All the Hildebrandts seek the path to virtue. This to and fro is refracted through Crossroads, a Christian youth group that changes the lives of all the characters, though never in the way the church intends. Only Judson, their youngest, watches from the sidelines, as yet untainted by the human need to create a set of moral values to justify our mendacity, our doubts and our defensiveness. Oldest son Clem is back from university afire with condescending moral certainty, eager to wound his pacifist father daughter Becky, the prettiest, most popular and productive girl in high school, is slipping down the drain of the counterculture son Perry, a genius, is also the school’s drug dealer, and headed for a violent comeuppance. Russ’s smarter, pudgier, more imaginative wife Marion – Franzen’s best answer yet to critics who claim he can’t create believable females – is overwhelmed by secrets of her own. Russ Hildebrandt, the second-string minister at First Reformed Church of Chicago, is confronting his lust for a sexy, recently widowed parishioner, and all the guilt that comes with it. It’s Franzen’s most sympathetic and most character-driven novel (which is saying something) – less satirical and biting than The Corrections (2001), the novel that thrust him into the limelight at the age of 42 less convoluted and psychologically extreme than its predecessors, Freedom (2010) and Purity (2015) more realistic and centred than his debut, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and its follow-up, Strong Motion (1992). Its 580 gripping pages are set in 1971 and track the once morally cohesive but suddenly splintering lives of Russ Hildebrandt, a minister, and his very white, very middle-class, very Middle American family. Do we need to hear any more about white people? Well, it depends on how the story is told.”Ĭrossroads is told very well. “If I started thinking about what angry people are going to say,” Franzen adds, “I would never write anything. He’s just published Crossroads, his sixth novel and eleventh book, and it’s already controversial. The best-selling, critically admired and endlessly berated writer is now 62 years old.

“I write what I can write, and I happen to have a white middle class experience of the world,” Jonathan Franzen, the American novelist, is saying over the telephone.

Crossroads by franzen