“Crossroads“ by Jonathan Franzen:
In this excellent not to say, marvelous novel, a pleasure to read, Franzen stays true to his previous themes: the quietly disintegrating household which lives in stiflingly strained, existential distress and the dramas that are played out again and again in each new generation. Franzen paints a cast of warm vivid characters who reside in the respectable township of New Prospect, a city outside Chicago, Illinois. It is the year 1971 and on a single winter day shortly before Christmas, in a play of interwoven perspectives, the story unfolds.
Here in New Prospect lives the family Hildebrandt, the parents, three sons, one daughter. The Hildebrandts are all isolated in self-absorbed worlds and terrified of their own irrelevance, they are lost and lonely, picking their way through the dark and often are a mystery even to themselves. Each one of them implicitly knows that punishment will be their fate for straying and sinning. Each one struggles “to be good” while strategizing what advantages this being-good could gain them.
There is Russ, the household patriarch, the associate minister of the parsonage. The pastor, a man who for facades sake plays virtuous but inwardly is self-pitying, who is in principle progressive but in practice reactionary. Empathy is not his strength, either and he can’t help feeling that he is a man of yesterday, that he’s lost “the edge” and that the future belongs to, in his opinion, frauds such as handsome and charismatic Rick Ambrose, the pastor who succeeded in winning over from him the adolescent members of the church’s youth group Crossroads. Ever since that incident, after being humiliatingly ousted from the group, Russ spends his days hating him, which flavors everything about his job.
Russ’s relationship with his wife is, to say the least, difficult. The rift in their marriage becomes openly clear when Russ becomes infatuated with a young widowed member of his congregation and his wife moves out of their bedroom. Because he is in the business of penitence, Russ recognizes the certainty that he is a sinner, but then he is also so very holier-than-though that he finds a way to gain even out of his moral decay. Shame and self-debasement are his portals to God’s mercy.
There is Marion who, as her husband, stands at a personal and spiritual crossroads. She is a frustrated, overweight housewife, depressive and full of resentments, as tragicomic as these characters tend to be, her womanhood, her personality rendered invisible to her family behind a cloud of momminess.
Educated as a Catholic she married her missionary Protestant husband and still knows the distinct Catholic feeling of guilt which to her is the inescapable consequence of sin. The arrival of Christmas, the images of red-clad Santas in the stores, sparks memories of a disastrous love affair in Los Angeles 30 years ago. In a scene between Marion and her psychiatrist she is transported back to her early 20s, where she had this toxic affair that landed her in a mental hospital, and now as her marriage splinters many of her then most extreme behaviors return.
Marion is one of the most vividly painted characters and might well be the most memorable of the Hildebrandts.
There is 15-year-old Perry, the Hildebrandts’ precocious third child, the real catastrophe of the novel. Blessed with an IQ of 160 and cursed with a growing drug addiction, he plunges more and more into the dark. Only shortly is Perry able to abdicate from drugs by participating in Crossroads, the youth group in which a “public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.” He muses that “Goodness is an inverse function of intelligence.”: “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.”
Some of the finest passages in Crossroads evoke Perry’s brightly burning intelligent mind in intensifying need of narcotics and quest for oblivion.
There is 18-year-old Becky, the only daughter, the pretty social high-school queen and cheerleader type. She joins the youth group Crossroads and thus deals her father a heavy blow of betrayal. Becky is not a member of her father’s church, and regards him and his faith skeptically. Becky has fallen in love for the first time and the object of her desire is a handsome churchgoing musician. Suddenly she realizes that “if she opened herself to the possibility of belief she might gain an unforeseen advantage.” A marijuana-induced encounter with God brings her closer to her boyfriend and farther from her family.
There is Clem, the eldest son, a student, who also struggles to retain control over his own life. While he and his sister Becky form a loving sibling relationship he is in difficult rivalry with his father. Clem is an atheist and moral absolutist, his solution to be good is that he needs to be and do the opposite of whatever his father, whom he considers to be a moral fraud, is or would do. Clem is coming home from college with a resolution that will shatter his father. In a bravura act of dichotomy, in a very intense setting he, while having intercourse, breaks up with his girlfriend who loves him in an “old-fashioned, romantic, totalizing way” and returns home for Christmas.
There is 9-year-old Judson, the youngest son, whom everyone likes but who doesn’t get as much attention in the book as the other members of the household.
And finally there is the youth group Crossroads, with its tribal air and climate of performative truth-telling, its theatrical spirituality of trying to see God in the relationship between human beings. It seems like a harbinger of our modern social media world, “Love” is everywhere but empathy is hard to find, hugs are freely given but real connections are harder to come by.
Crossroads breathes and evokes the air of the 70s quite well in its emotional dishevelment which strangely finds its similarity in our times. There is the same feeling of urgent expectancy. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these are the 70s were it not for the absence of television and internet. The novel lives on the friction between conservatism and radicalism, Christianity and social activism, and hints that there might not be a solution, that life is full of hardship and that families are both an importancy and utterly, impossibly disastrous.
All of the characters may seem small, manageable and unimportant but the inner lives of them are boundless. And it is exactly this quality, that in smallness such impressive humanity is hidden, that lends the novel greatness.
At first, Crossroads seems like a return to form. As in previous novels Franzen uses family drama to gesture at a global crisis. But thematically and in tone the novel proceeds and evolves beyond previous works.
This is a novel about how to be a good person, a novel with a strong religious and moral presence. In this it is in the tradition of the 19th-century novel. Many of the philosophical questions have their origin in the moral philosophy of the German Idealism and are raised without cynicism or irony but in heartfelt seriousness.
Franzen’s ambition seems to lie not only in mirroring society, but to return the individual readers to themselves by inviting them to find out how to answer and position themselves in regard to these questions. In taking an interest in the character’s trials and tribulations one finds it impossible not to be engaged by the most momentous questions of faith and morale - quite a Dostoyevskian move.
- If I do something good and selfless but at the same time do it also for personal reasons is it then truly good?
- How can I proof to God and myself that my motives are pure?
- Can a deed be bad if the intention was a good one?
Since there is no internet and hardly any TV, these questions appear pristine and unspoiled by irony, untouched by pop-culture, as if they have never been uttered or been trivialized before in countless soaps which make up our modern-day catalogue of narratives. This gives them a refreshing newness and sincerity. This is a world inhabited by people who seem like us but are an eternity of media evolution apart.
The writing is a marvel, it is brilliant and absorbing and throughout the book one has the safe feeling of being in the hands of a very confident storyteller and gratefully lets oneself being immersed and propelled forward in the story. This is family drama as high art. The illuminating of the inner lives of the characters is masterful. One of the most attractive aspects of Crossroads is its depth of moral and religious contemplation. It also shows that literature can still function as a vehicle to explore humanity’s most existential concepts.
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