Review: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

"paradise isn't eternal contentment, it's more like there's something eternal about being content" - franzen, purity

Jonathan Franzen writes moral novels about American families. His breakout novel The Corrections was a deep dive into the pathologies of the average midwest middle class family. It was very successful because no one had done that before, or at least as simultaneously empathetically and vitriolically. His follow-up was Freedom, which  takes on the pathologies of a midwest progressive liberal family. That was a little less successful because that subject is less universal and more cynical. Purity was his next novel, which diverged from the prior two; instead of taking on a nuclear family it takes on a mother-daughter pair, who live in isolation from the normal American world. It dives into foreign countries, including East Germany during the fall of the Soviet Union, and a pseudo WikiLeaks organization headquartered in South America, and Franzen is understandably more out of his element. Reading Purity in 2017 as a young idealist, I personally really resonated with the themes of this book: the idea that purity is both a rigid idealist heuristic that prevents real world progress from being made, and a shining beacon for the future showing where real world progress should go, but I think now I can recognize objectively it’s a weaker book.

The Corrections (2001) was seen as a herald to Bush America book, and Freedom (2010) was seen as a herald to Obama America book, which I think is a fair assessment of both. Purity (2015) is kind of a bookend for the Obama era, very frankly critical of its failures to achieve the ideals it set out for itself. The world since Purity’s publication in 2015 is very different though. Thankfully, for Franzen’s 2021 novel Crossroads, he didn’t try to incorporate the Trump COVID culture war world into the book in any meaningful way: he retreated to the year 1970.

Other Franzen books are sprawling stories that jump around through decades, featuring long continuous narrative from a single character in a single point in time, and then leaving that character and switching to another, possibly to never see the first again. In Crossroads, Franzen tries to return to a traditional chapter-based novel structure, still alternating point-of-view characters, but now in sequential narrative order at a single point in time. He’s clearly very inspired by Dickens and other Victorian writers here, although he still gets into a few lengthy Franzen-style character dives. Crossroads explicitly pays to homage to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, by calling itself the first book in a series titled “A Key to All Mythologies”. In Middlemarch, stuffy old religious idealist Casaubon isolates himself from the world to write the massive tome “A Key To All Mythologies”, which purports to synthesize the key teachings from all world religions. Casaubon dies before that project is finished. Franzen is being self-deprecating in titling his trilogy that, and it’s a funny in-joke, but I think his goal is to write a modern American novel as accessible and timeless as Middlemarch. 

So, Franzen returned to his most successful subject matter: writing about the normal midwest American family. Crossroads is set around the Hildebrant nuclear family in the Chicago suburbs at the turn of the 1970s, in a town that Franzen cutely names “New Prospect”. Relative to his other books, he ages down the children in this book to high school and college age. The characters in this book are some of Franzen’s sharpest. The Hildebrant father, Russ, is a protestant pastor caught in a standoff with another pastor who hijacked his youth group, named Crossroads, into a unique sort of hippie christianity, while Russ also lusts after a younger divorced woman at his church. Marion, the mother, regresses from her protestant mom selfless motherhood baking cookies driving the kids around phase into her catholic egirl smoking cigs having eating disorder phase, obsessing over a man that traumatized her when she was a teenager. Their oldest son Clem, is attending University of Illinois, and has a sexual awakening and following sexual rejection that mingles with a mental oedipal triangle he has with his father and sister, and causes him to register to fight in the Vietnam War. Becky, the oldest daughter, is a very popular high school senior, who joins the youth group Crossroads, dates a hometown celebrity musician famous in the group, and eventually becomes teen-pregnant with his child. The third Hildebrant child, Perry, is a younger highschooler, and feels more like a David Foster Wallace character than a Franzen one. He is inquisitive and smart, but so smart that he has to retreat to various drugs to escape the questions he runs into, while also wanting to reject the drugs and live a life of kindness, rapidly oscillating in mental health throughout the book. The youngest son, Judson, has no point of view chapters: he is a saintly younger boy that the rest of the family, especially Perry, anchors on.

For Russ and Marion, there are a couple of lengthy flashbacks each that sometimes drag, but it is mostly a continuous narrative with each character interacting with the others frequently. The middle of the book’s snowy Christmas section, with each Hildebrant going through various turning points on a single winter night, is extremely well-done, especially the way the narration is so deftly navigated between the various chracters, and makes for some of Franzen’s strongest narrative writing ever.

What makes Crossroads such an interesting book from a thematic perspective is the ideals of the Crossroads youth group. They strongly preach christian kindness, but also confrontation and honesty in a hippie way. If you have a problem with someone, in Crossroads, you immediately talk with them about it, rather than let it fester, and the characters in this book mostly do that, which is a big divergence from the problems that fester for decades in The Corrections. For example, at the start of the book, Becky and Perry realize that they don’t have a good relationship, and Becky is extremely honest with Perry as to why, telling him that she feels he thinks he’s too smart to respect her, and Perry takes that criticism to heart and tries to change. The tragedy of the confrontations in Crossroads is that they don’t really change anything; Perry and Becky’s relationship worsens in the long term. 

There are so many sad moments of partial conversion in this book for each character. Perry repeatedly tries to quit drugs, but cannot succeed. He tries to sell the remainder of his marijuana to a friend, who doesn’t really want to buy it, but eventually accepts and then Perry regrets making the moment transactional. In one of the saddest scenes of the book, the Hildebrant parents are not showing up at home to the Christmas Eve dinner party they asked Perry and his siblings to go to, so in a show of adulthood Perry takes Judson there with just the two of them, but Perry ends up anxious, getting drunk on eggnog, caught by the homeowners, and embarrassed in front of the friends of his parents. He then regresses back into his old habits, goes into harder drug use, and is eventually institutionalized. Becky, drawn to the ideals of the Crossroads group, has marijuana for the first time and then has a moment of spiritual conversion before a decorative wall cross where she repeatedly promises to Jesus “I’ll be your girl”. Becky’s moment of conversion goes somewhere, she becomes sweet and kind to those around her, but she loses her ambition to attend a liberal arts school, becomes teen pregnant, and despite her kindness she rejects her parents because of the overkindness that they show to Perry once he is institutionalized. Clem’s moment of conversion is a failure: he wants to escape the world by registering for the Vietnam War, but the war ends and there is no foolish cause for him to fight in anymore, so he works in New Orleans and later South America as a manual laborer in shame. Marion’s conversion happened before the events of the book, when she changed from deeply depressed twenty year old Catholic to a faithful housewife upon her marriage to Russ, and it was successful for a long time, but that conversion is undermined when she begins to crave a return to the drama and dignity of her old life. Russ undergoes various conversions: he finally takes his moment of bravery and talks to the pastor who took his youth group, but he does it because the woman in his church that he’s pursuing with asks him to, and it’s an unfulfilling confrontation for him where the other pastor cedes no ground to Russ and somewhat humiliates him. Russ finally does consummate his desire with the woman from his church, despite alternating times of swearing his pursuit off, but it’s an unfulfilling and terrifying consummation, like the end of Rohmer’s Love In The Afternoon, and he retreats back to Marion.

I read this book a month ago when it released, and really wanted to quickly write a review, but I have struggled to put this book all together into one coherent reading. It’s worsened by the fact that there are two sequels that aren’t released yet that will take these characters in yet-unknown directions. Along with these sad moments of failed conversion though are many optimistic moments where you really do believe the characters could follow through with the ideals to which they strive to hold themselves. Franzen seems earnestly to believe some of the christianity in this book, which is an interesting turn for him, but he’s also very critical of religion and especially the protestant culture. It’s also a very cold and wintery book, but it can be wintery in the sense of the approaching holidays as well as in the pain of the cold and snow. The answer is probably in my favorite quote from Purity: “Paradise isn’t eternal contentment, it’s more like there’s something eternal about being content.” Franzen expands on that in this book, discussing how in the Bible, Jesus frames heaven as something you do in the present, not a permanent resting place after death. Franzen believes in the eternal purification of these moments of conversion, even if unfulfilled in the permanent arc of life. Not every moment can be ecstatic moments of permanent self-confidence and peace, but those few that you get are very pretty. 

Would I recommend you read Crossroads? I would 100% recommend it to myself if I hadn’t read it. In my opinion it’s by far Franzen’s best novel, wrapping together my personal favorite aspects of The Corrections and Purity and showing real narrative maturity. The vitriol is way turned down from his previous books, and he seems to genuinely love the characters despite their clear flaws. I do struggle to recommend Crossroads to random people I talk to in the real world though, because the subject matter is kind of abrasive. On the one hand there’s very frequent discussion of religion that you have to take seriously and be willing to engage with critically, and on the other there are a ton of sex scenes. I’ve always said that Franzen is too edgy for NPR people and too NPR for edgy people, and this book is not an exception. He writes in a very strange space, and it’s sad because I think he’s a nice important middle ground. I guess if you’re reading it it’s for you, so I’m glad Franzen is writing these books for me.