Books: “Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen
Coming of age in the early 1970s was not exactly a picnic. The country was in transition—members of the Love Generation were entering a burnout phase. Hair was longer, clothes were tackier, and drugs were everywhere, especially if you went to a small-town high school.
It is in this small-town, small-minded milieu we find ourselves in Jonathan Franzen’s wonderful, perceptive new novel, Crossroads.
Russ Hildebrandt, the pastor of a suburban Chicago Protestant church, is undergoing a crisis of faith. A former Mennonite and staunch pacifist, he is upstaged by the arrival of Russ Ambrose, the hot young assistant pastor who is attracting all the too-cool-for-school HS kids with his “Crossroads” group—a cross between the guitar-playing Christianity of the early 1970s and an in-your-face encounter group.
Russ is bored by his wife Marion but has lust in his heart for Frances, the sexy widow who may have lust in hers as well. His daughter Becky, the town’s popular cheerleader, “betrays” her father by joining Crossroads. Son Clem, once influenced by his father’s pacifist views, threatens to enlist in the Army and serve in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Perry, Russ’s younger son who has an IQ in the bazillions, may be dealing drugs.
We follow Russ and his family through a number of events—some tragic, some wildly unexpected—until the book’s timeline ends in the late 1970s. Franzen has sketched such pluperfect portraits of these individuals that you become deeply invested in their lives. I’d love to know what they’re like in 2021.
What makes Franzen—whom Time Magazine once called “a great American novelist”—so worthy of a reader’s attention is not only his intellectual depth but his understanding of human character. In “Crossroads,” he digs deep to find the flaws beneath the surface of a seemingly idyllic family. A spiritual writer (but not religious), he is interested in the family members’ fall from grace and in a few cases, their redemption from what they perceive as sin. It doesn’t hurt that he understands small-town life, either.
Franzen once made the mistake of eschewing Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of The Corrections, one of his earlier works, and she responded by disinviting him from her show. Her loss. Don’t make it yours