Easily the best book of Franzen’s that I’ve read. As Becca Rothfeld points out, he has ditched the “systems novel” structure of his previous books and has instead laser-focused on what he does best: chronicling the disintegration of Midwestern families, reaching something universal through very particular lives. It’s not as if the “systems” are completely gone either: Russ’s concern for social justice, his service ministry to an Black church in inner-city Chicago and his longstanding relationship with the Navajos in Arizona, has Franzen venturing deftly into racial politics. But they are definitively backgrounded in the saga of the Hildebrandts.
This shift in focus results in a book shorn of satire, with a love for its characters that in previous books would have been occupied instead by smirking disdain. Franzen does not shirk away from describing how screwed up these people are---how pathetic Russ is in the throes of his libido, the depths of Perry’s addiction (crescendoed by a harrowing setpiece in the Navajo reservation), Marion’s curdled self-hatred (and subsequent escape from it, chain-smoking and all), Becky’s newfound religiosity covering her fundamental selfishness and self-righteousness, Clem’s hatred of his father’s weakness resulting in a vagabond existence. But the book is so animated by its characters’ obsessions and struggles with being good that it is hard not to fall for them and their very ordinary humanness. With that, Crossroads is a great success and an enormous pleasure to read.
Maggie Doherty puts forth the idea that Franzen gives a a partial solution to the central question in the book: to be good requires connection with the physical and a retreat from the obsession with the question itself. This she thinks is evidenced by Russ’s experience with the Navajos and Clem’s experience with the Peruvians, both of whom are too taxed with the daily physical struggles of life to ask themselves if they are being good; as well as Russ and Marion’s reconciliation by having sex. Doherty thinks this is a cop-out; I don’t think Franzen meant it to be a “solution” at all. Can’t it simply be another way that these characters cope? It’s not as if Russ or Clem really experienced a sort of spiritual awakening being strangers in strange lands---if anything Russ experienced a sexual awakening in the reservation, while Clem returns to New Prospect shorn of his moral absolutism but still in thrall with incestuous feeling for Becky. And Russ and Marion’s reconciliation through sex is really about Marion overcoming her self-hatred more than anything. I think Doherty is doing Franzen a disservice to say that he is posing any kind of solution: as she notes, he takes as his task as a writer to depict “mystery through manners,” in Flannery O’Connor’s rendition. Mystery by its nature precludes any sort of pat solution.