Crossroads: A Novel

Franzen doesn’t so much create original stories anymore; he perfects ones that exist, and tweaks makeshift ones into masterpieces of fiction. He’s never better than when he focuses on family and dramatic domestic dynamics. CROSSROADS, which takes place in the 1970s, centers on pastor Russ Hildebrandt and his more Catholic wife, Marion, one of the most memorable female protagonists in eons (on that level of intensity). If for no other reason, read this to meet Marion. These are key archetypes and themes, and also convoluted and Shakespearean with a (tragi-) comedy of errors. Existential characters seek freedom from contradictions by adhering to Christian doctrine--or rejecting it.The title Crossroads could be called Blurred Boundaries. Russ and Marion and their four children--Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson--are all highly intelligent and distinctively damaged. Generally, they live with poor boundaries. Reader, you’ll relate. Franzen doesn’t break walls, or puncture through ceilings with plot, but he will dazzle you with the authenticity of Marion, Russ, and three of their four children. Judson is the youngest child and the only one not fleshed out. (I think it is purposeful.) Depth of character is Franzen’s wheelhouse, and this narrative (a genre that he invented or at least contoured for the modern era) illustrates how lives bleed into each other, and who we are willing to discard on our way to become authentic and happy (or selfish and charlatan). Franzen practically created the modern domestic drama, and now he’s rearranging and adding the complication of religion.Crossroads is the youth group connected to the First Reformed church, where Russ Hildebrandt preaches (but he’s associate, not the lead). Rick Ambrose is the young, attractive, and hip new head counselor at Crossroads. His teenagers at the center admire, respect, and practically worship him. Ambrose and Russ’s antipathy toward each other creates much of this novel’s suspense; the roots of the feud are gradually revealed. The torture for Russ never stops, despite the fact that he created this quagmire.Franzen shows us religion (Christianity) through a laid back (not extremist) and compassionate lens. I’m an atheist and yet I was not turned off by First Reformed’s guiding principles and gentle approach to parishioners. You don’t have to agree with its doctrine to still respect the even-handed patronage (However incongruously, there’s still a struggle with hypocrisy by those that preach and parent).Crossroads is the first in a trilogy, which will likely take us through to the present, and possibly beyond, to a dystopian-esque near-future. The trilogy itself is allegedly named, A Key to All Mythologies, and I’m stumped how that fits in with Crossroads, the novel (which is assuredly fitting). Every primary character in this novel will stand at a personal crossroads. Some, like son Perry, will bring you to your knees. His infernal fall from child to enfant terrible troubled my nightly dreams as I continued to read.Romantic Love, sister/brother love, honor, addiction, betrayal, greed, adultery, rape, understanding, generosity, self-pity--all and more are explored. “It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins… None was deadlier.”Despite the degeneracy of a few characters, Franzen also counters the ugly with the softest, gentlest, and most forgiving grace that I remember from his novels Purity, Freedom, and even Corrections. The author’s empathy for his characters’ worst behaviors is crucial to this story. That is what allows him to explore his cast so thoroughly, and the deviances so particularly. Every time a segment ends on a character, I start off the next part wishing to go back to the character I was reading. But, Franzen is so talented a portraitist that by the time that a few pages pass into another character, I’m hooked again. That’s a skill that Franzen confidently possesses.God as a concept has some Navajo power and the story’s spirituality often encompasses desire for wisdom and balance, which contrasts with those seven deadly sins-- gluttony, greed, lust, envy, pride, and the rest. At the crossroads of each Hildebrandt--individually and as a family, moderation is crushed by dangerous indulgences.Now I’m eager for book #2. All the characters have a lot more living to do, and I suspect that the sidelined or obscured ones will carry more weight in the second book, their story blossoming. If it weren’t for the fact of a trilogy, I would have criticized the ending for being rushed and unfinished, but Franzen is setting up for the next book. (Still, no excuse for a teensy-bit of a sloppy ending). All is forgiven, because I inhabited this book for many hours, and I’m still having a hard time transitioning to another book.Starting around the 400 mark, there were about fifty pages that don’t fit the style and tone of the rest of the book. That part is a chronicle of Russ and his history with the Navajo tribe, and also how he met Marion. The tone was dry and flat, but the prose was still beautiful. I wondered if he removed his original work and replaced it with what read like journalistic entries.Cutting to the deepest theme hits the bone. The seven deadly sins serve biblically for the story’s underpinnings and fear factor of bad behavior. Can a hypocritical pastor nevertheless be effective at work? While the parents are busy with their self-indulgent mid-life crises, the children are all over the map. (This is not to disparage Marion’s past trauma). Becky is a natural leader with her cool head. Clem is dear to Becky but otherwise distant from family. He’s older. Judson, the youngest, was more of a sketch at this point. Franzen also blends in existential philosophy into the narrative. As Spielberg keeps looking for a father in his art, Franzen will eternally seek answers about existence.Where do we learn morality? Of course, from reading a Jonathan Franzen novel! This is his best character study novel yet. Marion just blows me away. Read it, literature and character geeks!

That I closed the cover on this 580-page book and felt bereft might make you think one of two things: either that I absolutely have no life, or that I lucked out in choosing a book to further enrich my life. If you read Jonathan Franzen’s latest effort (purportedly the first in a planned trilogy), you’ll (hopefully) realize the latter thing about me (and hopefully about yourself!) would be true.Like several of his previous works, this family saga is set in a small Midwestern town not far from Chicago and focuses on a similar set of characters—a seemingly innocuous married couple: he a frustrated assistant minister, she a frumpy housewife, both saddled with their four kids, not a lot of money but a lot of unscratched itches and accumulated grievances. The timeframe is the early 1970s, though there are excursions to the pasts of both the principle characters.Franzen builds his story slowly but with assuredness. With so much going on, so many disparate threads to weave, you hardly realize that the action is coming to a boil. But it does, at various junctures in the book, and includes everything from rape, arson, abortion, thievery, adultery, drugs, and deceptions of all kinds.At its most serious center, the book is concerned with how people try to do good in their lives but inevitably come up against their own selfishness and myopic self-assorption. Their missteps are sometimes funny, sometimes exasperation and sometimes tragic. The title refers both to a ballad by one of Russ Hildebrandt’s favorite blues-men, Robert Johnson (he who legendarily sold his soul to the devil in exchange for learning to play the guitar), and to the youth group to which the Hildebrandt kids belong: Clem, whose relationship with his father is fraught; Becky, a high school beauty who knows it and thumbs her nose at her mother; Perry, a fifteen-year-old with a sky-high IQ who dangles on a knife’s edge; and Judson, a sweetheart of a child who helps sustain his mother at her most vulnerable.Each of these siblings undergoes a crisis and transformation that, when they come, leave you feeling they were both surprising and inevitable.How so? Mostly through Franzen’s apt juxtaposition between what characters are thinking and what they do or say, the ways in which their desires and disappointments come up against the strictures of family life or of their individual versions of “faith.” To be sure, as in Freedom and The Corrections, the author critiques them, but with humor and compassion as well as with a sharp eye.Consider how the dissatisfaction that dogs Russ Hildebrandt in his thirty-year marriage to Marion is described:It was unfair of him to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only now to feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty.Talk about unerring word choice: “unavailing“ as to makeup.Or, Marion’s revelation much later, when to fulfill her own long-nurtured fantasy, she pays a visit to a former lover on the West Coast:The man who answered was somewhat like Bradley but jowlier, sparser of hair, wider in the hips. He was wearing loose linen pants and an oversized sort of toreador blouse, halfway unbuttoned. Also a frightful pair of sandals. “My God,” he said. “It really is you.” She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. This led to a third and unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.Again, unerring word choice: the “frightful pair of sandals,” and then the “yellowed-toenails.”In addition, there is largely throughout the novel a careful balance of exposition, narrative thrust, and dialogue; time shifts that rarely jolt; and changes of scene that expand the characters‘ (and our own) perspective—from a contentious church retreat to Navajo territory, to a tawdry interlude in Rome, to a hard-scrabble jaunt to the Andes.Very little could I find to object to: perhaps one or two extraneous characters in Marion’s past in California; perhaps a tad too much on the bonding rituals of the church youth group. But these are minor quibbles.Since I’m also a novelist as well as a reader, I typically try to take a few notes about sentence structures, or tonal shifts, or transitions that work well in novels I read. I found something to ponder or emulate on almost every page of this one.Coming away from Crossroads, more enriched for sure, I keep wondering why this author hasn’t yet won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Franzen is acknowledged to be one of the top living novelists in America. In his “Crossroads” he has demonstrated yet again why he has retained this accolade for so long. A small number of readers loath him but I think the reason is that they just don’t get his style. Here is an author who can convey poignancy and humour in the space of a single sentence. When his characters compromise themselves and end up in a Catch 22 situation, Franzen is in the background with a wry smile saying “look what I got you into”. “Crossroads” is reputed to be the first in a trilogy and interestingly as you come to towards the denouement, you can see traces of where the story might go in Volume 2. He has adopted an interesting structure for this novel; The first 180 pages consist of five chapters, each one told from the point of view of a different character. Most of the action takes place over the course of one day. This allows him to do what he is best at; by means of a style that is both sharp and empathic he excavates deeply into the core of the persona of each of his main characters. For example, his depiction of the mental illness of Marion should be required reading for all psychiatric health professionals as it gives a fresh insight into what a breakdown must really feels like. It’s classic. The book can be read at so many levels; from a tour de force of literary style to a good story with a comic twist. However, and this seems a new departure for Franzen, it could be argued that he has tackled that fundamental moral and philosophical question “What does it really mean to be good”. The 1970’s context also adds colour and of course he is spot on in his understanding of the culture of that decade. Here is a novel that is vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. I felt cheated after 580 pages as I did not want it to end. Roll on Volume 2.

Franzen has lost the crucial skill of engaging the reader. It's a rule of fiction that a writer should show but not tell. Rules are made to be broken but not ignored. Franzen ignores the rule to the point of being tiresome.Fiction is as much about what a writer leaves out as what he puts in. What is left out is filled in by the reader's imagination and empathy with the characters. That is the magic of fiction.Franzen leaves out nothing about his characters. He describes every emotion, every thought about that emotion, every emotion about the thoughts about that emotion, every thought about the emotion about the thoughts about that emotion - ad infinitum.In a novel with a thin plot driven by characters we end up curiously uninvolved with those characters. This is because by describing the characters in every detail, Franzen leaves the reader no room to project into them, to provide for them the elements that the author may only suggest or briefly describe. In his endless dissection of the minds of very ordinary characters Franzen destroys the magic of fiction.

Reached the end, though don't know how or why. Author uses ten words when one would do, jumping confusingly from one time frame to another. This is supposedly the first in a trilogy...... well, count me out from the rest

Crossroads has finally broken my reading draught after some six months since The Lincoln Highway stole my Christmas. Again and again, it reminds me of The Ice Storm. Both set in the 1970s and in the heart of winter, both a certain type of American family, both dealing with the tension and fragility of family life and the threat that it might burst apart at the seams. After about 80 pages the world falls into place and you move through it and its characters seamlessly. Only the best writers are able to pull that off.I'm only half way through and I've already queued up Franzen's 'Freedom.'

Seventies american, mid-west religion, may not sound like a promising premise for a book, but like his other novels, Franzen gets underneath the american psyche and all the tortured guilt and anger of middle-class life to bring us another slow-paced, but utterly absorbing, morality tale. I thoroughly enjoyed it.