crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen

They stand at their own crossroads and study what the devil has on offer.įor Russ, who has suffered a variety of professional humiliations, the crisis is one of authenticity. Throughout this novel each of the major characters - Russ, his wife, Marion, and three of their children, Clem, Becky and Perry - suffer crises of faith and of morality.

You know the legend about Johnson: He met the devil at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, Miss., where he exchanged his soul for mastery of the guitar. The family patriarch, Russ Hildebrandt, is also the church’s idealistic associate pastor and an unreconstructed blues fan, and he lends his Robert Johnson records to a younger, adorable, widowed church member he’d like to sleep with. The title, “Crossroads,” refers to the name of a popular youth group at a local church, but it’s got a second meaning. Perhaps the biggest danger, in his families, is to misread one’s position in them. In Franzen’s fiction, families are their own form of religion, with options for salvation and purification, and just as many for apostasy. This is a novel with strong religious themes.

At its center are the Hildebrandts, another of the author’s seemingly solid Midwestern families - like the Probsts in “The Twenty-Seventh City” (1988), the Hollands in “Strong Motion” (1992), the Lamberts in “The Corrections” (2001) and the Berglunds in “Freedom” (2010) - with eggshell foundations. Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events - a car wreck, rape, suicide attempts, adultery, drug deals, arson - that arrive only slowly, as if revealed in sunlight creeping steadily across a lawn. “Crossroads” is a big novel, nearly 600 pages. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations. “Crossroads” is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.Īnd yet here’s the novel itself, and it’s a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker.

Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “ Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary.

Crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen