Crossroads is a Career High for Jonathan Franzen

The writer Jonathan Franzen is one of the most controversial white male American authors of the past twenty years. Accused of literary snobbery (the Oprah scandal), https://www.vox.com/culture/22691692/jonathan-franzen-controversy-crossroads-oprah-franzenfreude remarkably tone-deaf misogyny, and known as a difficult interview, nevertheless Franzen continues to create amazing novels peopled with unforgettable characters. His latest, the first in a trilogy thank goodness, is simply wonderful.

“Crossroads” is the name of the youth group at First Reformed church from which pastor Russ Hildebrandt has been relieved of his duties. Ostensibly his sin is that he’s too “preachy,” alienating the high school kids who prefer the younger, hipper assistant, Rick Ambrose. But, in fact, we learn that Russ indiscreetly, in a moment of extreme oversharing, necessary for Crossroads members, has confessed to an impressionable teenage girl, that he no longer sexually desires his wife, Marion.

Marion is proof positive that Franzen is working to dispel his sexist tendencies. She is such a complex, fascinating work in progress. A victim of sexual abuse whose affair with a married man and her subsequent breakdown at its demise landed her in an institution, Marion is a woman who survived by recognizing what she needed to do to live a simpler, safer life and went after it with intention.

In 1971 she and Russ are living outside Chicago in the First Reformed community and raising their four extremely different children, kids battered by the politics of the times, the drawdown of the war in Vietnam, the proliferation of easy access to drugs, the sexual revolution, and the subtle feeling that all is not right between their parents. How these pressures affect each of the children, Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson, is at the crux of the story.

And then there’s Russ, a mass of contradiction, a man torn between his passion for social justice, his work with the Navajo nation is renowned, and his lust for the natural urges of a middle-aged man enthralled with a newly widowed parish member. His struggles to be a good person, to find solace in prayer to a god who is not listening, to be a good father, come up short when weighed against his vanity and childishness.

Franzen’s superpower is the way he writes interiority. As each of his characters acts out in shocking ways – though not terribly surprising to any reader raised in the white bread ‘70’s suburbs – Franzen allows us deep into their thinking processes, where each grapples with the hypocrisies inherent in the subconscious self, the desire to be other than what appears on the surface. Motivations that might seem inexplicable become clearer when seen in relation to past experiences of cruelty, resentment, humiliation, or deprivation. Reading Franzen is like taking a full semester course of study in Psychology 101.

The humor is wry and biting, just the way I like it. The characters are infuriating and embraceable, so absolutely human. Franzen has taken the myth of the ideal American family and turned it on its head, and I can’t wait to see where he takes them next.