Crossroads

My last post was about comfort food; this post will be about comfort reading. I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Crossroads, and I liked it. If you like Franzen, or if you’re a fan of conventionally structured, realistic, literary novels, you’ll like it too, as well as his other ones. If I had to rank his last four books, in the order of my enjoyment, they would be: 1. Freedom 2. The Corrections 3. Crossroads 4. Purity. Of course, my reading of them spans about fifteen years of my own life – I haven’t reread the other three recently – and people change. That’s the beauty of a book or any work of art – the work is the same, but you experience it differently each time, because you’re different. I’m sure I’d feel differently about each of Franzen’s books now, at age 40, especially after the last five years we’ve been through. For my money though, he’s one of the best living American novelists.

Franzen contemplates Crossroads as comprising the first novel of a trilogy called A Key to All Mythologies, which is a reference to Reverend Casaubon’s quixotic, unfinished opus in Middlemarch. The trilogy is projected to span three generations of a fictional family, the Hildebrandts, from the early 1970s to the 2020s. Russ Hildebrandt, the father of the family, is himself a reverend at a Protestant church in a town outside Chicago in the early 1970s, and Crossroads is the name of the youth group that he helps to lead (and which some of his children join) at the church.

Each member of the Hildebrandt family (except for the youngest child, Judson) is at a crossroads emotionally, with both Russ and his wife Marion fed up with each other and looking to stray, while the oldest three children, Clem, Becky, and Perry try to stake out independence as they wrestle their own demons. The familiar Franzenian (?) character type of a passive liberal white man is represented in the person of Russ, who can’t help but seem pitiable throughout the course of the story in his professional and amorous failings. And except for Judson who, as the youngest child, is somewhat of an afterthought, the children come off as bratty and angry at their parents, out of all proportion. But of course, preacher’s child syndrome makes a potent cocktail when mixed with adolescent hormones. Ultimately, Marion is the most likable and interesting character in the story – but doesn’t this make Franzen’s trick more impressive, that his plot, and pacing, and character development are so masterful that I am compelled forward with everyone? It’s what they say about the HBO hit Succession, that the characters’ likability isn’t the question. There are moments in the book, say, in the midst of one of Franzen’s patented, painstakingly-constructed backstories, that make the mind boggle with the sheer monumentality of the edifice. It’s enough to make you rethink your first impressions. As a wise person once said, to understand all is to forgive all.

Maybe the biggest knock on Franzen, and Crossroads even more than the prior three novels, is the writing itself, which is pretty spare and workmanlike. Apart from a few long-unfurling opening lines to chapters (“The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds . . .”), the book lacks lyricism. It’s as if Franzen has decided that poetic language is so much gristle that must be trimmed from this lean tenderloin of plot and character. Call it a milder take on Theodor Adorno’s line about poetry after Auschwitz being barbaric. And there is a certain purity to an unadorned narrative, and the idea that, as in the real world, beauty lies in the lives of people, their relationships to each other, and the finite time they have to perfect those relationships, rather than what anyone says about them.

But for lovers of language, what does it say about America today, that one of our greatest novelists eschews beauty in language? And isn’t this the difference between literature and mere entertainment, or in 2022, has the distinction finally collapsed? It’s not just beauty in language that Franzen eschews in Crossroads, moreover; it’s contemporary life altogether, as if he is retreating to the past, where his identity was formed, and thus where only there things make sense to him. Franzen offers this explanation:

 I started writing a little more than a year into the Trump administration. One of the factors that inclined me toward breaking the book into three was that I could write an entire novel set in the past and not have to deal with the present so long as Trump was president. It felt like we were in a moment here in this country that I could not make sense of in real time. And that if I tried, as much as I’m committed to not letting my political views inform my fiction, I would have succumbed to my rage and dismay at everything that Trump represented for this country. It was just the time to be looking back. It was a kind of escape and an instinct.

And who can blame him? These days, I find myself wondering more and more what the point is of following the lives of made-up people, as ecosystems collapse and a death cult continues its plunge into mass hysteria, dragging our democracy off the cliff with it. The Irish novelist Sally Rooney expresses a similar sentiment:

I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things than writing novels. And I have just failed to do that. . . . There is a part of me that will never be happy knowing that I am just writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic objects at a time of historical crisis. But I am not good at anything else. This is the one thing that I am good at.

Richard Powers attempted to address the problem in his 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Overstory, by centering the narrative more on nature than on humans. And while that work contains some of the most beautiful and revelatory writing about the natural world I’ve ever encountered, in particular the descriptions of the intelligence and irreplaceability of a forest, the story itself feels a bit unmoored.

But why can’t escapism be just as valid a reason for art as any other, especially in times of crisis? Truth and beauty, yes, but on a scorching hot day, nothing is more welcome than a cold drink. And what better escape for Franzen and his audience than the early seventies, when American Christians actually tried to imitate Christ, and a criminal president was forced by his own party to resign in disgrace? Sometimes the tools feel inadequate to the task at hand, but even at its most stripped down, literature can still conjure up that old-time magic. The same fare applies, as always – pay attention, and you will be transported to another world, to experience someone else’s consciousness. And what a relief that can be. Be kind to yourselves, friends.