Crossroads: when Franzen is good, he’s very, very good

Crossroads

Author: Jonathan Franzen

ISBN-13: 978-0008308896

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Guideline Price: £20

Published a week before 9/11, it’s hard to believe that it’s been two decades since Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections, his National Book Award-winning meisterwerk. Through the story of the fictional Lambert family, The Corrections explored the excesses of 1990s America. It was followed by Freedom (2010), which covered the Bush era, and the more plot-driven Purity (2015), which took on digital surveillance.

The risk of the state-of-the-union novel is that it dates quickly. If The Corrections was a blockbuster despite Enid Lambert proclaiming that disasters “no longer seemed to befall the United States”, it was thanks to the strength of its characters, and perhaps a tinge of nostalgia for a time when the Twin Towers still stood.

By setting his latest novel in the early 1970s, Franzen circumvents this expiry-date problem. Or delays it, at least: despite claiming that Crossroads would be his last novel, it is the first volume of a trilogy that will span three generations, landing in the present. (Now 62, he admits that embarking on a three-book project is “like a middle finger to the fates”.) Franzen has subtitled the series “A Key to All Mythologies” – a wink to Casaubon’s pedantic project to tie all belief systems to Christianity in Middlemarch.

On the backdrop of the war in Vietnam and domestic crusades for social justice, at the crux of Crossroads is a family in crisis. Russ Hildebrandt, a 47-year-old father of four, is an associate pastor of a church in suburban Chicago. Blaming his wife, Marion, for dulling his “edge”, Russ courts danger by flirting with Frances, a recently widowed parishioner 10 years his junior. Both his sexuality and faith are inexorably entwined with shame, and he tries to frame his attraction in religious terms: “Was she the second chance that God was giving him?”

Youth group

Russ is still smarting from the humiliation of being ousted from Crossroads, a cultlike youth group led by Rick Ambrose, his now-nemesis. Ambrose’s emphasis on community over liturgy is catnip to teens. As we learned in Franzen’s 1996 memoir, The Discomfort Zone, he was involved in a similar group, Fellowship – “no definite article, no modifier” – as a teenager in St Louis, replete with trust exercises, “confrontations” and ploys for popularity.

To Russ’s chagrin, three of his children get involved with Crossroads (Judson, the youngest, is not yet of age). Now at university, the eldest, Clem, looks back on the group dynamics with disdain. Becky, the queen bee of her high school, joins Crossroads at the invitation of Tanner Evans, a “bell-bottomed dreamboat” with musical aspirations. Perry, a 15-year-old pothead, finds that “to be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant”. Hyperintelligent, he tries to manipulate the group’s currency of confession to inch towards the inner circle.

With Crossroads, his sixth novel, Franzen returns to a structure that has served him well: close third-person narratives that circle back to cover some of the same ground from varying points of view. Each family member arrives at (you guessed it) a crossroad. Racked with guilt about the inequity of the draft, Clem drops out of school to forfeit his student deferment. Becky grapples between loyalties in deciding how best to spend an inheritance left by her aunt. Perry’s drug habit escalates, culminating in calamity.

Extramarital fantasies

The biggest surprise is Marion: portrayed as a buzzkill by Russ, when things come to a head in their marriage, she jolts to life, relinquishing her role of thankless helpmeet and getting a job. Via secret sessions with a therapist, where she pockets samples of Quaaludes, we flash back to the dark past that she has hidden from her family. While Russ’s loins stir for Frances, Marion has extramarital fantasies of her own, plotting to reconnect with a man with whom she had a dramatic affair in her youth.

Like most of Franzen’s oeuvre, Crossroads could have been trimmed by a good hundred pages. “Pruning back or reining in are unpleasant tasks,” Franzen told the New Yorker in 2001, adding that he prefers “the vastly more enjoyable task of layering as much of life into it as you possibly can”. In Crossroads, Franzen masterfully conveys consciousness and the nuances of belief systems. His sly, self-deprecating wit is a delight: the board game Risk is forbidden in the Hildebrandt household “owing to the Reverend’s violent pacificism”.

Crossroads is a better book than both Freedom and Purity, although I didn’t warm to the Hildebrandts quite as much as The Corrections’ Lamberts. “Every style is a means of insisting on something,” wrote Susan Sontag in 1965. While Franzen now steers clear of the “fancy words” that alienated some readers of his earlier work, his style can’t help but insist on its cleverness. He once quipped that “it takes 600 pages to accurately convey emotion”. But the weight of the words can bury the pulse of the hearts beating underneath. Still, when Franzen is good, he’s very, very good. And having invested 580 pages in the Hildebrandt clan, I can’t wait to see what they get up to next.