New novel may be Franzen’s best yet
In his 2002 collection of essays How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen wrote: “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.”
This is an apposite sentiment coming from a writer who would be named variously “the great American novelist”, “a public intellectual” and “kind of a prick”.
The previous year, he released his novel The Corrections, a hyperreal, frenetic, sprawling and magnificent work that revolves on American society and specifically the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children. It delves into the lives of its characters from the mid-20th century to the “one last Christmas” the mother wishes them to spend together near the turn of the millennium. It was released just days before 9/11.
That same year, he did a very bad thing: when Oprah chose The Corrections for her book club, he turned her down, publicly disparaging her literary taste. It was a decision that made him one of the most hated people in America.
Despite the enormous success of his 2010 novel Freedom, another masterpiece of American fiction, it’s an epithet that has stood the test of time in some parts.
All the more telling then that his latest novel Crossroads, the first in a trilogy modestly subtitled The Key to All Mythologies, is largely being hailed as brilliant.
Franzen takes readers back to the Midwest in the 1970s, the heartland of the US, when the Vietnam War is making it look as if the American dream may come apart at the seams.
The story follows two generations of the Hildebrandt family, headed by Russ, the pastor of a church in smalltown Illinois, who, when we first meet him just before Christmas 1971, is hungering for an affair with a recently widowed parishioner and harbouring a grudge against young and hip Rick Ambrose, the charismatic leader of the church’s popular youth group, Crossroads.
Russ’s wife, the self-effacing, self-loathing Marion, who has gained weight over the years — and lost her prematernal intensity, with her husband’s sexual interest — is guarding a few secrets of her own, as are the couple’s three children, Clem, Becky and Perry. Each of the five characters struggles with questions of morality and integrity, privilege and purpose, and the opposing desires for independence and connection.
The New York Times describes Crossroads as “warmer than anything he has yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect”.
Says The Washington Post: “Thank God for Jonathan Franzen. With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, Crossroads is distinctly Franzenesque, but it represents a marked evolution, a new level of discipline and even a deeper sense of mercy.”
Crossroads is “a pure pleasure to read”, according to The Guardian. “Franzen has laid the ground beautifully, and his first act is intoxicating —a luxuriant domestic drama that opens out into politics, running against the grain of the counterculture with its focus on the friction between conservatism and radicalism, Christianity and social activism.”
How does one live morally? the novel asks. More plainly, how can one be a good person? “I know I’m a bad person,” insists Marion, a Jew who converts and becomes a lapsed Catholic who suffers from bouts of depression. On his part, Russ wonders whether an affair, “to joyfully make love with a joyful woman”, might afford him an ecstatic way to follow the teachings of Christ, especially if it leads “his heart towards forgiveness” of Ambrose.
In a conversation on podcast Radio Open Source, Franzen says: “Sometimes you have to take the risk of being disagreeable because much of what is most interesting, most relatable, is also what is rather shameful. And the task of advanced fiction writing, I think, is to go to places that are not necessarily comfortable, but to do it in a way that nonetheless, at some level, feels entertaining because you’re in good hands. You trust the writer to have anticipated your discomfort and taken it into account and rendered something to minimise discomfort and maximise a sense of recognition.”
Embracing the legacy of the 19th-century novel and the aftermath of postmodernism, Franzen epitomises the dispute about what “the Great American Novel” means now. By refusing to stake a claim for himself in the literary canon, he frees himself to simply write, and to write exceptionally well.