I’m not quite a Jonathan Franzen “fan,” but I think it’s fair to say that I’m an “admirer.” By “fan” I mean someone who follows, say, an artist’s entire production or a sports team’s entire schedule. By way of contrast, an admirer exhibits less personal commitment to such material but nevertheless regards it with esteem—a meaning present in the Latin admirari (“to look upon with wonder”). So it is with me and Franzen. I have not read Franzen’s first two novels, nor have I perused his short fiction or nonfiction essays. I’m definitely not a Franzen “completist.” On the other hand, I have read each of his four major novels, starting with the acclaimed 2001 book The Corrections. In each case, I have been wowed by Franzen’s development of psychologically rich characters, as well as his finely wrought observations about American suburbia. At times he seems more like a psychoanalyst than a storyteller, probing the hopes and fears of late modernity, especially those permeating the elitist classes of the Northeast and the Midwest.
And yet, for all of their literary magnificence, Franzen’s novels always seemed to fall just short of greatness. For many, this deficiency can be attributed to a kind of perspectival narrowness. He is, it seems, the quintessential white, male, cisgender, heterosexual novelist. Franzen’s most notable controversy, in fact, foretold such a reputation. In September 2001, when American talk show host Oprah Winfrey selected The Corrections for her popular “book club,” Franzen publicly balked. Among other things, he worried that Oprah’s imprimatur would devalue his artistic accomplishment: “She’s picked some good books,” Franzen conceded, “but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight.” Franzen had been slated to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986-2011), but Oprah rescinded her offer. In the aftermath, Franzen came across not only as a snob but also as a hypocrite—a cognoscente who disdained his audience but wanted their money. Ironically, nearly a decade hence, Oprah again chose Franzen’s work for her book club—this time, his fourth novel Freedom (2010). That Franzen handled the selection of Freedom with more aplomb did not seem to matter. His name would forever be linked with the previous “Oprah affair.” As novelist Jodi Picoult tweeted in 2010, “NYT raved about Franzen’s new book. Is anyone shocked? Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.”
Amid these debates, it was not often noticed that Franzen’s authorial insularity seemed to extend to religion as well. And yet, it always struck me as peculiar that Franzen, scion of the American suburbs, would pay such little attention to church settings or, at least, to the role of Christianity in modern American life. One could argue, I suppose, that The Corrections pivots around the possibility of an estranged family reuniting for Christmas. But Franzen merely presupposes the significance of this holiday, whether in terms of its theological or cultural import. We know that the family in question—the Lamberts of Missouri—were once involved with a Presbyterian church. And yet, that’s all we know. Franzen does not bother to explore why they have seemingly drifted away, nor does he detail the nature of their current religious practices or viewpoints. Religion is slightly more prominent in Freedom, albeit in a negative sense. One the novel’s main characters, a left-leaning lawyer and environmental activist named Walter Berglund, loathes the “unclouded serenity” he perceives in religious believers. The “Siamese-twin fundamentalisms” of evangelical Protestantism and Islamic radicalism are mentioned, but what really gets Walter’s goat is Roman Catholicism: “In Walter’s view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church.” Franzen’s fifth novel Purity (2015) builds on this treatment. One character is said “to hate the Church for its venality and its crimes against women and the planet.” Another uses his position as a church minister to exploit young women.
With all this in mind, it is somewhat surprising, and perhaps even a little concerning, that Franzen’s sixth and most recent novel Crossroads (2021) pivots around church life in the early 1970s. Does the book amount to little more than a hatchet job? Franzen himself does not think so. Crossroads, he insists, is meant to be the first of a multipart series of novels collectively entitled A Key to All Mythologies. This phrase is taken from George Eliot’s classic work Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72), but, in an interview, Franzen says that “a key to mythologies” represents far more than a literary allusion:
I have been thinking a lot about the inescapable nature of religion. Even if it is uncoupled from transcendent beliefs or metaphysical structures, everyone still organizes their life around something that can’t be proved. I would say this goes particularly for the virulent atheists. It had been building in me for a long time, a wish to write about the fundamentally irrational basis for everything we think and do and espouse. And obviously, that phrase came to mind because if everyone has a mythology, it’s only a matter of listing what they are.
For Franzen, then, all people are religious, even “virulent atheists.” Yet, Franzen adds, this intrinsic religiousness is owing to the fact that “everything we think and do and espouse” evinces a fundamental irrationality. In other words, the word “religion” names the illogical side of the human mind, by and from which we account, however deficiently, for whatever we say and do. Each human life, in the end, requires a mythos to sustain itself.
Whether or not Franzen is right on this point is a big question—one that invites philosophical and theological reflection. But Crossroads, qua novel, prefers to show rather than tell. The story’s protagonist, the Rev. Russ Hildebrandt, is a case in point. He has all the trappings of a successful man—an enduring marriage, four talented children, and a comfortable home in the suburbs. Beneath the surface, however, a host of problems are percolating. At home, Russ’ kids are struggling with various crises, none more severe than the drug use of his precocious yet depressive teenager Perry. Equally troubling is Russ’ relationship with his wife Marion. Whereas Russ was raised in a stable, pious home, Marion had a tumultuous, even tragic upbringing. Thus she continues to battle past demons about which Russ himself is unaware. The resulting strain between them has turned their marriage as cold as the bounteous snowfalls that bear down on their Chicagoland town. So, when a new parishioner begins flirting with Russ, he pines for a different life—one with a younger (and thinner) woman, who views him as the spiritual hero he always wanted to be.
To be sure, things are no better at work. Though nominally a figure of repute, Russ is unsatisfied with his ecclesiastical standing. Situated between his church’s august senior pastor and its twentysomething youth minister, Russ feels underappreciated and misunderstood. A onetime “Jesus freak,” Russ views himself as an authentic Christian radical, in contradistinction to youth pastor Rick Ambrose, who prefers hip clothing and (in today’s parlance) “virtue signaling” to serious ethical action. And yet, it is Ambrose’s weekly youth group “Crossroads” that has proven most influential in their Reformed congregation. At “Crossroads,” the youth are invited to see Christianity as a locus for self-fulfillment; talk about the Bible and Jesus Christ has been replaced by talk about one’s personal ambitions and peer standing. Russ despises this diluted form of Christian theology, even as he longs for the status that Ambrose has so quickly attained. Hence, on an annual mission trip to the Navajo Nation, Russ has designs on usurping Ambrose’s authority once and for all. Circumstances, however, conspire against him.
Throughout Crossroads, Russ exemplifies Franzen’s interest in self-mythologizing. The novel features an abundance of references to “God,” but they are of a decidedly Feuerbachian bent. In his massively influential 1841 treatise The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums), German theorist Ludwig Feuerbach argued that theology is, in truth, anthropology. “God,” in other words, is a projection of those sentiments and virtues that human beings instantiate or desire. Hence, when a person is praying to God, she is effectively communing with herself, albeit in an idealized sense. Love, for example, is an eternal human good, and thus to say “God is love” is to deify humanity’s highest good. In my intro-level “Faith, Reason, and Culture” course at Villanova University, I have long used Frank Asch’s children story Happy Birthday, Moon (1982) to illustrate Feuerbach’s Hegelian and, ultimately, atheistic reading of human religiousness:
Of course, as Feuerbach goes on, classical dogmatic theology only confuses the matter. Not only does it wrongly convince people that God exists apart from humanity, but, by way of the Bible or church sacraments, it implies that extrinsic, material “access” to the divine being is available. If human culture is to progress, says Feuerbach, people must come to transcend such superstitious ways of thinking.
While Franzen does not single out Feuerbach’s influence—after all, given the latter’s influence on Karl Marx (1818-83), many of his ideas have come to permeate modern culture—it is clear that Crossroads expresses a Feuerbachian logic. As Franzen himself puts it:
I am singularly uninterested in theology. I’m not uninterested in the Bible, both Testaments. I think the Gospels are an incredibly powerful document. But if you go to the original source, the Gospels, there’s only one commandment that matters, which is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “Yeah, all these other things are important. But that’s the key thing.” My approach to religion, or the way I was thinking about it in Crossroads, was as an experience, particularly an emotional experience.
It is not surprising, then, that many of the novel’s characters invoke God, if only as a means of articulating their inner lives. In an early scene, for example, Russ reflects on his bumbling attempts to impress a female parishioner: “The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days,” Franzen writes, “the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed.” Similarly, while visiting a psychologist, Marion wonders if her own youthful mistakes have resurfaced in her son’s drug problem: “She loved Perry more than ever. His suffering, for which her side of the family was responsible, was the punishment that God waited three decades to inflict on her.” But it’s not just pain that Franzen associates with God. Late in the novel, when Russ fears that his marriage may be over, “God” turns up yet again—this time in relation to happiness.
“I don’t deserve you!”
“Shh. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t deserve joy!”
“No one does. It’s a gift from God.”
In each of these cases, a biblical-cum-theological point is raised, but Franzen provides little in the way of explication. Still less does he attempt to synthesize these different points into a cohesive theological system. For Franzen, religion is a messy affair, just because human lives are nothing if not messy.
To be sure, it is possible that herein lies what Franzen views as the real “key to all mythologies.” Yet, since Crossroads marks the beginning of Franzen’s larger project, it is too early to say for sure. One could even speculate that Crossroads’ distinct socio-historical setting raises another possibility—that the “crossroads” at the heart of Crossroads is the turn from modernity to postmodernity, when Feuerbach’s “anthropological theology” became not just an abstract theorem but an inescapable (and possibly damning) cultural presupposition.
Really enjoyed reading this! I wish I had more to contribute, but I haven't read Crossroads (although another friend had already recommended it to me). You might already know this, but George Eliot had read Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" and even translated it into English, and so just as a matter of literary history and intertextuality, it's quite striking then that Franzen might be picking up precisely on that thread of Eliot's influence in the "key to all mythologies" (which as you note, is already an Eliot quote).
More substantially here - about Feuerbach. Vitor Westhelle broke into a big toothy smile when the topic came up in lectures here at the Lutheran seminary in Chicago, and he talked about Feuerbach as the "gulf of fire" that any modern Christian must cross, i.e. reckoning with Feuerbach's accusations that God, the divine, Christianity, is nothing more than an anthropological projection, the projection of an idealized human self into a symbol or "social construct" I suppose as more recent lingo. I would have to take your Faith, Reason, Culture course to hear how you handle this I suppose, but I think S.K. has plenty of antidotes for Feuerbach. For myself, I always tend to land on lines akin to the paradoxes in Mark 8:34, about attempting to save your life and losing it, and losing it for the sake of the gospel, and how the power of the gospel turns around what is natural human inclination - in the teeth of Feuerbach. The danger still lurks though if an even greater self-deception replaces a previous one, but that's where I think only actual suffering, actual dying, actual losing, actual Anfechtung, becomes the test of faith (and not the argument from a paradox), where you come through the fiery gulf and confess and name, praise, and thank, the God of the cross and resurrection. But here I go preaching....