There are, I suppose, levels of fandom. One can be a fan of an artist or a movie or a team or whatever without being a FAN. And that’s how I’d describe my relation to the work of American author Jonathan Franzen. To date, Franzen has written six novels. I have read three of them—The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and now Crossroads: A Novel (2021). Actually, I’m only halfway through Crossroads, but it already exhibits many of the qualities that made The Corrections and Freedom so appealing. While not a stylistic master like Cormac McCarthy, Franzen’s novels are nevertheless rich with finely-observed details and intricate characterization. At times these proclivities slow down Franzen’s plotting, but his novels are never tedious. In the manner of a Dostoevsky, Franzen’s lengthy digressions only make you more eager to learn the fate of his characters. Indeed, Crossroads itself may be a kind of digression: it is the first volume of a planned trilogy called A Key to All Mythologies, which, according to Franzen, is meant to trace the “inner life” of American culture over the last three generations. Needless to say, this is an ambitious project, but my sense is that Franzen has found the right place to start—namely, with the dissolution of mainstream American Christianity in the 1970s. In and through his exploration of the Hildebrandts, an ostensibly “typical” suburban family outside Chicago, Franzen neither endorses nor condemns the church or Christian doctrine. What he does do is suggest that American Christianity was too pliant, too “exhausted,” to resist the deluge of cultural changes first unleashed in the 1960s. In Crossroads, all of the main characters are involved with the church, but they are rebelling against it, whether overtly or secretly. The situation is dire, albeit in comic fashion—for example, the “social justice” loving pastor who goes on inner-city mission trips to flirt with an attractive widow. But such tension is apropos. After all, in mythology, a “crossroads” is a liminal space, a threshold, where demons just as much as deities are bound to show up.
From Franzen’s Crossroads: “She merely winked at Becky, who until then had followed Clem’s example and abhorred dishonesty. The different between dishonesty and make-believe, Shirley said, was artistic imagination.”
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Just bought Crossroads.