. It’s a credit to Franzen that he re-creates these characters and their nexus of sex and salvation in a nostalgic yet immediate way. His use of rich period detail is spot-on, from sheepskin jackets to group hugs to two-faced cliques.

The Crossroads crew is touchy-feely, perhaps overly so. Russ’s eye has wandered to Frances Cottrell, mother of a ministry member and a 30-something widow whom Perry describes as a “F-O-X.” Tempted to stray, Russ enlists Frances on a visitation to a Black inner-city congregation on this snowy afternoon. (Franzen deftly contrasts white-savior memes with the skepticism of the Black pastor.) Meanwhile, Perry has vowed to turn a new leaf by dialing down the marijuana and cultivating a friendship with his hostile sister. Becky’s not sure she wants to be good. On the one hand, she’s considering sharing an inheritance from her aunt with her siblings; on the other, she’s attracted to the magnetic Tanner Evans, a musician in a rock band and a mainstay of Crossroads. There’s only one problem: Tanner is going steady with Laura, a player in Russ’s earlier downfall. Off in the college town of Champaign, navigating the throes of his first serious relationship, Clem wrestles with a sense of duty: ßhould he give up his draft deferment?

And Marion? She’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma: equal parts Emma Bovary, Elizabeth Bennet, and Enid Lambert (the world-weary wife in Franzen’s The Corrections , winner of the 2001 National Book Award). Her husband thinks he knows her, but secrets swim in her opaque depths like deep-sea fish, “invisible to her kids as well—tendered featureless by the dense, warm cloud of momminess through which they apprehend her.” Franzen pours all his gifts into Marion, and the result is dazzling. She sneaks off to her psychiatrist under the pretense of an exercise class, but in Dr. Serafimides's office she drifts into a reverie, a brilliant novella embedded within the novel. Originally from California, Marion has survived all manner of traumas, sublimating her own ambition—her selfhood—for the sakes of her spouse and kids. That she’s cracking apart comes as no surprise, and Franzen peels back her layers methodically, like a surgeon. Marion’s history is a vessel for some of the novel’s most vivid, perceptive writing.

The Hildebrandts are mired in a quest as old as literature: How does one live an authentic life? How does one become a moral person? Each grapples with strategies and tactics, and each emerges more confused, more compromised. The novel’s later sections circle around the burnt-out star that is Perry, who grasps that his desire to be good is a fool’s errand, as much a youthful fantasy as being elected president of the United States. Morality, he realizes, is anything but a binary choice, so to hell with it. Perry’s unraveling commences at a private holiday party and then carries into a late-night Crossroads event: “There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thoughts of being a good person...”

Somehow the Hildebrandts survive Christmas, but the family has shattered. Marion makes plans to leave her unhappy marriage. Russ has his own epiphanies during the annual spring trip to Arizona, where Franzen weaves in another gorgeous novella, the pastor’s own backstory and web of relationships. There’s more to Russ than virtue signaling.

Against the internal rumblings of his characters, Franzen posits the enduring beauty of the world and its indifference to the bipeds that dominate it—they’re recent arrivals to the planet, and will depart soon. As Russ wanders across the mesa, “a raven was croaking, jackrabbits browsing in sagebrush shadows. A snake, both startling and startled, went airborne in its haste to leave the road.”

“A triumphant opening gambit in what may become a vital pillar of our literature.”

The novel paces itself leisurely, accreting detail and narrative strata in the vein of Eliot’s Middlemarch and Balzac’s The Human Comedy , but Franzen is also dialoguing with Dante’s Inferno, injecting a distinctive American Puritanism. The family’s walls eventually tumble down, and yet the consequences aren't what we'd expected. With the exception of Judson, each Hildebrandt flails about in his or her circle of Hell, from drug-induced psychosis to steely sanctimony to literal exile; whether they can navigate their way through Purgatory to Paradise is an open question. The self stands in the way of surrender to God. Crossroads ’s final act is punctuated by repetition of “vanity”—in a hotel room Marion and Russ confess their vanities, Becky wonders whether her virginity is a “kind of vanity.” Here Franzen echoes that most ponderous of Old Testament books, Ecclesiastes: “ Vanity of Vanities, saith the Preacher [Solomon, Son of David], vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” (It’s no coincidence that singer Carly Simon wrote her famous “You’re So Vain” in 1971, or that Tom Wolfe coined “The Me Decade” for the 1970s.) Post-war Americans have long absorbed the benefits of self-absorption, now exacerbated by social media. It’s a master stroke to look back 50 years at the genesis of our own cultural rot.

Perhaps Franzen’s most radical move is to bore deep inside a middle-class family as it struggles with cosmic issues of faith and fealty, family and community. Crossroads is consumed with the cause and effect of our choices, especially our selfish ones. The novel closes on a cliffhanger, teeing up for the next two installments of his trilogy, a triumphant opening gambit in what may become a vital pillar of our literature.

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen review – spiritual successor to The Corrections

The pastor’s family at the heart of Franzen’s sixth novel – a bravura examination of the mores of liberal America in 1971 – are his most sympathetic creation to date

T he characters in Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel exist in that much-disputed no man’s land between hip and square, in the culture wars of 1971. Since The Corrections , 20 years ago, Franzen has made himself the modern master of that fundamental driver of the 19th-century novel, the understanding that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Here, his never less than acute attention falls on the interior lives of the Hildebrandt family in small-town Illinois in the run-up to Christmas.

The patriarch, Russ Hildebrandt, is the minister at the First Reformed church in New Prospect, beset by temptation in the sweater-dressed form of his recently widowed congregant, Frances Cottrell, and usurped in his spiritual mission by a new young youth minister, Rick Ambrose, who offers the town’s teenagers a heady mix of gospel platitudes and rock music (you are reminded that Jesus Christ Superstar had opened on Broadway that autumn). Ambrose has created Crossroads, a cultish youth group for midwestern adolescents, which renounces sex and drugs in favour of “honest interactions” and “personal growth”. Fringed denim, earnest eye contact and cross-legged confessions are mandatory. Partly as an act of rebellion, Hildebrandt’s three eldest children have neglected their father’s Sunday sermons and joined Ambrose’s after hours’ mission. Perry, 16, with an IQ of 160, sees the group in part as a useful market for his pot dealing. His sister, Becky, has sensed the godhead in the 12-string guitar and sensitive fingers of Tanner Evans, Ambrose’s most charismatic young disciple. Nights at Crossroads, in the falling snow, are James Taylor songs come to life.

In the two novels after The Corrections – Purity and Freedom – Franzen examined how far family ties could fray before breaking in a liberal America that had all but rejected the motherhood and apple pie ideas of marriage and filial duty in favour of self-actualisation and free expression. Here, he returns to a time and place in which some of those tensions were established. Russ Hildebrandt is a fourth-generation pastor whose inherited worldview is under enormous threat: he is a man still locked in a Norman Rockwell sketch at the beginning of the Me decade.

In some ways, this is the territory of Franzen’s stylistic predecessors, John Updike and Philip Roth: the impossible constraints of fidelity in the era of psychoanalysis and after the 1963 invention of sexual intercourse . Like some of the protagonists of those earlier novels, Russ Hildebrandt is “bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad”. The minister’s failing marriage is here seen not only though his eyes, however, but also, in successive chapters, through those of his wife, Marion, and their children. Not for the first time, Franzen’s novel reminds you in places of those morality tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which pitched the puritanism of America’s settlers against the democratic dreams of “the pursuit of happiness”. The Hildebrandts are not so far removed from those New England innocents who believed they might inhabit a new Eden, before the inky cloaked preachers and their four-hour sermons got involved.

In examining the attitudes of 50 years ago, in the knowledge of how they turned out, Franzen never forgets, sentence by sentence, that the novel is a comic form. He invites his readers both to sympathise with each of the family’s private passions, their frustrated desire to be loved, their troubled relations with their gods, while having enormous fun observing the folly of their romantic delusions, the lies they tell themselves about love. This is, you realise, just about the perfect year in which to set that tragicomedy, full of “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” and “everyone is beautiful” earnestness (“everyone is ludicrous” might be a Franzen recasting of that lyric). He teases out some of the inbuilt hypocrisies of Vietnam protests (white college undergrads using their student draft deferrals to send young black men off to war), of the progress of civil rights (Russ Hildebrandt’s first “date” with Frances Cottrell involves an ill-fated trip to bring Christmas toys to children in the Chicago projects), and of the war on drugs, sermonised in public, despite a general private sense that “where there is dope there is hope”.

Much as Franzen’s characters might believe that they are in charge of their destinies, they find themselves dancing to the music of their times. Having established in loving detail their ingrained hopes and fears, Franzen has to find a way to bring those inner voices out into the world and test them against reality. While the minute currents of tension in domestic relations are as ever the engine of his writing, those frustrations, also typically, find their release in wider generational themes. The catharsis here is provided by two quests. Marion Hildebrandt – “She was a mother of five, with a 20-year-old’s heart” – goes in search of her troubled past, before she found God and Russ, in seeking out the used car salesman who was her disastrous first love. Her husband, meanwhile, joins the Crossroads trip out to a Navajo reservation in the Arizona desert, along with Frances Cottrell and two of his children, and Burning Man fantasies inevitably come to dust.

It is a testament to Franzen’s authorial habits of empathy, his curiosity about the lives of others, his efforts in a land of cliche to add twists to easy assumptions, that you are likely to find yourself caring about how things turn out for each of the Hildebrandts equally: for Russ and Marion’s marriage, for the mental frailties of Perry, for the love story of Becky and the political idealism of Clem, the eldest. As a group, they are the most sympathetic of Franzen’s creations since the Lambert family of The Corrections and, as with that novel, their local tribulations speak with wit and eloquence to the fatal flaw of American society: the question of how a culture of extreme individualism equates to the ties of guilt and convention and love that bind us to family and community. The answers in 1971 are no easier than those of half a century later.

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Jonathan Franzen, America’s Next Top Moralist

For years, his work has been marked by his creeping fear that the world is in need of an urgent intervention—and why not from him.

Roughly halfway through  Crossroads , Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel, 15-year-old Perry Hildebrandt, pleasantly buzzed on gløgg at a local minister’s holiday party, confronts two men of faith with a difficult question: Is it possible to be truly good? Perry, an unusually intelligent teenager, has himself recently resolved to stop selling and consuming drugs and to be nicer to his older sister, Becky, but he worries that his efforts are ultimately self-serving. If he takes satisfaction in being a good brother, is he really being good, or is he merely being a narcissist? The men are pleased by the complexity and sincerity of his inquiry; Perry is pleased by their pleasure. They discuss the possibility of redemption, the danger of constantly second-guessing one’s motives, and Perry’s fear that he is already “damned.” Their conversation is abruptly brought to a halt when the minister’s wife notices that Perry is drunk, prompting the boy to insult her before breaking down in tears. So much for his resolution.

Crossroads  is a novel about how to be a good person. “She herself was good,” Franzen writes in close third-person of 18-year-old Becky, the morning after her first kiss (with another girl’s boyfriend). “I  know  I’m a bad person,” insists her mother, Marion, a converted-then-lapsed Catholic who suffers from depression. If she were a good person, she tells her therapist, she would be happy that her husband, Russ, the junior minister at a Protestant church outside Chicago, is pursuing a widowed parishioner. Russ, for his part, wonders if an affair—“to joyfully make love with a joyful woman”—might actually be a way of following Christ’s teaching, if it leads “his heart toward forgiveness” of his rival, the church’s youth minister. Clem, the eldest child and an atheist, thinks he knows how to be good: He needs to do the opposite of whatever his father would do, since Clem believes that Russ is a “moral fraud.” Though a pacifist like his father, he drops out of college and hopes to be sent to Vietnam, since he thinks it’s hypocritical to allow a less fortunate young man to fight in his place. Even Frances Cottrell, the “foxy” widow Russ has his eye on, worries that she’s “just not a good enough person” to merit Russ’s attention.

In making goodness the major theme of the novel, the first in a planned trilogy , Franzen is far from alone. Since the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, novelists have explored the question of how to live morally; some even produced didactic fiction. But the contemporary novelist who addresses moral issues does so in a different environment from her predecessors. The novel may be one of the last few spaces in the culture in which morality is discussed seriously. Church attendance remains low; cultural forums are often partisan; universities are more interested in shaping “the student experience” than a student’s conscience. Writers have long dramatized political and ethical problems, and to some readers they appear well positioned to offer moral guidance.

Franzen seems more than happy to answer the call. For years now, his work has been marked by his creeping fear that the world is in need of an urgent intervention—and why not from him? Since writing his masterpiece,  T he Corrections , in 2001, he has increasingly moved from considering the psychologically rich world of the family on its own terms to using family drama to gesture at a global crisis that he feels palpably—as a bird-watcher , a Democratic Party donor, and a childless man who enjoys playing doubles tennis in California’s high-risk wildfire zone. An American Dickens, he works in the genre of social realism, crafting major and minor characters who can represent different types of people and divergent political positions. He stages familiar debates—about climate degradation, digital privacy, the student debt crisis, and the secular age—in a familiar literary mode. His ambition is his strength and, sometimes, his downfall:  Purity , his 2015 novel about a debt-ridden college graduate who gets entangled with a Julian Assange-like figure, fails because it tries to cover too much ground and takes Franzen too far away from what he knows.

At first,  Crossroads  seems like a return to form. Much like  The Corrections , it’s a novel tightly focused on a Midwestern family. But tonally and thematically, the novels are quite different. There are fewer family memories in  Crossroads , less skewering of Midwestern manners, and a whole lot less humor.  Crossroads  is also a historical novel, Franzen’s first. It’s set in the early 1970s, an era of political turmoil, robust social movements, and intergenerational strife—in other words, an era much like our own. This is a savvy choice: It allows him to stage conversations about politics and morals without aligning his characters with any current ideological group. Where  The Corrections  was a deeply secular book,  Crossroads  has a strong religious presence. The novel’s first section is called “Advent,” its second, “Easter.” The characters preach and pray. They ask God for guidance. They are, for the most part, utterly sincere about their faith.

Crossroads  is a different mode, even a different genre for Franzen, as it explores a world-ordering system with less satire and more earnestness. And unlike his last three novels,  Crossroads  isn’t exactly social realism. It’s closer to a novel of ideas, though it’s not quite this either. Unlike a more typical novel of ideas, such as J.M. Coetzee’s  Elizabeth Costello , there are no lectures or staged debates. Characters are more than mouthpieces, although they and their discussions of being good are relatively flat. On some level, Franzen seems to know this, as the novel’s plot ultimately undercuts its philosophizing. The irony of  Crossroads  is that it’s a novel of ideas about the inadequacy of ideas—a book full of people thinking that dramatizes the danger of too much thought.

It’s always helpful to evaluate a writer’s work in light of what he’s trying to accomplish, and, luckily for us, Franzen is remarkably open about his purpose and his method. In a 1996 essay for  Harper ’s, Franzen articulated his goals as a novelist: He aimed to create work that would, as Flannery O’Connor once put it, “embody mystery through manners.” Franzen glosses “mystery” as “how human beings avoid or confront the meaning of existence” and “manners” as “the nuts and bolts of how human beings behave.” “What’s frightening for a novelist today,” he continued, “is how the technological consumerism that rules our world specifically aims to render both of these concerns moot.” From today’s vantage point, Franzen’s fears seem quaint: He was worried about television replacing books and “leaf-blowers replacing rakes.” He couldn’t have foreseen smartphones and social media.

In  The Corrections , he managed to nail both the mystery and the manners. The decline of Alfred, the once-feared family patriarch, is illuminating and moving—a true confrontation with “the nature of existence.” When it comes to manners, Franzen gets so much right: the repressive tendencies of a mother like Enid, who would rather gulp down wine in secret than ask her daughter for another “splash”; the love that Gary, the eldest child, now a father himself, develops for “mixed grill,” to him the height of luxury; and the impulsive romantic choices made by Denise, the beloved baby of the family, in part because she’s trying to make everyone happy. The novel creates a social world but does much more than that: It conveys the power of imperfect familial love. I’ll never forget the description of Alfred, incontinent and barely capable of forming a sentence, seeing his second son, Chip, on his doorstep on Christmas Day and greeting him several times in a row, “his face blazing with joy.” One almost wishes it weren’t so easy to please one’s parents, that it were harder than simply showing up.

In the novels Franzen has written since, there are fewer mysteries and too many manners.  Freedom  (2010) opens with a catalog of the habits of Twin Cities gentrifiers: “Were the Boy Scouts OK politically?” asks the narrator. “Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries?” The trend continues in  Purity , which is far too detailed about social worlds that are far from Franzen’s own experience—Communist East Germany in the 1980s, for instance. Reading these novels, we learn what cars people drive and what search engines they use and how much rent they pay and to whom, but we’re rarely surprised or moved by their plights. As a result, Franzen’s fiction has seemed increasingly thin, like an ink stamp used again and again until it leaves only an outline of its original image.

Crossroads  brings back the mystery and dispenses with many of the manners. While the characters sport painter’s pants and long hair, and occasionally allude to “women’s lib” and Gloria Steinem, the novel doesn’t investigate the social world of the 1970s. Franzen has shifted his attention to more existential concerns: How can people be good if they’re born sinners? Can they truly forgive themselves and each other, or is that a task best left to Christ?

The plot of the novel and the dialogue among the characters suggest varying possible answers to these questions. Marion, the representative of Catholicism, punishes herself relentlessly for her sins: She had premarital sex! She had an abortion! She failed to prevent her father’s suicide! She argues that this is appropriate: “I know you think it’s sick to blame myself,” she says to her therapist, “but I think it’s healthier spiritually.” Russ, a Protestant minister with social justice leanings, has a less binary understanding of sin. Adultery is sinful, yes, but isn’t his wife’s zealous self-hatred another kind of sin? Couldn’t the appearance of a younger, attractive woman be God’s way of offering him a second chance—and who is he to refuse divine forgiveness? (Russ’s self-justifications and self-exonerations are the closest Franzen comes in the novel to psychological acuity.) Becky, who thinks she has two direct encounters with Christ over the course of the novel, represents a version of evangelical Christianity. She embraces the prosperity gospel—she has few qualms about accepting a $13,000 inheritance from her aunt and spending it mostly on herself—and prizes her virginity. When her parents claim her inheritance in order to pay for Perry’s misdeeds, Becky cuts them out of her life. At times, the novel feels like a crash course in comparative religion: One can imagine the book’s ideal reader drawing a Venn diagram and noting places where various doctrines overlap.

After lots of discussion and much family conflict, the novel eventually lands on two related ideas about goodness. The first is that thinking constantly about being good is antithetical to being good. The mind is too supple; it’s too easy to find reasons to do what you want to do anyway. The more time Russ spends thinking about why he might be morally justified in seeking romance outside his marriage, the less attention he pays to Perry, who obviously has a drug problem, one that ends up costing his family in every sense. Obsessing about one’s sinfulness isn’t great either: Marion, too, loses track of her children and her marriage during her depression and then again during a kind of manic phase, when she leans in to her worst impulses. Even Rick Ambrose, the beloved youth minister who is Russ’s bête noire, is too self-conscious to be a good model for the moral life. “All I can see is you having it both ways,” Russ complains during one confrontation with Ambrose. “Being an asshole and congratulating yourself on your ‘honesty’ about it.”

The cure for all this thinking, we learn, is to perform hard physical labor under punishing conditions. In the novel’s “Easter” section, the church’s youth group, Crossroads, goes on a service trip to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, on the theory that suburban teenagers would benefit spiritually from digging wells for those less fortunate than themselves. Russ himself spent time with the Navajo in his twenties, when he was avoiding military service in World War II. The Navajo are portrayed as straightforward, ascetic, deeply connected to the earth, and free from some of the neurotic tendencies that plague people like Russ and Marion. “Better to be like the Navajo, the Diné, as they called themselves,” thinks Russ at one point. “The Diné had nothing.… But spiritually they were the richest people he’d ever known.”

We might be suspicious of this characterization—Russ isn’t the most reliable observer—if Franzen didn’t reinforce this idea of the materially starved-but-spiritually rich indigenous people near the novel’s end, when Clem frees himself from his adolescent “moral absolutism” by living with and working for an indigenous family in the mountains of Peru. “Neither having nor seeking a larger motive, he found one in the highlands,” Franzen reports. Clem’s time farming in the mountains doesn’t grant him complete clarity, but he begins to understand how silly some of his earlier moralizing was.

There’s a critique to be made here about neocolonialism and the white man’s fantasy of the exotic Other, but I’ll leave that to another critic. What strikes me about Franzen’s vision of spiritual uplift is its relation to physical—not mental—exertion. God may be all-knowing, but the body has its own wisdom. When Russ and Marion finally forgive each other and heal their marriage, it’s not through talking or praying—they try both of these things—but through making love. Under the right conditions, and with the right intentions, physical pleasure isn’t sinful, but rather, as Marion puts it, “a gift from God.”

Of all the characters in  Crossroads , it is the unbeliever, Clem, who best embodies this idea of redemption through hard physical work. Alone in the Andes, he lives an “elemental existence,” like a monk. He’s freed from empathy and conscience: “empathy was a luxury a day laborer couldn’t afford.” His days blend together and become routine: “He woke and worked, drank chicha and slept in a shed with the Cuéllars’ donkey.” He’s a being of pure motion, and of brute, physical need.

One day in March, he leads the donkey into the mountain forest to gather firewood. “He was amazed that the hardwoods could survive at all at such an altitude,” Franzen writes. “They had small, silvery leaves, twigs encrusted with lichen, branches hairy with epiphytes and tortured in their angles, as though they’d been thwarted at every turn by the harshness of their environment.” Awed by the trees, Clem wishes he weren’t “hacking at them with a machete.” On his way back, he notices that the soil of the tree-cleared land is “badly eroded, less water-retentive, than the loam in the forest.” But Clem, like his fellow laborers, is cold and hungry and in need of firewood. He doesn’t dwell on the ethics of forest-clearing, nor does he consider alternatives. Like Tolstoy’s Levin, who, in one of  Anna Karenina ’s most memorable scenes, experiences his “most blissful moments” threshing among peasants, Clem dwells in the bliss of unconscious action. He rarely stops to think about what his work is doing to the forest, and what the future of this community, and this planet, might be.

“It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had become unconscious, and to think,” writes Tolstoy of Levin in the fields. It is certainly liberating to take leave of the conscious mind and to dwell entirely in the physical world. But if it’s hard to stop thinking obsessively, it may be harder still to think honestly and deliberately about the consequences of one’s actions. This is what Clem, returning to his family at the novel’s end, attempts to do: to think through problems, without being obsessive or doctrinaire. The novel ends with his pondering an ethical decision, his choice to be revealed in a future book.

Luckily for Clem, the stakes aren’t as high as they might be. In  Crossroads , it’s still 1972. Nearly 50 years later, as Franzen well knows, temperatures in Arizona will soar north of 110 degrees and stay there for days on end. Franzen has his own ideas about what actions one might take to address the worsening climate crisis—he wrote them up in  The New Yorker  in 2019, to a largely hostile reception—but for now, he’s keeping quiet.  Crossroads  may not be a return for Franzen, but it is something like a retreat: from the urgencies of our current moment, and from the ways that they warp our literary discourse. The historical moment that  Crossroads  depicts—of asking big, existential questions, or of working hard to avoid having to—feels definitively like the past. But Franzen has promised not to linger in this earlier era: He’s indicated that the trilogy will eventually describe the 2020s. One hopes that by the time this third book comes out, we’ll have collectively found ways to be—that is, to do—good.  

Maggie Doherty is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s .

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads’ represents a marked evolution in a dazzling career

Thank God for Jonathan Franzen. His new novel, “ Crossroads ,” is the first of a planned trilogy modestly called “A Key to All Mythologies.” With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, “Crossroads” is distinctly Franzenesque, but it represents a marked evolution, a new level of discipline and even a deeper sense of mercy.

This time around, the celebrated chronicler of the Way We Live Now is exploring the Way We Lived Then — notably the early 1970s. And the gaping jaw of his earlier novels, capable of swallowing a vast body of cultural trends and commercial ills, has been replaced by a laser-eyed focus on the flutterings of the soul.

Before now, “soul” is not a term I would have associated with Franzen, whose brilliant, acerbic work has seemed committed to a purely material concept of human identity. But “Crossroads” feels consumed with the Psalmist’s question, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?”

The story revolves around Rev. Russ Hildebrandt, an associate pastor at an active Protestant church in suburban Chicago. When the novel opens, 47-year-old Russ is still smarting from the brutal cancelation of his work with a church youth group called “Crossroads.” Three years earlier, bell-bottomed teenagers, led by a few particularly outspoken girls, insisted that Russ stop attending and leave management of the group to a younger, hipper pastor named Rick Ambrose. Since that night, Russ has stored up such enmity against Ambrose that it shapes everything about his job, even how he walks through the church to avoid passing the man’s office.

Everyone else moved on from that ecclesiastical kerfuffle, but the disgrace has shattered the minister’s confidence and turned him against his long-suffering wife, Marion. Now, in the perverse logic of Russ’s wounded ego, he considers Marion “inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating.” Salvation, he imagines, will be found by casting her off and falling into the arms of a recently widowed parishioner who is “gut-punchingly, faith-testingly, androgynously adorable.”

With ‘Purity,’ Jonathan Franzen tackles the Web, mothers, the truth

Hatred and humiliation — and their skewering effects on human behavior — are not new concerns for Franzen’s fiction, but here he concentrates explicitly on the spiritual costs. Although Russ can be an old fool capable of absurd acts of self-delusion and pomposity, he’s spent decades considering his life in terms of his fidelity to God. Betraying his marriage vows and pursuing the affections of another woman in his congregation require equal degrees of physical and theological flexibility, which Franzen portrays with an exquisite combination of comedy and sympathy.

Initially, it’s hard to take the novel’s spiritual concerns seriously. Given his reputation for piercing characters on the mandibles of his superior intellect, a praying Franzen doesn’t feel much more sanctified than a praying mantis. But “Crossroads” quickly demonstrates that it isn’t — or isn’t just — a satire of suburban church culture or the hypocrisies of religious faith. It’s an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life. With his ever-parsing style and his relentless calculation of the fractals of consciousness, Franzen makes a good claim to being the 21st century’s Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Russ may want to believe that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being,” but he typically resides in a fog of “daily shame.” In fact, the pages of “Crossroads” are pockmarked with the words “shame” and “ashamed”; the members of Russ’s family are deep-fat fried in shame. The chapters rotate through these characters, testing each one’s struggle “to be good” while engaged in a battle of ceaseless strategizing for advantage in their transactional relationships.

Among these characters is Russ and Marion’s only daughter, 18-year-old Becky, who has fallen in love for the first time, even as her parents’ marriage collapses. It’s in such perfectly drawn portraits that Franzen’s attention to the origami of moral reasoning takes flight. Becky is purposely not a member of her father’s church, and regards him skeptically. “His earnest faith and sanctity were an odor that had forever threatened to adhere to her,” Franzen writes, “like the smell of Chesterfields, only worse, because it couldn’t be washed off.” But the object of Becky’s affection is a handsome churchgoing musician, and suddenly she realizes that “if she opened herself to the possibility of belief [she] might gain an unforeseen advantage.” How that belief eventually calcifies in her mind is a harrowing tale.

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But her younger brother, Perry, whom she considers “an amoral brainiac,” is the real catastrophe of the novel. Ridiculously precocious and cripplingly self-conscious, he’s contending with depression and addiction largely outside the attention of his parents, who are too baffled by their own crossroads. His faltering efforts “to become a better person” may be the most plaintive tragicomedy Franzen has ever written.

Disastrously drunk on Christmas punch at a church party, Perry confronts a minister and a rabbi: “What I’m asking,” he says too loudly, “is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.”

Both religious leaders respond to Perry with academic formality, but Franzen hears the agonizing paradox in his question. Indeed, the novel is tightly constructed to reach its crescendo with a trip to a Navajo reservation for an act of charitable outreach that’s marbled with vanity and racism. Although lampooning such do-goodism would have been easy, “Crossroads” lets the chaff and the wheat grow together. At points, Franzen sounds as though he’s writing an answer to “ On Moral Fiction ,” John Gardner’s 1978 critique of the failure of contemporary novels to “provide us with the flicker of lightning that shows us where we are.”

The result is a story of spiritual crises with a narrative range more expansive than Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, which can sometimes feel liturgical in their arcane ruminations. Franzen is working closer to the practical theology and moral realism of John Updike’s “ Rabbit, Run ” and “ In the Beauty of the Lilies .” Grasping at reeds of grace and selfishness, the Hildebrandts demonstrate in the most poignant way how mortals stumble through life freighted with ideals that simultaneously mock and inspire them.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

On Wednesday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. ET, Jonathan Franzen will conduct a virtual conversation with Tony Tulathimutte on Politics and Prose Live, wapo.st/franzen100621 .

From our archives:

Review of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.”

By Jonathan Franzen

Farrar Straus Giroux. 580 pp. $30

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2021

New York Times Bestseller

by Jonathan Franzen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2021

Franzen’s intensely absorbing novel is amusing, excruciating, and at times unexpectedly uplifting—in a word, exquisite.

This first novel in an ambitious trilogy tracks a suburban Chicago family in a time of personal and societal turmoil.

It says a lot that, at almost 600 pages, Franzen’s latest novel, set amid the waning years of the Vietnam War, leaves you wanting more. That it does so is also very good news: It’s the first in what promises to be a sprawling trilogy, continuing to the present day, which the author has titled A Key to All Mythologies in what is presumably a wink at its far-from-modest ambitions—yes, à la Middlemarch . That reference is classic Franzen, who imbues his books with big ideas, in this case about responsibility to family, self, God, country, and one’s fellow man, among other matters, all the while digging deep into his characters’ emotions, experiences, desires, and doubts in a way that will please readers seeking to connect to books heart-first. Here, the story follows two generations of the Hildebrandt family, headed by Russ, the associate pastor of a church in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois, who, when we first meet him in the lead-up to Christmas 1971, is nursing a crush on a recently widowed parishioner and a grudge against the groovily charismatic leader of the church’s popular youth group, Crossroads, in which three of Russ’ four children are variously involved. Russ’ wife, Marion, who has gained weight over the years and lost her pre-maternal intensity and with it her husband’s sexual interest, is nursing a few secret preoccupations of her own, as are the couple’s three oldest children, Clem, Becky, and Perry. Each of the five characters, among whose perspectives Franzen adroitly toggles, is struggling with matters of morality and integrity, privilege and purpose, driven in part by the dueling desires for independence and connection. Their internal battles—to fight in an unjust war or unjustly let others fight in your stead, to fight their way out of a marriage or fight to stay in it, to fight for sanity or surrender to madness, to fight to define themselves and determine their paths or to cede that control to others, to name a few—are set against the backdrop of an era in which “love” is everywhere but empathy is in short supply, where hugs are liberally dispensed but real connection’s harder to come by.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-18117-8

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Jonathan Franzen

by Jonathan Franzen Karl Kraus

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PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett

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Franzen’s Latest Does Everything a Great Novel Should Do

Forget all of the controversies and just read it..

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Jonathan Franzen novels don’t come along often, but they always arrive encrusted in a lot of paraliterary baggage fomented on social media. With all due respect to the proponents of peeved Franzen discourse (which in my opinion is not a lot of respect), I’m just going to skip the long tedious prologue many reviewers seem to find obligatory, addressing Franzen’s persona, his publisher’s publicity campaigns, how he doesn’t “get the internet,” and etc. Do you really need to read any more of that? I didn’t think so.

Franzen’s superb latest, Crossroads — the first volume in a trilogy friskily titled A Key to All Mythologies , after the tome the desiccated scholar Mr. Casaubon labors over in Middlemarch — mostly takes place in the last months of 1971, with each chapter told from the point of view of one of five members of the Hildebrandt family. (The inner life of the sixth and youngest member, Judson—born at about the same time as Franzen himself—remains unknown to the reader.) Everything about the Hildebrandts is middle-ish. They are unprosperous members of the white middle class living in a suburb of Chicago, where Russ Hildebrandt is an associate minister at the First Reformed Presbyterian Church. Beneath that bland surface, however, roil passions, antipathies, rivalries, and hatreds. For example, Russ, who takes the first chapter, has lost interest in Marion, his wife; lusts after a pretty widow; and detests the man who now controls Crossroads, the youth group that Russ founded.

“Crossroads” is exactly the sort of mildly groovy, earnest name a Protestant youth group would have had in 1971, but it also refers to the title of a song by the legendary early-20 th -century bluesman Robert Johnson. The lyrics describe Johnson falling to his knees, pleading with God for mercy, but he was also rumored to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for becoming a master guitarist. Each of the Hildebrandts is presented with a dark bargain of some kind in the course of the novel. Each of them struggles to be “good” as he or she understands it, and some of them believe in God. Crossroads is a novel that takes the religious beliefs of its characters seriously, without ever forgetting how easily faith can twist itself into absurdity.

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The social change convulsing America in 1971 only lightly shapes the crises that beset the Hildebrandts. Unlike Franzen’s previous two novels, 2010’s Freedom and 2015’s Purity , Crossroads is light on curmudgeonly social commentary. (Readers who prefer his breakout 2001 novel, The Corrections , will surely welcome this.) For Russ, who organizes volunteer work in the inner city and at a Navajo reservation, the ’70s bring a humiliating shift in identity. Not so long ago, while living in New York City, he and Marion were “the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action.” But the younger minister who usurped him as the leader of Crossroads takes a more “psychological and streetwise” approach, focusing the youth group on heartfelt confessions and discussions of intragroup relationships, an intimation of the Me Decade to come.

As with the best of Franzen’s fiction, the characters in Crossroads are held up to the light like complexly cut gems and turned to reveal facet after facet. Russ, whose squirming attempts at adultery encourage the reader’s contempt, approaches his relief work with a countervailing maturity. “What Russ most liked about Theo,” the Black pastor whose congregation he aids, “was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies.” On the other hand, that humility also comes tangled up in narcissistic self-loathing. Listening to Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” Russ tells himself he is “an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he.” At times, the lust he feels for his comely parishioner seems like a pretext to punish himself as a perverse validation of his faith. “The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days,” Russ thinks, “the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed.”

Although they don’t realize it, Russ and Marion—the novel’s most magnificently realized character—share this attraction to Christianity’s masochistic side. They met in Arizona. He was working for the Navajo and she was going through an ecstatic Catholic stage following a catastrophe she’s only partially confessed to Russ, an affair and a breakdown and a transaction with a person she firmly believes to have been Satan. The affair, with a married salesman at the Los Angeles car dealership where Marion worked, haunts her. It was both the best and worst time of her life, and it is the emotional epicenter of the novel. Crossroads feels purged of showy writing and stylistic set pieces, but the long flashback recounting this interlude feels bleached with the merciless glare and punishing downpours of winter afternoons on treeless Southern California boulevards. The way Franzen conveys this atmosphere without calling attention to how well he’s conveying it is in tune with the deferential spirit of the novel.

Of Russ and Marion’s three oldest children, Clem is the least vivid creation, a college student whose sexual awakening triggers an idealistic rejection of his draft deferral. Becky, the Hildebrandts’ only daughter and a virginal cheerleader, expertly navigates her high school’s social hierarchy until a guitarist belonging to Crossroads catches her eye. He has a girlfriend, but it strikes Becky that going out with the musician would be “a crowning confirmation of her status,” and she sets about stealing him. Of all the Hildebrandts, Becky enjoys the most unsullied experience of religious feeling, a “golden light” that suffuses her the first time she gets stoned. Crossroads is sustained structurally by a web of oppositions like these. The suffering entangled with Russ and Marion’s versions of faith certainly seems unhealthy, but the complacent glow of Becky’s revelation appears, by the end of the novel, to be leading her down a more perilous path.

All of the characters’ moral conundrums seem to converge in Perry, a 15-year-old genius who, when he first appears, savors his mastery of the “fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval. To be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant.” A dressing-down from Becky, however, inspires him to try to be “good,” a condition the very nature of which perplexes him. How is it possible, Perry wonders, for someone as clever as himself to do a good deed, when he is “helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised?”

These were the preoccupations of Franzen’s late close friend David Foster Wallace, with whom Perry also shares a ravenous susceptibility to addiction. At a particularly farcical Christmas party, Perry even gets into a debate on the foundation of morality with a rabbi and a priest, and holds his own until the shrewd hostess, perceiving that the kid has been sneaking glasses of her potent gl ö gg , kicks him out. But of all the mind-twisting problems  that torment Perry, he never wonders if he is calculating because he is an addict or if he became an addict because he sees people as the means to an end. Clever as he may be, Perry, like all the Hildebrandts, remains oblivious to the most essential questions.

By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Like all the Hildebrandts, and like most human beings. The power of this enveloping novel, facilitated by neatly turned plot elements—will Russ win the widow? What will happen when Marion goes back to L.A.? Will Perry survive a spectacularly foolish attempt to buy a bag of peyote buttons on the Navajo reservation?—finally resides in how uncannily real, how fully imagined these people feel. It’s easy to despise Russ for his indifference to Marion and the matronly weight she’s put on in bearing and raising his kids. After all, he despises himself for it, noting that “Hating her looks was yet another of the jobs she quietly and capably took on for him,” as brutal a line as Franzen has ever written. But as the couple’s full story emerges, it becomes clear that the real Marion, the one he married, has encased herself in something less material but far more deadening than adipose, a layer of Midwestern niceness that both stifles her and keeps her alive, even as it corrodes her marriage.

Real people are tricky puzzles, volatile blends of self-knowledge and blindness, full of inexhaustible surprises and contradictions. Literary characters seldom achieve a comparably unpredictable intricacy because they are, after all, artifacts made by equally blinkered human beings, and furthermore they are the means to an artistic end. Franzen hasn’t always given his readers characters as persuasively flawed as the Hildebrandts. He hasn’t always tried to. But in Crossroads , his satirical and didactic impulses largely in check, his touch gentled, Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do? I didn’t think so.

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A So-So Franzen Novel Is Still Better Than Most Books. That Said …

It is 1971. The cars are boxy, the coats are sheepskin, the lapels are yawning, the potatoes are served in a cream sauce, and the rec rooms are paneled in knotty pine. We are in New Prospect, a fictional suburb of Chicago. It is winter. A midwestern family is in crisis. This could only be a Jonathan Franzen novel. In the case of Crossroads (out October 5), it is the first installment of a planned trilogy about the Hildebrandts, a unit consisting of a husband and wife who hate each other and four children who are, in descending order from the oldest: a brain, a princess, a basket case, and a 9-year-old who is too young to conform to the Breakfast Club taxonomy of humankind.

Russ Hildebrandt, the head of the family and an associate pastor at the local church, is not a fun guy. He’s a nurser of grudges, a misreader of signals, a dullard, a clown. His mode of communication, both vocationally and recreationally, is the sermon. Nearly everyone dislikes him, including me. Filling out the ranks of Russ’s haters are his children, the hot parishioner he lusts after, a large portion of his congregation, and, eventually, Russ himself.

Russ’s nemesis is Rick Ambrose, the church’s director of youth programming. Rick is young, cool, and mustachioed. He cusses. He once owned a motorcycle. He has a mesmeric effect on the adolescents of the fellowship, partly due to his belief that the teens should constantly hug one another as an expression of their Christian calling. Russ, on the other hand, drives a decrepit wagon and can neither peel himself away from scripture nor pull off a shaggy beard. (When he makes a stab at the beard, his wife tells him he looks like John the Baptist.) As one of the youths puts it, Russ is a “fucking dork.”

Half of Crossroads takes place on a single pre-Christmas winter day, the rest in that day’s aftermath. The story is delivered through what Franzen has called “interlocking novellas.” The best of these come from the perspective of Russ’s wife, Marion, and their son Perry. Marion has a troubled past — psychotic episodes, sexual trauma, abortion — which she reveals to a psychiatrist whose office is discreetly camouflaged inside a dentistry practice. (Anyone waiting to see the shrink could plausibly be waiting to get a cavity filled.) Marion’s confession sets off unexploded ordnance in her psyche and causes her to go on a rampage of murderous delusions, reckless behavior, crash dieting, and way too many cigarettes.

Perry is a sophomore in high school, shifty and stormy and clever. He is an indiscriminate gulper of drugs, a dealer of weed, a menace to his siblings. At a Christmas party, he gets wasted on glogg and buttonholes a priest and a rabbi to ask whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality. (The answer is: both.) When the party hostess notices Perry’s disinhibition and accuses him of getting into the glogg, which is not for children, he freaks out and sobs, “Do you think I enjoy being damned?” Reading Perry’s downward-spiraling chapters reminded me of a subway ride I took in July, when a woman boarded the downtown 1 train at 72nd with a stroller and immediately leaned over her baby to whisper, “Mommy lost her marbles and doesn’t have two screws left.” A perfect line, better than anything a screenwriter could dream up. Perry starts out with a slight marble deficit; by the end of the book, he has none left and no screws, either.

The other characters are less interesting than Marion and Perry, which is tough because they make up roughly three-fifths of the novel. The structure that worked beautifully for Franzen before feels herky-jerky in Crossroads, with each shift in perspective stalling the book’s momentum. The real problem is Russ, who is a chalk outline where a character should be. His suffering is shallow, and his grievances are petty. This is a guy whose life truly and comprehensively sucks: His parents have disowned him, his wife is staging a one-woman mutiny, the hot parishioner turns out to be a froth of nothingness, and he has squandered whatever spiritual influence he once held over the community. So why isn’t he catastrophically angry, sad, vengeful? Why does Russ drift along in a mood of lightly fluctuating resentment and unease with occasional flares of frustration? Why does his suffering have few consequences? Why is he so boring?

He is boring even on topics that wouldn’t seem to abide boringness, like adulterous desire. When Russ’s mind turns to the hot parishioner: “He felt a melting warmth in his loins.” When the parishioner hugs him: “Her warmth entered his body and funneled straight into his loins.” When she compliments him: “She could hardly have said anything more warming to his heart and loins.” (Whenever Russ’s loins came up, I pictured a pepper-crusted cut of beef being turned slowly in a pan.) Another topic that would seem snoozeproof is when Russ exchanges lacerating words with a Navajo man who is infuriated by the pastor’s clumsy attempts at outreach during a service trip. “That’s the thing about other cultures,” Russ muses after the argument. “An outsider can never really understand what’s going on.” Well, yes.

It is demonstrably possible for a novelist to write about dreary characters without producing dreary text, but too many of the Hildebrandt family are boring in exactly the same way: stubborn, narrow, flummoxed, risk averse. Where are their minds? With the exception of Marion and Perry — the designated lunatics — it is an impalpable family. Those sections are revelatory, combustible, and funny, and when I rounded onto them I could hardly stop myself from fist-pumping and yelping, “Franzen’s back, baby!” And then Russ or his loins or one of his other two children would plod around, with their turnips and their long johns and their self-pity, and my resting heart rate would reinstate itself.

Those other two children: I haven’t even named them yet. They are Becky and Clem, but they could be called Fiber Cracker and Memorial Day Traffic, or Company-Wide Email and Jury Duty. One of them is in high school, and the other is in college. One of them is popular, and the other is not. They are both nice. They say things like Okay and Wow and Whoa and Nope and Yep and Gosh and Yeah.

In the course of writing this, I mentioned to three people (separately) that I was reading the new Jonathan Franzen novel, and they all nodded and said (near-identically), “I have complicated feelings about Jonathan Franzen.” You know who else has complicated feelings about Jonathan Franzen? Jonathan Franzen. He has written and talked about his writing in a way that rubs some critics in a stop-doing-our-job sort of way but that I find pleasingly transparent and generous. There’s an instructive New Yorker essay from 2002 in which he proposes a distinction between two models of how literary fiction might relate to its audience. One, Franzen suggests, is the Status model: the idea that great novelists are geniuses who produce works of high art, and if the public is too dumb to get it, well, that’s no reflection on the quality of the work. The second is what he calls the Contract model, in which an author serves at the pleasure of his reader and ought to provide accessible connection. Contract books, Franzen writes, are the kinds of books his mother would have liked. (Rude.) The essay is long and not entirely coherent, but the incoherence, I think, is intentional, or if not that, then at least it’s effective in proving Franzen’s own ambivalence: He confesses to subscribing to both models and toggling nervously between them.

I don’t co-sign Franzen’s Contract vs. Status binary (or any of the many similar divisions floated by earlier critics and writers that it echoes), but it doesn’t matter when reading Franzen, because he does. Crossroads is an experiment in going Full Contract. It is a novel of family dynamics, the interior life, the soul — the very material at which he consistently excels! As an experiment, it should be successful. But I miss the belligerently brainy and ambitious version of the author who plumped his novels with weird words, arcane shit, and glorious tangents. This book contains fewer than five words an eighth-grader might be moved to look up in a dictionary, and the plot beeps along like a healthy reading on an EKG monitor with no tricky shifts or unparseable turns. Franzen has scrubbed away his talent for think-y digressions about the pharmaceutical industry or Lithuanian black markets or the Internet or bird-watching. There are Big Themes allegedly at work in Crossroads — consumerism, Christianity, conformity, hypocrisy, race, class — but they play in the background like a nearly inaudible score, with rare increases in volume when, for example, Russ interacts with the Black minister of an inner-city church.

Look, even a so-so Jonathan Franzen novel is better than most novels. There are breathtaking sentences in this one! Several dozen of them! But I would argue that this ratio of breathtaking to inert sentences is not favorable, not in a novel of 592 pages. There are also sentences like “The only thing better than seeing and smelling and tasting her vulva was the moment when he got to put his penis in it; and therein lay the problem.” Sentences that you can’t imagine any reader, not in a million years, underlining for reasons other than perhaps to scribble a little ? beside them.

The downside of writing two miraculous works of fiction ( The Corrections and Freedom ) and a really good one ( Purity ) is that what follows of your output will be evaluated against that standard, and by that standard Crossroads comes across as not only muddy and unstylish but determinedly and self-righteously so — like showing up at a party wearing a baggy brown turtleneck and getting annoyed when people don’t compliment your outfit.

However, if you elect not to read this one, you’re also opting out of the next two novels in the planned trilogy, which could mean spending the next 20 years wandering in a Franzenless desert. This sounds awful to me because even when Franzen misses, he takes a big swing — and not a lot of other novelists can say the same. It’s a good thing to live in a world where writers do that, even if only a few, and even if not always well. So I would suggest the following: Amble over to your neighborhood bookstore and locate a copy of Crossroads. It will be stacked right near the front, perhaps even in the window display. Handle the book gingerly, so you don’t render it unsellable with your filthy hands, and give the first ten pages a whirl. If you like those pages, proceed with your purchase; those first ten pages are an accurate sample of the 582 to come. And if you don’t? Hey, you tried.

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Reviews of Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

A Key to All Mythologies #1

by Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads .

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless―unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads , Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon. A certain person, Mrs. Frances Cottrell, a member of the church, had volunteered to help him bring toys and canned goods to the Community of God that afternoon, and though he knew that only as her pastor did he have a right to rejoice in her act of free will, he couldn't have asked for a better Christmas present than four hours alone with her. After Russ's humiliation, three years earlier, the church's senior minister, Dwight Haefle, had upped the associate minister's share of pastoral visitations. What exactly Dwight was doing with the time Russ saved him, besides taking more frequent vacations and working on his long-awaited volume of lyric poetry, wasn't clear to Russ. But he appreciated his ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• The Hildebrandts share a complicated bond of compassion and conflict, honesty and infidelity. Consider their family dynamic. In what ways are the Hildebrandts good toward one another? In what ways are they deceitful or manipulative? If you had to identify a crucial hitch—or "barrier" (page 26), as Rick Ambrose might call it—that hinders their relationship, what would it be?
• When we first meet Russ Hildebrandt, he's a pastor "starved in spirit" (page 17) who's desperate for a change in his professional, personal, and spiritual life. Discuss Russ's outlook at the beginning of Crossroads . Do you think he sees himself as a martyr of forces beyond his control or a victim of his own misdeeds? What are Russ's solutions for ...
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Each Hildebrandt is delightfully multi-layered, but Russ and Marion in particular are incredibly complex creations. Following Marion's journey over the course of the book is a joy — perhaps the highlight. I thoroughly enjoyed Crossroads start to finish, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in a beautifully written, character-driven trip back in time. Its themes and discussions of faith make it an excellent choice for book groups... continued

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(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs ).

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Crossroads: by jonathan franzen.

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At the time, Franzen sniffed at any association with other Oprah-approved authors (such as Jacquelyn Mitchard, Jane Hamilton and Wally Lamb) whose readers were overwhelmingly women and thus, by implication, less serious . Franzen and Oprah eventually made amends. She subsequently picked, with no objection on Franzen’s part, his 2010 novel Freedom as another book club selection. But for many readers, the sour stench of Franzen’s initial ingratitude and snobbery lingers on.

The problem with grumbling about Jonathan Franzen, and all these pretensions, is the cold fact that he’s one of America’s greatest living writers. The Corrections endures as a modern masterpiece, a classic of the contemporary canon . That it hasn’t already been adapted into a feature film or an HBO miniseries after all this time simply speaks to its emotional complexity and formal slipperiness. Franzen’s excellent follow-up, Freedom , only disappoints by comparison. Likewise, 2015’s Purity seems just okay when held beside these twin giants.

Franzen’s latest tome, Crossroads , arrives as the first part of a grand trilogy named A Key to All Mythologies (a title which nods at George Eliot’s Middlemarch ). As a project, this is the author at his most sprawling and ambitious. As a standalone (albeit incomplete) installment – which splays across nearly 600 pages and multiple generations – Crossroads represents his most humanistic literary achievement to date. The novel brims with vivid and flawed individuals who, at times, each try their damnedest to be good and then invariably fail, sometimes spectacularly.

In his previous works, Franzen treated characters’ foibles with acidity and, in some cases, outright scorn. By contrast, the extended (sometimes novella-length) chapters that compose Crossroads radiate with warmth and empathy. When taken out of context, the poorly considered decisions of the novel’s five main characters (and its bevy of supporting players) often veer into the gray zones of morality. Franzen never outright excuses any single questionable deed we encounter in the book. He instead fashions a resplendent quilt of human imperfection, woven together with silvery threads of grace.

Crossroads marks Franzen’s inaugural foray into period drama. More than half the novel transpires on December 23, 1971, though it often flashes back to earlier decades of the 20th century. The remainder of its pages don’t veer too far ahead from that pivotal date. Even so, Crossroads isn’t presented as That 70’s Novel, with constant, era-specific markers of Baby Boomer culture. The framework of this fabulous story could be transposed to last Tuesday and would work just as well.

True to form, Crossroads centers on the dysfunctions of a midwestern, middle-class family. This time around, it’s the Hildebrandt clan, who live in the fictional Chicago suburb of New Prospect. Russ, the novel’s patriarch and Franzen’s fullest comic character, is the associate minister at the First Reformed church. He’s blandly good-looking, basically well-meaning and desperately pursuing an adulterous relationship with a widowed parishioner. His eldest child Clem, away at college, has dropped out of school and given up his Vietnam deferment, mostly to punish his pacifist father. Daughter Becky (a queen bee at the local high school) and brilliant son Perry (a misanthropic addict and drug dealer to middle-schoolers) have joined the ranks of the titular Crossroads, First Reform’s almost cultish youth group.

Both Becky and Perry have become regular members for different, self-centered reasons. Early on, we learn that Russ once was once Crossroads’ leader. That is until his earnest religiosity collided with the charismatic cool of a young colleague named Rick Ambrose, his primary antagonist and the current head of Crossroads. Russ is left licking his wounds years after a crushing “humiliation” that at first is merely hinted at and then becomes the central narrative event of the novel, one that ripples outward in concentric circles like a stone thrown into still, deep water.

And then there’s Marion, the Hildebrandt matriarch, one of Franzen’s finest creations. She’s whip-smart and, when we’re introduced to her, unhappy with her middle-aged self (see: a plump body and sexless marriage). Marion is the beating heart of Crossroads , a character to root for, and even adore, well before Franzen unveils the details of her tragic past. The novel methodically builds toward two magnificent set pieces that fling all these vibrant characters in varying directions, trajectories that Franzen will inevitably investigate in subsequent entries to A Key to All Mythologies . After all these thrills we’re left waiting, with finger-tapping impatience, for what’s coming next.

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On the Shelf

By Jonathan Franzen FSG: 592 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

I’ve long had a soft spot for Jonathan Franzen’s essay “ Why Bother ?” Originally published in Harper’s in 1996, his manifesto for a more socially engaged literature — of the kind he went on to write — incorporates some of my favorite modes of Franzen: melancholic, earnest, esoteric, a little whiny . He’d published two novels, which no one seemed to have read. He was angry. He had writer’s block. He was tired, terrified of writing for no one. Pre-Oprah, pre - adulation ; it’s like those snapshots in Us Weekly: J Franz, he’s just like US!

Then, of course, “The Corrections” happened. Then “ Freedom .” “Purity” sold less than an eighth of the previous two novels but still did better than almost every other book in 2015 (and I would argue it was formally more interesting). Three years after that, Franzen was quoted as saying he “doesn’t know if anyone has more than six fully realized novels inside of him.” And yet here is “Crossroads,” his sixth — but the first in a proposed trilogy.

The title of the trilogy, “A Key to All Mythologies,” is also the name of Rev. Casaubon ’s uncompleted work of theological scholarship in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” The irony here checks out: Casaubon, not unlike so many of Franzen’s male characters, is self-righteous, pompous, largely ineffectual. Something of a joke.

The family in “ Crossroads ” is also steeped in God. The Hildebrandts are made up of Russ, an associate pastor; Marion, a stay-at-home mom; and four kids — Clem, Becky, Perry and Judson. The first section is titled “Advent.” It’s Dec. 23, 1971, suburban Chicago. The town is New Prospect; dad drives a Fury; Crossroads is the name of the youth group created by Rick Ambrose, Russ’ younger protégé turned nemesis. Subtlety has never been Franzen’s thing.

Russ is considering cheating. Three years ago he suffered a humiliation, which he blames in part on his wife. “Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it.” Frances is his new pursuit: “sagless, pouchless, flawless, lineless, an apparition of vitality in a snug paisley sleeveless dress” 10 years his junior, with a teenage son, a year from the loss of a husband she did not particularly like.

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Franzen’s breadth remains extraordinary. Here is Taffy Brodesser-Akner in her wonderful 2018 New York Times Magazine Franzen profile : “He makes no points that can be distilled to a few words and still be understood in their breadth. The breadth is the point.” This also makes it difficult to quote the novel. The sentences are often good, but it’s the way they accrue and interact, pile up over pages, that gives them their effect.

The world he builds is lush and complicated, immersive and alive. You internalize the floor plans of the house and church, learn to navigate New Prospect’s streets. The pace is slow and careful. There is interpersonal pressure, small-scale suspense: Clem’s girlfriend calls him on his privileged avoidance of Vietnam; Marion begins seeing a psychiatrist, reaches out to an old sort-of boyfriend, starts smoking again and losing weight; Becky gets a fraught and unexpected windfall, has a crush on someone else’s boyfriend, betrays her father, is less than Good for the first time in her life; Perry’s weed dealing escalates.

Each character inhabits an individual-scale version of a timely social crisis — each on the verge or in the midst of shift or rupture. And yet, while they are all under pressure, the present action stagnates; shifts in time and among characters make it more difficult to feel the press of thrill or threat.

And then, on page 358, the plot picked up: My skin got that proper prickle. Events were promised, consequences loomed, and because Franzen is a man who hits his beats, they came. And they felt weightier because of all that came before. If anything, this slow burn felt emboldening. What, after all, do we read for? To rush headlong through a plot as if it were a Netflix treatment? How many such novels have I read that made me want to die? What about, instead, a deliberate engagement with characters, an unfurling of their history and thinking, an attempt at care and intimacy? Also, there is something fundamentally fun about getting caught up in the sheer sweep of a Franzen novel (except the first two, neither of which I will claim to have finished reading).

It should be said that the characters do not feel fully human; they feel allegorical. There’s lots of talk of God and goodness; past traumas are overwrought. The place we find Marion near the end feels both inevitable (by the novel’s logic) and absurd (by life’s). The characters feel, in other words, like characters: incredibly well-constructed pieces moved through the novel’s equally well-constructed world.

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Leave the acute depiction of individual human consciousness to the post-Franzen vanguard: Lerner, Cusk, Knausgaard. Franzen, meanwhile, has always been thought of as a throwback — but to whom or when, I can never quite place. Dickens is too busy, Faulkner much more difficult; Roth, Updike and Bellow all seem less interested in women. The books can feel as pointedly political as DeLillo, but (pre-Oprah novels aside) Franzen is no systems novelist. Two influences Franzen claims are Paula Fox and Penelope Fitzgerald — two of my favorite writers — but their brilliance is tied up not only in precision and verisimilitude but also in their brevity.

Franzen can spin a stellar yarn; “Crossroads” is further proof of that. Yet the sentences can get sloppy, attention lags. One wonders, why these seven good-to-great sentences, when one or two sharper ones could have held them all? By the end, it felt like the story was just barely getting off the ground.

Granted, it’s the start of a trilogy, but what to make of the presumption that the reader will keep returning to a project that hasn’t yet shown it knows how or where to land? Bigness can create a feeling of fullness, but also exhaustion. “Who has the time?” said another mom at camp pickup when she saw me reading “Crossroads” and I told her it was the first of three.

After finishing the novel, I reread a lot of Franzen’s non fiction , including that Harper’s essay. Unfair as it may be to once again subject his persona to review, it would be absurd not to admit that I have a complicated relationship with the idea of him, as a female novelist who feels sometimes as if the only way to get any traction as a (female) novelist is to cultivate a certain cold detachment that Franzen gets to disavow.

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It is also true that his relationship to the world is inseparable from his flaws as a novelist. I realized, this time — reading the Harper’s essay, the interviews and profiles — that Franzen’s never actually experienced failure, at least not in the way most of us have. Those first two books still earned advances large enough for him to write full time; there is a quick mention in the essay of a limo ride to a Vogue shoot during the promotion of one of those “failed books.” He is a man who disavowed Oprah and still thrived. He is, has been his whole career, to use an awful capitalist term, too big to fail .

I have less a criticism than a request for Franzen. Great work often seems to sit just on the precipice of failure; so much of what lights me up sits just shy of utter tripe. I wonder about the dogged certainty with which “Crossroads” seems to have been written, the almost unfathomable (to me) trust that there’s inherent value in all the (many) things the writer has to say. In “Crossroads,” I felt the stolid knowledge that must come from decades of succeeding , a writer in full possession of his powers, etc. What I did not feel was the thrill of failure’s threat.

I wondered often, after, what that might look like for Franzen — who is an extraordinary novelist. How, truly fearing failure, he might find ways to surprise us and himself. What I hope for the next two books of this “Key to All Mythologies” is that they engage just as carefully and deliberately as “Crossroads” with the world he’s building, but that they also push to reimagine what books and their writers might be capable of.

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Crossroads: A Novel Hardcover – October 5, 2021

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Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads . It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless―unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads , Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

• Book 1 of 1 A Key to All Mythologies
• Print length 592 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date October 5, 2021
• Dimensions 6.17 x 1.72 x 8.65 inches
• ISBN-10 0374181179
• ISBN-13 978-0374181178
• See all details

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book of the Year by Air Mail, Barack Obama, Bookforum, BookPage, Electric Lit, Financial Times, The Guardian (UK), Good Housekeeping , The Independent (UK), Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, Oprah Daily , The Millions, New Statesman, Newsweek, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Slate, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Telegraph, TIME, Town and Country, USA Today, Vogue, Vulture, The Washington Post, and more "A mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. Crossroads is warmer than anything [Franzen has] yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect . . . Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events . . . [but] the character who cracks this novel fully open―she’s one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction―is Marion . . . The action in Crossroads flows and ebbs toward several tour-de-force scenes." ― Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review "Thank God for Jonathan Franzen . . . With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, Crossroads is distinctly Franzen-esque, but it represents a marked evolution . . . It’s an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life. With his ever-parsing style and his relentless calculation of the fractals of consciousness, Franzen makes a good claim to being the 21st century’s Nathaniel Hawthorne." ― Ron Charles, The Washington Post "Superb . . . As with the best of Franzen’s fiction, the characters in Crossroads are held up to the light like complexly cut gems and turned to reveal facet after facet . . . Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do?" ― Laura Miller, Slate " The Corrections was a masterpiece, but Crossroads is [Franzen's] finest novel yet . . . He has arrived at last as an artist whose first language, faced with the society of greed, is not ideological but emotional, and whose emotions, fused with his characters, tend more toward sorrow and compassion than rage and self-contempt...” ― Frank Guan, Bookforum "A work of total, tantalizing genius. Entombed with big ideas and eccentric characters, Crossroads is a brilliant, excessive, and absorbing novel that instantly feels like Franzen’s finest." ― Brady Brickner-Wood , The Chicago Review of Books "Like a latter-day George Eliot, Franzen can light up large thematic skies but also keep his eye on the sparrow." ― Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review “Franzen is a master of rendering the broad sweep of humanity through the (extremely human) minutia of a family. In Crossroads , I felt a frustration and fondness for the Hildebrandts so deep it was almost familial. This is, perhaps, [Franzen’s] greatest skill as a writer . . . What more could a reader ask for, really?” ― Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub "[A] pleasure bomb of a novel . . . New prospects are what keep [ Crossroads ] so engrossing, each section expanding on and deepening the poignancy of what has come before . . . . Few [writers] can take human contradiction and make it half as entertaining and intimate as Franzen does . . . A magnificent portrait of an American family on the brink of implosion . . . Crossroads is Act I of what’s bound to be an American classic." ― Lauren Mechling, Vogue "Soulful, funny and so sharply observed it hurts . . . Crossroads gets this wildly ambitious [trilogy] off to a glorious start.” ― Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times "[A] sweeping, sumptuous new novel . . . [Franzen] pays homage to great nineteenth century social realists, from George Eliot to Balzac to Dickens, while gazing unflinchingly to the ills that shape us today . . . Crossroads is consumed with the cause and effect of our choices, especially our selfish ones. The novel closes on a cliffhanger, teeing up for the next two installments of his trilogy, a triumphant opening gambit in what may become a vital pillar of our literature." ― Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily "[ Crossroads ] is carefully wrought, its neatly balanced architecture another clandestine source of its power." ― Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker “ Crossroads is expansive and funny; a pure pleasure to read.” ― Xan Brooks, The Guardian “Franzen brings to this novel a refreshing simplicity . . . What remains is family drama as high art. What remains is Franzen’s gift for interiority, his uncanny ability to take us into minds as fraught and depraved as our own.” ― Erin Somers, The A.V. Club "A marvelous novel." ― Becca Rothfeld, The Atlantic "Absolutely engrossing . . . There’s not a scenario in [ Crossroads ] that doesn’t ring true." ― Allison Arieff, San Francisco Chronicle "Superbly rendered . . . [ Crossroads is] a supremely skillful book, ingenious and practiced in its execution, on point in its small, historical details . . . ” ― Walter Kirn, Air Mail "Franzen’s best novel." ― Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns "[A] superb domestic epic . . . Franzen’s faith in fiction as a means to get at questions of goodness and righteousness is unshakable." ― Mark Athitakis, USA Today (Four out of Four Stars) "This is peak Franzen, with richly created characters, conflicts and plot . . . The writing is a marvel." ― Rob Merrill, Associated Press "Excellent . . . With Marion, [Franzen] reminds us that he’s actually one of our great novelists of female fury . . . Jonathan Franzen really is one of the great novelists of his generation. Crossroads stands ready and willing to prove it." ― Constance Grady, Vox "[Franzen] imbues his books with big ideas, in this case about responsibility to family, self, God, country, and one’s fellow man, among other matters, all the while digging deep into his characters’ emotions, experiences, desires, and doubts in a way that will please readers seeking to connect to books heart-first . . . Franzen’s intensely absorbing novel is amusing, excruciating, and at times unexpectedly uplifting―in a word, exquisite.”― Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Franzen returns with a sweeping and masterly examination of the shifting culture of early 1970s America, the first in a trilogy . . . Throughout, Franzen exhibits his remarkable ability to build suspense through fraught interpersonal dynamics. It’s irresistible." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "[A] masterful, Tolstoian saga . . . Franzen adroitly portrays eternal generational conflicts . . . This masterpiece of social realism vividly captures each character’s internal conflicts as a response to and a reflection of societal expectations, while Franzen expertly explores the fissions of domestic life, mining the rich mineral beneath the sediments of familial discord. In this first volume of a promised trilogy, Franzen is in rarified peak form." ― Booklist (starred review) “Franzen pens complex, densely layered characters . . . with America’s heartland functioning as a stage upon which the tension between enduring values and societal change is enacted . . . Franzen is keenly aware that human struggle is defined by understanding and acceptance and that it is generational, ideas he admirably captures here.” ― Library Journal (starred review) “[Franzen] does not disappoint . . . [He writes] with penetrating insight delivered through incisive sentences . . . I can’t wait to read what happens next.” ― BookPage (starred review)

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (October 5, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374181179
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374181178
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.92 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.17 x 1.72 x 8.65 inches
• #1,751 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #5,345 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• #5,409 in American Literature (Books)

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About the author

Jonathan franzen.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels--Purity, Freedom, The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion--and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away, How to Be Alone, and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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The Church of Jonathan Franzen

By Kathryn Schulz

A rabbi, a preacher, and a drug dealer walk into a Christmas party. This is not the setup to a joke; it is the setup to a pivotal scene in “ Crossroads ,” Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. The drug dealer is Perry, the fifteen-year-old son of Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of the First Reformed Church of New Prospect, Illinois. That makes him a P.K., or preacher’s kid, a famously fraught identity that some people navigate by striving to be good enough to live up to the accompanying expectations, and others by becoming conspicuously, defiantly bad. When we first meet Perry, he is stranded between the two options: brilliant but troubled, he has lately resolved to quit doing drugs, be nicer to his sister, and generally become a better person, but he is finding the whole idea of goodness difficult to comprehend.

At the party—an annual interfaith affair for the religious leaders of New Prospect—he convinces himself, through a brief bargaining session with his better angels, that drinking is not technically a contravention of his resolution, then covertly helps himself to a generous amount of gløgg, the potent Scandinavian drink on offer. While the booze works its way into his system, he strikes up a conversation with a rabbi and a pastor about a question that is much on his mind: whether an action can be considered good if the actor knows that by taking it he will gain either pleasure or advantage. Is a godly man truly good if “he enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life”? Is Perry himself good if he can’t stop his busy mind from tallying up the ancillary benefits of doing the right thing? The rabbi and the pastor are pleasantly surprised that a teen-ager is interested in such morally substantive matters, but the hostess, familiar with Perry and therefore suspicious of him, tries to steer him away from the clergy. Perry, blood alcohol surging, promptly explodes; as the party falls silent, his mother steps into the room. “This is what I’m talking about,” he exclaims. “No matter what I do, it’s always me who’s in the wrong.” Drunk, desperate, ashamed, he bursts into tears, and into the only apologia available to him: “I’m doing the best I can!”

Perry is not the only character in “Crossroads” who is struggling to understand the nature of virtue. The Hildebrandt family occupies a milieu—churchgoing, suburban, Midwestern—in which worth is measured according to “the all-important niceness spectrum,” niceness being that quality Perry fears: a simulacrum of goodness that may or may not have its substance. Within this milieu, Russ is known for being upstanding, and his wife, Marion, for being “Very Nice,” but both of them, together with three of their four children, are doing some notably Not Nice things.

This distinction between real and ersatz virtue is the central preoccupation of “Crossroads”—so much so that Franzen, who historically wears his thematic concerns on his dust sleeve (“ Freedom ,” “ Purity ,” “ The Corrections ”), might have titled this new novel “Goodness,” if the word didn’t double as an awkward exclamation. It is true that “Crossroads” is also concerned, like every Franzen novel, with the makeup and the breakdown of American families. And it is concerned, too, with the issues implied by the title he gave it: those moments in the lives of individuals and in the history of a nation when stark choices with permanent consequences must be made. But, deliberately and otherwise, the book returns again and again to the same question: What does it mean—for a person and, in a different sense, for a novel—to be good?

“Crossroads” is structured chronologically, around the liturgical calendar, and opens in the season of Advent. But Russ Hildebrandt is not waiting to celebrate the birth of his Saviour. He is waiting for an opportunity to convert his adulterous feelings for Frances Cottrell, a pretty young widow in his congregation, into an actual affair.

Raised Mennonite and still devoted to God and at least nominally to family, Russ is not a serial philanderer; Marion was his first love and remains the only woman he has ever slept with. But, twenty-five years and four children later, time—which, for the families in a Franzen novel, is almost always a corrosive rather than an adhesive force—has worn their marriage away to a dull cycle of aversion and routine, and his eye has lately wandered. Marion knows this, but she also knows what Russ does not: that lurking behind their relationship is a lie she told at its very beginning, and lurking behind that lie is the conviction that she is a fundamentally bad person, one who deserves forgiveness from neither her husband nor her God.

The Hildebrandts, in other words, are a nuclear family chiefly in the fissile sense, rendered unstable and explosive by reactive elements at the core. Only the youngest, Judson, seems (at first) unscathed by this ambient volatility; at nine years old, he is still possessed of a kind of Rousseauian purity. Not so the eldest child, Clem, lately deflowered and on his way back from college to inform his parents that he has dropped out, given up his deferment, and notified the local draft board that he is ready to ship out to Vietnam. His sister, Becky, the social queen of her high school, is newly in love, newly interested in Jesus, and on the verge of thwarting every expectation that anyone ever had for her future. As for Perry, the second youngest: Clem ignores him, Judson worships him, Marion believes that he is a genius while worrying that he has inherited her family’s troubled genes, and Russ, who fears Perry’s intellect, generally tries to avoid him. That leaves Becky with—in her opinion—the only clear-eyed view of her younger brother: as an expert manipulator, too slick by half, with a surfeit of brains and a deficit of soul. But Perry himself shares her view, though he is unsure whether he is responsible for his faults or has been condemned by fate to being an “evil, selfish worm.” Either way, he believes that he is intrinsically bad, as Marion believes that she is—in contrast to Russ and Becky, who remain convinced of their own fundamental goodness, no matter what they actually do.

Thus do the Hildebrandts enter the Christmas season of 1971. The events of that season and those which follow are told by Franzen, a master of free indirect discourse, via a series of baton handoffs among the five older members of the family. What we learn from Russ sets the stage for the intramarital and intergenerational breakdown to come: three years earlier, he suffered a grand “humiliation” in which he was ousted—in his telling, owing to excess piety and insufficient hipness—from the youth group at First Reformed. That group is called Crossroads—a name with just the right degree of clever-hokey Christian plausibility. It is now led by Russ’s nemesis, the adored youth pastor, Rick Ambrose, under whose guidance it has become vaguely cultlike: low on recognizable Christianity, high on the repeated baring of adolescent souls. Its members speak “from the heart,” offer one another “strokes” for affirmation, sing along to the strumming of acoustic guitars, and gather around a single candle flame to share their feelings.

Much of this world will be familiar to readers of “ The Discomfort Zone ,” a 2006 collection of essays (some of which appeared in this magazine), in which Franzen describes his youthful participation in a similar organization. And indeed the depiction of Crossroads has the uncomfortable accuracy, simultaneously comic and cringeworthy, of a particularly unfortunate childhood photograph. But one can as easily mine one’s past for clay as for gold, and at first glance the goings on at a Christian youth group in the nineteen-seventies seem less like the stuff of serious literary fiction than like the premise of the newest movie from Christopher Guest.

As it turns out, though, Crossroads is classic Franzen fodder: a slice of suburban life ripe not for satire but for the far deadlier scrutiny that comes from taking it seriously. He shows us the group as it is experienced by his characters, each of whom grants it outsized importance. For Clem, Crossroads matters because he was present for Russ’s humiliation and promptly lost all respect for him. For Becky, it matters partly because joining a Christian youth group is a morally unimpeachable way of rejecting her father, and partly because she was encouraged to join by the young man with whom she has fallen in love: Tanner Evans, an aspiring musician whose band is a Crossroads mainstay. For the addiction-prone Perry, who grasps that, in the economy of the group, “public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval,” it matters because he craves that approval like a drug.

Ultimately, this oozy adolescent experience is no less important to the two grownup Hildebrandts. For Russ, Crossroads matters because, having semi-reconciled with Ambrose, he has invited himself along on the group’s annual service trip to a Navajo reservation in Arizona, where he hopes to seduce Frances, one of the trip’s parent chaperones. For Marion, it matters because, while Russ is away, she plans to visit an old flame in Los Angeles and commit a little adultery of her own.

That service trip, which takes place during spring break, advances the time line of “Crossroads” from Advent to Eastertide, and propels the Hildebrandts from mere dysfunction to outright disaster. Yet despite that catastrophe, and earlier ones in the history of Marion Hildebrandt, “Crossroads” does not offer a theodicy—an explanation of why a benevolent and all-powerful God would permit the existence of suffering. Franzen is not interested, here, in why bad things happen to good people. He is interested in why people perceive themselves as good or bad, often despite ample evidence to the contrary, and why people who are at least intermittently trying to be good do terrible things.

These questions are among the fundamental concerns of moral philosophy, but they are also some of the oldest preoccupations of fiction, which was once far more overtly concerned with goodness than it is today. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels are full of naïve young protagonists striking off on journeys of ethical maturation, and omniscient narrators opining on virtue and meting out reward or punishment to characters based on their moral worth. Novels were judged in part on their promotion of rectitude—“Madame Bovary” caused a scandal because Flaubert failed to explicitly condemn the adultery he depicted—and authors, accordingly, used their work as vehicles for advancing ethical ideals. Consider Dickens, making the case again and again for selflessness over greed, or Austen, parsing the distinctions between dignity and vanity, discernment and snobbery, amiability and ingratiation—those everyday virtues, at times almost indistinguishable from manners, that make sharing one’s life with others either pleasant or insufferable.

Eventually, this tradition waned, partly because of the rise of modernism, with its greater interest in consciousness than in conscience, and partly because of increasing skepticism toward conventional notions of goodness. But Franzen is an admirer and an inheritor of this earlier mode of the novel, and he nods to it in his new one. “Crossroads” is the first volume in a trilogy called “A Key to All Mythologies,” a title he borrowed from George Eliot’s “ Middlemarch ,” perhaps the most deft and persuasive work to emerge from the long history of fiction as an instrument of moral instruction. The original “Key to All Mythologies” was an omnibus treatise on world religions, destined to remain unfinished, that was the life’s work of the dreary old clergyman Edward Casaubon, who marries the book’s moral and actual heroine: the much younger Dorothea Brooke, who realizes too late that his mind is no match for his ambition.

Given that the phrase “Key to All Mythologies” is now inseparably associated with misguided and unrealized ambition, it’s unclear, in Volume I, why Franzen has decided to use it. Presumably he is not just winking at his Casaubon-like status in certain corners of literary culture: cranky, condescending, out of touch, always at work on that other impossible achievement, the Great American Novel. Nor are there any obvious literary progeny of “Middlemarch” here, though Marion, like Dorothea, is markedly smarter, more socially astute, and more theologically sophisticated than her husband, and has faithfully rewritten his sermons throughout their marriage.

What seems most likely is that the reference is meant to draw our attention to the fatal limitations of totalizing theories of religion or anthropology—of any attempt to unify the wildly varied ways that people justify their actions, measure their own worth, and make sense of existence. In the course of Franzen’s novel, we watch the Hildebrandts pursue such different means of doing all this that they collectively reflect the fracturing of any kind of shared understanding of virtue in modern life. Marion tries psychotherapy; Clem rejects introspection in favor of action; Russ turns to volunteer work; Becky experiments with romantic love and love of God; and Perry tries logical deduction, will power, and cocaine.

None of these efforts are particularly successful—but then, with the exception of the cocaine, none of them are wholly unsuccessful, either. Franzen is not Dickens, which I mean here as a compliment; he does not do moral pageantry, doling out impossible quantities of virtue to some characters while withholding it entirely from others. Instead, in “Crossroads,” the desire to be good is broadly shared but alarmingly ephemeral, dissolving with equal ease in the face of forces as potent as addiction (for Perry), as insidious as self-pity (for Russ), and as trivial as a traffic jam (for Marion). Yet it is also strangely persistent, readily rekindled by an encounter with another person, an experience of the ineffable, or the banked heat of some mysterious inner fire. This combination of fragility and tenacity renders the old-fashioned question of virtue interesting again, by rendering it suspenseful. Like real people, the characters in the book go to therapy every week and attend worship services every weekend because their will to be good is in constant need of renewal, which is to say that it is in constant jeopardy.

If this were the only question about goodness animating “Crossroads”—basically, “Will it prevail?”—the novel would be old-fashioned indeed, and also almost certainly not by Jonathan Franzen. What makes the book distinctly part of his canon, with its ambient atmosphere of self-absorption, self-loathing, and disaffection, is not the question of whether virtue can triumph but the meta-question that Perry asks: Does real goodness even exist, or is it always compromised by the dividends it pays to the do-gooder?

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To ethicists, that is a question about whether right thinking matters more than right action—that is, whether we should judge people’s goodness based on what they are doing or on why they are doing it. Most of them agree that motives matter: in a perfect world, we would all do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. But we don’t, and Franzen repeatedly exploits the gap between what we do and why we do it—which, in fiction, is the gap between plot and character. Many of the book’s crises are set into motion by allegedly high-minded decisions: Becky shares an unexpected financial windfall with her siblings; Clem gives up his deferment to keep someone from a less privileged background from taking his place in Vietnam; Russ, in his youth, leaves a cushy administrative job to help out on a Navajo reservation. Yet we know that Becky is not so much generous as invested in feeling superior; that Clem wants to spite his father, a former conscientious objector who opposes the current war; and that Russ’s volunteer work has long been more helpful to him than to its intended beneficiaries.

Do these motives matter to the rest of the story? You can imagine. In the end, the ostensibly good acts in “Crossroads” are only slightly less disastrous than the overtly bad ones, and virtue seems less like a living possibility than like a trap or a phantasm. There is no Dorothea here, no steadfast moral center to rouse our admiration. Instead, the most generous take on human nature to be found within “Crossroads,” and the final summation of all its characters, might be that desperate claim Perry makes at the Christmas party, rendered strikingly pitiable by how sincere it is, and how little it avails: “I’m doing the best I can!”

It would be a mistake to conclude, from all this talk of virtue, that “Crossroads” is a solemn book. It is, on the contrary, a breezily written family drama with plenty of plot and a touch of melodrama; on the map of literary culture, it shares a border with the beach read. As befits a novel of middle-class suburban life, its crises are insular: a kid isn’t living up to his potential, a woman is unhappy about her weight, a teen-ager has a crush on someone else’s boyfriend. Even the Vietnam backdrop bows to this insistent banality: by 1972, the war is beginning to wind down, and the draft board isn’t interested in Clem, who ends up going to Louisiana and working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

These everyday stakes are not a problem; most of life is banal unless it is happening to you. But some part of Franzen—the part that believes in social novels and novels of ideas, and, no doubt, also the grimacing pessimist of his nonfiction, who feels so much despair for the state of the world—is forever turning outward, toward the grand sweep of history and the prevailing customs and troubles of our era. Sometimes his attempts to square those two scales are successful. Without manipulation or overreach, he nicely instantiates in the characters of “Crossroads” a series of larger phenomena: the generational fraying of the nineteen-sixties and seventies; the emergence of women’s liberation, slightly too late for Marion’s cohort of mid-century mothers and wives; the way mainstream Protestantism lost traction with young people precisely by its eagerness to retain them (Rick Ambrose, defending the absence of anything identifiably Christian in his youth group, weakly observes that, “obviously, the hope is that everyone will find their way to an authentic faith”); and, especially, the particular kinds of trouble that befall suburban Wasps whose lives have everything but meaning.

Moreover, in a first for Franzen, whose characters of color have historically been few and dreadful, the extreme discomfort of scenes set on Chicago’s South Side reads less like authorial limitation than like literary realism. Russ, in his volunteer work there, displays the awkward mix of self-consciousness, self-congratulation, and obliviousness emblematic of white liberals struggling to reconcile their awareness of racial inequality with their sense of themselves as the good guys. And, to the bit part of a Black preacher, Franzen grants an interiority not interested in sharing itself with Russ, and an external reality, in the form of pastoral obligations, that the white volunteers are just as likely to complicate as to improve—another, more fraught iteration of the question of whether our intentions or our actions matter more when we try to do the right thing.

Sometimes, though, Franzen’s outward impulse leads him away from his own strengths. At heart, the human scale to which he is most acutely attuned is the familial—taken together, his novels amount to one long elaboration on the theme of Every Unhappy Family Is Unhappy in Its Own Way—and the forces he channels best are centripetal: he is at his finest when writing about the Midwest, the middle class, midlife crises, middlingness in general. The farther he ventures from all that, the shakier his plots become, the less organically they arise from his characters. Thus the otherwise effective spring-break trip is marred by a secondary tragedy on the Navajo reservation involving strip mining, which seems imported less from Arizona than from “Freedom,” where it didn’t work, either. Similarly, toward the end of “Crossroads,” Clem vanishes to rural Peru, for no reason except that Franzen routinely sends one character per book on an ill-advised adventure in a developing nation, in service to some woes-of-globalism subplot. In such moments, the characters seem subservient to a set of ideas, which is the problem with Clem more generally: his fall from diligent student to aimless drifter is less a plausible personal trajectory than a convenient embodiment of the generational archetype of the dropout. Even Judson feels more like a real person, despite having almost no role in the book beyond quietly absorbing his family’s trauma.

That lacuna is effective, in that it makes the reader look forward to hearing from the youngest Hildebrandt in the rest of the trilogy. Elsewhere, though, the spectre of those future novels does not serve the current one as well. In general, Franzen is good at endings; a surprising feature of his writing, given how consumed it is with dysfunction and disaffection, is how regularly it finds its way toward tenderness in the final pages. But the pacing is off at the end of “Crossroads.” Although most of the book lingers on just a handful of days during Christmastime of 1971 and Holy Week of 1972, its final stretch feels rushed. A couple of years pass with no more than a summary of the momentous events that filled them, and the conclusion is really just a cliffhanger; the novel does not so much end as trade on our knowledge that the story itself is far from over.

Yet here is the thing about “Crossroads”: when I got to that unsatisfying ending, I found myself irritated less by its shortcomings than by the fact that I couldn’t read those other volumes right away. The experience brought to mind E. M. Forster’s maxim about the novel: “ Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next.”

By that metric, “Crossroads” plainly succeeds—yet that metric does not distinguish Jonathan Franzen from James Patterson. Still, the two are plainly distinct, which raises the question of what, other than suspense, makes Franzen’s new novel so compelling. That’s tricky to answer, because what’s true of ethics is also true of aesthetics: certain forms of goodness are strangely elusive. And Franzen, more than most contemporary writers of his calibre, operates in this covert mode almost exclusively. In the years since the publication of “The Corrections,” his prose has grown looser and laxer; never a showy author, he now sometimes scarcely seems like a good one. He has become so assertively styleless that he appears to have deemed linguistic pleasure not only inferior to but anathema to all other literary aims. Whole chapters—almost whole books—go by without a beautiful line or an arresting image. Yet I still remember the description, from “The Corrections,” of thunderstorms piling up across the Midwest—“like big spiders in a little jar”—and I miss the writer who conjured that vision. Unlike Perry, in other words, Franzen does not always seem to be doing the best he can. That impression is enhanced by the unmistakable fact that, from time to time, he towers above his own work. I don’t just mean that “The Corrections” was the best of his novels; I mean that at some point within each novel he demonstrates the full, showstopping range of what he is capable of doing.

These bursts of excellence take two forms, the first having to do with his characters. Not all of them are convincing, although I’ve never agreed with the claim that Franzen is bad at writing women. (Yes, all the female characters in “Freedom” are weak, but so are all the men.) But when he does succeed with characters he succeeds dramatically, lighting up their inner lives, in the manner of police stations and emergency rooms, with accurate, unflattering fluorescence. Think of Enid, the matriarch of “The Corrections,” who presides over her difficult husband’s decline into dementia while desperately yearning for one more family Christmas with her adult children gathered together in their childhood home. She is needy, maddening, familiar, sharp, utterly consistent, in urgent relationship with the constraints of her gender, her marriage, and her era, and, all told, one of the truly great creations of twenty-first-century literature.

In “Crossroads,” the standout characters are Becky, Perry, and Marion. We watch Becky’s moral formation almost in real time—under the triple influences of newfound piety, a narcissistic aunt, and her family’s sudden implosion—and the result is flatly terrifying. By the end of the book, she appears to have turned to ice, complete with an inner Zamboni to keep her maximally smooth; nothing can mar her perfect self-righteousness, and it is to Franzen’s great credit that she made my skin crawl to a degree usually achievable only by someone from whom you have repeatedly walked away fuming. Perry, meanwhile, is terrifying in a different way: we are scared not of him but for him. A teen-age drug addict with a troubled mind, a grave lack of adult oversight, and ruinous instincts, he is headed for disaster from the beginning, yet I can think of no other character in the Franzen universe who receives such tender treatment.

Together with Marion, Perry also illuminates the second of Franzen’s erratic but astonishing gifts, which is for the creation of the perfect set piece. There is at least one of these in almost all the novels—a moment when some inner gear shifts dramatically upward and we are delivered into a stretch of literature transcendent in its wonderfulness. In “The Corrections,” that moment comes when Chip, in childhood, is left alone at the dining-room table until he finishes his dinner. All around him, the other members of the family retreat to their various corners of the house, his mother willfully and his father accidentally forgetting about him, while time simultaneously slows to a crawl, reduced to Chip’s microscopic contemplation of the pattern on a placemat and the ancient boogers stuck to the underside of the table, and stretches forward indefinitely into the future—because, as Franzen understands, once you have sat alone at age seven in front of a plate of cold liver and mashed rutabaga for long enough, some part of you will be sitting there for the rest of your life.

That scene is representative of what makes these set pieces work: it combines maximum insight into a character’s psychology with maximum narrative reach, both spatial and temporal—a different kind of successful squaring of scales. In “Crossroads,” the analogous scene with Marion lasts for sixty pages and is set in a therapist’s office, a convenient place for both elongating time and accessing interiority. In the course of it, we learn what her therapist, interestingly, does not: as a very young woman, she had an affair with a married man that resulted in a psychotic break, a pregnancy, and an abortion, which she could afford only through a bargain so Faustian that she sincerely describes its purveyor as Satan.

It is difficult to know which is more gripping: this backstory or Marion’s take on it, which is shaped by the potency of her belief in guilt and sin. Her insistence that she is responsible for some of the terrible things that have happened to her dismays her therapist, who suggests, predictably, that she should forgive herself and feel angry at the perpetrators instead. But Marion, who does not regard anger as benign, is refreshingly unpersuaded: “I know you think it’s sick to blame myself, but spiritually I think it’s healthier.” Gradually, we learn that the litany of things for which she blames herself tracks backward along a dark red line from Perry’s fragile mind all the way to her father’s long-ago suicide. And all the while Becky is heading to a Crossroads concert to publicly declare her love to Tanner Evans, Perry is taking Judson to that ill-fated Christmas party, and Russ, who should be at the party as well, is getting into a fender bender in the increasingly heavy snow with his would-be mistress beside him in the car.

Three hundred more pages and thirty years elapse before Marion’s crisis is echoed by another, and we watch as Perry, now in the grips of a full-blown addiction, descends into catastrophe in the Arizona desert. Franzen’s narrative dexterity is never more evident in the book than in the widening chasm between Perry’s inner experience and what we see happening to him there, and the resulting story line is the opposite of Clem’s: meticulously constructed, emotionally convincing, simultaneously suspenseful and inevitable. But it is also successful for a subtler reason. A breakdown in the past, a breakdown in the present; two parents each abandoning a child in order to pursue an affair; a climactic week unfolding with exact, unforced choreography across multiple time zones and six family members: it turns out that “Crossroads,” which reads so speedily it can seem almost slapdash, is carefully wrought, its neatly balanced architecture another clandestine source of its power.

“Crossroads” is an imperfect novel that is nonetheless a great one, its inner operations lofting it high above its flaws. Only the rest of the trilogy can tell us whether the same will hold for any of its characters. Throughout the book, Franzen fixes his gaze on bad decisions, bad faith, the incremental setting in motion of disaster. Ultimately, though, he seems more invested in what happens after all those calamitous choices are made—in their practical consequences but also in who offers forgiveness and who withholds it when the will to be good has failed. The deepest form of suspense at work in his novel is driven not by its plot but by a kind of moral uncertainty. At its conclusion, almost every character is at his or her worst; the question it leaves us with is whether any of them can ever be better. ♦

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