Jonathan Franzen is back! With the grandest-sounding novel of 2021
Two years ago, Jonathan Franzen told the New York Times that he was working on his sixth novel, and that it would be his last, because “he doesn’t know if anyone really has more than six fully realised novels in them”. “I may be wrong,” he said at the time. “But somehow this new one really does feel like my last.”
It turns out he was wrong: his US publisher is set to publish that sixth novel next May, and it’s the first volume of a trilogy. Grandly titled Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1, it is the story of the Hildebrandt family: unhappily married father Russ, who “is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless – unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first”, and their children.
His publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has described Crossroads as “by turns comic and harrowing, a tour-deforce of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense”, and the “foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual and social crosscurrents of the past 50 years”.
Given the many ways in which Franzen is mercilessly mocked by the online world (which he apparently won’t ever see, as he hates social media), surely his publisher is trolling us in turn, a little, when it describes him as “universally recognised as the leading novelist of his generation”? It’s also easy to picture Franzen feeling a little glee over the internet’s realisation that he’s chosen to give his novel the same title as the unfinished work of Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch. “Inviting comparison to Casaubon is bold and annoying and playful and pretentious and unpredictable and obvious and selfdeprecating and self-aggrandizing and … In other words, perfect for Franzen,” author David Burr Gerard wrote on Twitter.
In any event, it can only be good news that there’s more to come from Franzen, who never asked for the Great American Novelist moniker, and who really, really loves birds. Now if we could only convince Bill Bryson to change his mind about retirement…