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Crossroads, in detail
It is Christmas Eve 1971 in the Chicago suburb of New Prospect, Illinois, and the Hildebrandt family is in various states of crisis. The father, Russ, is an associate pastor at a Protestant church whose youth group, Crossroads, has been taken over by a charismatic rival who now holds all the influence and affection Russ believes he deserves. The mother, Marion, has a secret history that she has managed with extraordinary care for decades and is now watching that management fail. Their eldest son, Clem, is at home from college with a new moral conviction about Vietnam. Their daughter, Becky, is navigating the social politics of Crossroads with the social intelligence of someone who has always gotten what she wanted and is beginning to want things she can't quite name. Their youngest son, Perry, is the most intellectually gifted of the family and also the most in danger.
Crossroads is the first volume of a planned trilogy called A Key to All Mythologies. It is Franzen's most formally disciplined novel — each of the five family members gets substantial chapters, and the book is structured so that you understand the full picture only gradually, as each narration reveals what the others concealed. The 1971 setting is genuinely inhabited: the Vietnam-era countercultural Christianity of Crossroads, the Native American missions, the period's particular mix of idealism and hypocrisy, feel researched and imagined in equal measure.
What distinguishes Crossroads from Franzen's other novels is its explicit engagement with religion. Russ is not a hypocrite in the easy satirical sense — he is a man who genuinely believes and also genuinely fails to live by his beliefs, and Franzen takes both halves of that seriously. Marion's backstory involves a religious crisis and a psychological crisis that are harder to separate than she would like. The novel asks what faith actually is, as opposed to what it claims to be, with more seriousness than most contemporary literary fiction bothers with.
The length and the slow accumulation of perspective are the price of entry. This is not a novel you read for plot momentum. It rewards the kind of reading where you go back to an early chapter after finishing a later one and see it differently. Franzen's critics will find here everything they find in his other work; his admirers will find what they came for, and probably more care in the construction than usual.
The big ideas
- 1.
Franzen takes religious belief seriously rather than ironically — Russ and Marion are not hypocrites in the simple satirical sense but people whose faith and failures coexist without canceling each other.
- 2.
The five-perspective structure requires patience but pays off: each family member's section reframes what you thought you understood from the others.
- 3.
Perry's intelligence is rendered as both his greatest attribute and the thing most likely to destroy him — a familiar Franzen pattern, but executed with unusual warmth.
