More than once, as I mentioned to literary-minded friends that I’d received an early copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, I was asked: “Well, how is it?” These weren’t Franzen haters, per se, but I knew full well what they wanted to hear: “Oh, he’s so out of touch on this one,” or “It’s another sprawling family epic that claims to tell the truth about America. You wouldn’t believe how wrong it is!” They wanted me to denigrate Franzen and what he represents — the aging white male novelist who refuses to disappear. But all I could tell them was what I’d continually muttered to myself as I worked my way through the first half of Crossroads: “It’s well done. When the man is on, he’s very good at what he does.” Which is probably what annoys so many people about Franzen. He’s good, he’s been good for a long time, and he will presumably continue being good for a long time. Every five to seven years, he reminds the haters of just how good he is with the publication of yet another sprawling family epic.
Franzen’s latest, Crossroads, takes place in suburban Chicago during the early 1970s, and the family around which it sprawls is the Hildebrandt clan, led by Russ, a middle-aged associate pastor, who, at the start of the novel, is trying to recover from “his humiliation.” Russ’s spouse, Marion, three years his senior, is the prototypical wife and mother who long ago gave up her life and dreams for the greater family good — or so we think. The oldest son, Clem, is off at college and suffering from a bout of “moral absolutism,” which manifests as a desire to drop out and lose his Vietnam deferment. Becky, the lone daughter, is a popular goody-goody with a budding interest in the counterculture. Perry, the true problem child of the family, is a 15-year-old genius with a drug problem who spends his sober hours mentoring the family’s youngest, Judson.
It was Tolstoy who said: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Every acclaimed realist novelist of the past century operated with this adage in mind, and Franzen, their heir, is no different. The Franzen formula, perfected in The Corrections, is simple: The tension created by family secrets will make a family unhappy, but the collision of said secrets once they’re out in the open will tear the family apart. Russ’s secret is simple and cliche but apt for a man suffering a midlife crisis: He is infatuated with one of his parishioners, the newly widowed Frances Cottrell. The previously mild-mannered minister has been weakened ever since he was run out of his church’s youth group, Crossroads, by a hip youth minister, “him of stringy black hair and the glistening black Fu Manchu.” To sleep with Frances is to regain his manhood.
Early on, one is led to believe that Crossroads will revolve around this battle between an aging pastor and the charismatic upstart who’s turned the youth group into a hippy cult. But a quarter of the way through, when Marion, the dumpy housewife, visits a psychiatrist, the novel brilliantly pivots, revealing itself to be not merely a book of male insecurity and narcissism but also of female rage and rebirth.
In the Marion section — the novel alternates between sections told from different characters’ points of view — the housewife who’d earlier been painted as a nonentity is exposed as the one harboring the deepest and darkest secrets. Marion, who’s been visiting a psychiatrist for months, mostly for friendship, finally bares her soul: After her father committed suicide after losing everything during the Depression and her mother moved in with wealthy friends, Marion left her hometown of San Francisco for Los Angeles. She worked at a car dealership, where she met Bradley, a hotshot salesman with whom she fell in love. Bradley was married and wouldn’t leave his wife. And then Marion got pregnant. Bradley tries to pay her off, so she leaves town. She suffers a crackup at a Safeway, where she’s been working since fleeing the dealership:
The smell of certain foods, meat products especially, was revoltingly intense to her, and her fear was growing with the thing inside her. One day, when she was sticking toothpicks in miniature canned franks, her fear impelled her to walk out of the store, run home, and obey the commands of her feral intelligence. She hit herself in the stomach and jumped up and down violently. She swallowed a mouthful of ammonia and couldn’t keep it down. When she tried again and blew ammonia out her nose, the explosion in her head was so extreme she thought she was dying.
We learn that she never told Russ about the crackup and the abortion when they’d met. She still hasn’t told him after 30 years of marriage. The irony, of course, is that Russ, long bored of Marion, has no idea of her mysteries.
Crossroads is a dissection of the American family, but Franzen, very slyly, also sneaks his social commentary through the back door. The novel takes place in the early ‘70s, with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement lurking in the background, which allows Franzen to indict the wishy-washy liberalism that would later blossom into the white-savior social justice movements of today. In an especially cringe-inducing scene, Russ, trying to impress Frances with his love and knowledge of the blues, sounds like a guy straight from Reddit:
“I happen to have the original recording of Johnson singing ‘Cross Road Blues,’” he bragged, repellently. “Back when I lived in Greenwich Village — you know, I used to live there, in New York City — I’d find old 78s in junk stores. During the Depression, the record companies went out into the field and made amazing authentic recordings — Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was working with an afterschool program in Harlem, and I’d come home every night and play those records, and it was like being carried straight into the South in the twenties. There was so much pain in those voices. It helped me understand the pain I was dealing with in Harlem.”
Crossroads isn’t a conservative novel, exactly, but it will appeal to a readership concerned with questions of grace, salvation, and truth. It treats these subjects with a respect and earnestness rarely seen in contemporary fiction. Throughout the novel, the troubled but brilliant Perry is obsessed with questions of goodness, culminating in a drunken scene at a holiday party in which he corners a rabbi and a reverend.
“My question,” Perry said, “is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, what have you. If you’re smart enough to think about it, there’s always some selfish angle.”
This is the question at the heart of Crossroads, and one that Russ and Marion are forced to confront when, after months of chasing their desires, of basking in their supposed liberation from one another, a tragedy befalls one of their neglected children. They are brought back together, but will it last? We don’t get the answer in Crossroads, the first installment of a planned trilogy, but one gets the sense that it won’t be simple. Franzen, thankfully for us, is only getting started with this unhappy family.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
