Over the past two decades, perhaps no novelist has created a profile like Jonathan Franzen. He’s written a couple of novels, including the National Book Award-winning The Corrections, a ton of essays, and managed to anger a great number of readers with controversial comments and opinions. His latest novel, Crossroads, the first of a planned trilogy on spirituality, is a return to Franzen at his strongest. The novel centers on the life of one family, the Hildebrandts, living in the suburbs of Chicago in the 1970s, whose life revolves around the local church, where the father Russ is a minister. Each member of the family is fighting their own battles, whether it be against each other or the tides of the society they’re living in, and struggling with conundrums both spiritual and mortal.
Russ spends his days stewing in the parsonage, angry with the charismatic younger pastor at his church who pushed him out of the youth group, Crossroads, and feeling more and more obsolete in his role. Russ struggles to connect with the church’s youth, and feels his mission to serve the poor and disadvantaged communities around Chicago has been squandered at his small suburban parish. As he laments his loss of vigor and diminishing importance, he begins contemplating an extramarital affair with a divorced parishioner, who occupies his every thought. Russ’s wife Marion, however, is not fooled by her husband’s aversions; she is depressed with their small life and repulsed by her husband’s lust for another woman. Marion at first appears to fit the mold of the 70s housewife, but her backstory reveals a complexity not previously hinted at in the early pages of the novel.
The children in the Hildebrandt family are dealing with quandaries no less serious than their parents: the eldest son Clem has dropped out of the University of Illinois after just a semester, and enlisted for service in Vietnam in an effort to anger his pacifist father. The daughter, Becky, a popular and high achieving high school-er, joins the youth group that her father has been excluded from, and immerses herself in the 70s youth culture that so terrifies him. Perry, the third son, also a member of the youth group, is plagued by moral questions surrounding his prolific drug usage, and begins dedicating himself to pursuing sobriety and a higher calling. But Perry’s slippery nature means that his efforts to work on his drug addiction are mostly half-baked, and his deception and lies only build over the course of the narrative.
The novel features a series of flashbacks to the past decades, and the backstories of Russ and Marion, which explain how the two ended up in such an unhappy marriage. Marion’s backstory is an absolutely fascinating probe into the life of a young woman abused by an older man, whose lifelong struggle with depression and manic episodes explain partially how she ends up married to a stable local pastor. The story of Russ and Marion’s vocation is where Franzen gives space to philosophical musings on the role of spirituality and its intersection with culture, where the novel feels truly grounded.
Crossroads is a classic Franzen novel in its complexities and focus on family, but what feels especially fresh about this novel is its grounded nature. The novel is not a critique of the current moment, as many of his work is, but a retrospective on a departed era, which gives it a sort of meditative quality. Many of the central questions of the novel are still unanswered in our modern age, but Franzen has so well conjured the period details of life in the 70s that the reader feels fully transported from the current moment. The novel is a meticulously crafted classic for our age, in which American life is so deftly skewered and laid bare, a rare achievement even for such a celebrated literary talent.
The novel stands out in Franzen’s impressive oeuvre perhaps most for its quietness. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Franzen explained, “I wanted to write a more quietly realistic story than I have attempted. I was trying to do a whole book where no one is famous and no one is rich. There is no one with any direct connection to major happenings, and no external craziness — no new technology, no earthquakes. Just straightforward realism, which was a challenge. The present is always tugging at my sleeve. So it made it easier that it was set in the past. But I also feel readers should draw their own conclusions. I actually don’t like to look back. The polarization in this country and where it comes from, I was writing about it in “Freedom.” That rage — that was obvious 10 years ago. I have been writing about Silicon Valley, I have been writing about social media. Why do that now?”