Franzen's interest in larger issues - pacifism, sin, sex, betrayal, guilt, class conflict, Christian forgiveness - is often buried beneath mountains of angsty prose that seem like backwaters to his narrative's forward flow. This belabored story line struck me as too minor to occupy so much of the novel's first half. He has had a falling out over it with a more popular youth minister, Rick Ambrose.
Russ is in the throes of a personal and professional humiliation involving a work mission to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. In his inner conflicts we see our own ridiculousness.Ĭracks in the suburban facade become chasms as we learn Marion's horrific back story and are introduced to the couple's children, including college student Clem, the "amoral brainiac" Perry and pretty, popular Becky. Fascinating and frustrating by turns, Russ is among Franzen's most memorable protagonists. The massively insecure Russ - vain, childish, preachy, spiteful - confesses he is "bad at being bad." This does not stop him from having a go at half the cardinal sins. His act of Christian charity is countered by the fact that he has the hots for Frances Cottrell, a widowed parishioner who rides along with him that day. Russ is on a mission to a predominantly Black church on Chicago's South Side.
The book, first in an announced trilogy, opens at Christmastime. He and his wife, Marion, have four children. Russ Hildebrandt is a handsome 47-year-old assistant pastor at the village's First Reformed Church. But "Crossroads" is mainly set in 1971, when nearly three of four Americans said they belonged to a church. That Franzen, so attuned to liberal boomer culture, chooses to write about Christianity may seem curious, given today's decline in religious identification among Americans. New in this weighty fiction is the centering of religion. Paul-set "Freedom") fall into the married-with-children category, and "Crossroads" is no exception. They live in the Chicago suburb of New Prospect, which despite its name is no Eden of optimism or happiness.įranzen's previous novels (including his breakout "The Corrections" and his St. Even with God on their side, the Hildebrandt family at the center of Jonathan Franzen's intermittently powerful new novel are far from redeemed.
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