Crossroads: The latest novel from the international bestselling author of The Corrections

This was the first book I had read by Jonathan Franzen, in fact I had never even heard of Jonathan Frazen before ‘Crossroads’. I had seen ‘Crossroads’ in bookshops and then read some great reviews. The subject matter looked interesting to me and I love a big book but it wasn’t until I saw the Kindle edition for 99p that I grabbed a copy.Crossroads is a huge family drama. We follow the Hildebrandt family just before Christmas 1971. The father and patriarch of the family is Russ. Russ is a second pastor at First Reform church in New Prospect, Illinois. Russ’ wife is Marion, who has dark secrets in her past. Clem is the eldest son and he wants to drop out of college and fight in Vietnam. Becky is the popular child and is falling in love whilst trying to find her own identity. Perry is super smart but has a huge problem with drugs and Judson is the youngest sibling who we don’t learn a lot about in this book. Crossroads is the name of the church's youth group that plays a central part in the story.Although this book seems to divide people, I really enjoyed it. I loved getting to know the characters and I found them all interesting in their own way. It feels like there are so many themes covered in this book; goodness, morality, faith, God, religion, marriage, parenthood, sibling individuality, sibling relationships, love, sex, boyfriends, girlfriends, infatuations, adultery, humiliation, coming-of-age, drugs, music and church to name a few. It sounds like this should all be overwhelming but it wasn’t. The writing is really good, the storyline is strong and the characters are super interesting. The start of the book is set up with five chapters, each one told from the point of view of a different character and most of the action takes place over the course of one day. I found it easy to keep up with the different characters and what was happening in thor worlds.It’s hard to say what happens in this book as it feels like everything but also nothing happens but this is a book to get lost in; very re-readable, beautifully written and compelling. I am very much looking forward to the next instalment.

This is certainly a very readable story of a family living through a range of familiar dysfunctionality, kids not relating well, drugs, uncertainties, various hang-ups, insincerity, infidelity etc.. The specific issue is religion, which Franzen either knows or has researched well. Family members experience its many variants, from the judgmental strictures and shibboleths of Mennonite code, through exploitation and abuse, a pop culture church youth group, to an emphasis on personal enlightenment and virtue. But all lead to fracture rather than harmony. Franzen shows his characters struggling with their natural passions, desires, and faults, their loves and hatreds, their jealousies and friendships, their personal aspirations and realisations. He tries to blend this with the religious quest, but the latter proves inadequate, his final settlement feeling like the compromise we eventually all reach.

This long novel focuses on a family - the Hildebrandts - in ‘70s Illinois. Patriarch Russ is a pastor, lusting after a divorcee parishioner. Russ’s wife Marion is loyal but weary, seeing a psychiatrist, haunted by her turbulent past. Their kids Clem, Becky, Perry and Judson, are similarly troubled, in different ways. Each reach their own ‘crossroads’ moments of moral crisis, to varying degrees. The family dynamic is stretched to its limits. There are epiphanies, spiritual victories - and defeats. Crossroads is a story about longing, love and loss, but Franzen is a great chronicler of family life, and ultimately Crossroads is about families, in the same mould as his previous titles, such as The Corrections and Freedom - both also brilliant novels. Families are tested, divided, and sometimes reunited. Crossroads is also the name of the Christian youth fellowship where Russ is one of the senior figures. There’s some gentle satire of its members and the parent volunteers of New Prospect, where the Hildebrants live - their earnestness and the internal politics of the group, which reminded me a little of Kingsley Amis satirising therapy in Jake’s Thing (which is a good deal more vicious in its lampooning). This novel explores some pretty big philosophical and religious questions and at the centre of them all is faith, its resilience - and its fragility. But always with humour, and it’s never laboured. Franzen is Updikean, preoccupied with most of the same concerns about love, sex and religion. In genre terms, he writes in the classic tradition of the grand Victorian novel, at length and in detail, following the lives of each individual character. That makes reading his work a significant investment of time, but it’s well worth it. Franzen also has a dark humour and (like Kingsley Amis) an eye for fantastic set pieces. He writes with honesty and wit about family rituals and relationships. This is a book to get lost in: very re-readable, beautifully written, and compelling.

Franzen has lost the crucial skill of engaging the reader. It's a rule of fiction that a writer should show but not tell. Rules are made to be broken but not ignored. Franzen ignores the rule to the point of being tiresome.Fiction is as much about what a writer leaves out as what he puts in. What is left out is filled in by the reader's imagination and empathy with the characters. That is the magic of fiction.Franzen leaves out nothing about his characters. He describes every emotion, every thought about that emotion, every emotion about the thoughts about that emotion, every thought about the emotion about the thoughts about that emotion - ad infinitum.In a novel with a thin plot driven by characters we end up curiously uninvolved with those characters. This is because by describing the characters in every detail, Franzen leaves the reader no room to project into them, to provide for them the elements that the author may only suggest or briefly describe. In his endless dissection of the minds of very ordinary characters Franzen destroys the magic of fiction.

O livro é fantástico. Daqueles calhamaço que você consegue devorar em poucos dias, porque a leitura te prende, porque a ansiedade de saber os desdobramentos das decisões de cada um dos personagens não te deixa parar.

Very easy to engross yourself in the characters in this novel, easy read that keeps you turning more pages than you expected to in a sitting!

After reading The Corrections and, particularly, Freedom, I was convinced that Franzen was a force to be reckoned. All the press reviews I thought were spot on. But Crossroads seems like the work of some body else. It is plainly boring and lacking all the luster and intelligence of those previous two books.

That I closed the cover on this 580-page book and felt bereft might make you think one of two things: either that I absolutely have no life, or that I lucked out in choosing a book to further enrich my life. If you read Jonathan Franzen’s latest effort (purportedly the first in a planned trilogy), you’ll (hopefully) realize the latter thing about me (and hopefully about yourself!) would be true.Like several of his previous works, this family saga is set in a small Midwestern town not far from Chicago and focuses on a similar set of characters—a seemingly innocuous married couple: he a frustrated assistant minister, she a frumpy housewife, both saddled with their four kids, not a lot of money but a lot of unscratched itches and accumulated grievances. The timeframe is the early 1970s, though there are excursions to the pasts of both the principle characters.Franzen builds his story slowly but with assuredness. With so much going on, so many disparate threads to weave, you hardly realize that the action is coming to a boil. But it does, at various junctures in the book, and includes everything from rape, arson, abortion, thievery, adultery, drugs, and deceptions of all kinds.At its most serious center, the book is concerned with how people try to do good in their lives but inevitably come up against their own selfishness and myopic self-assorption. Their missteps are sometimes funny, sometimes exasperation and sometimes tragic. The title refers both to a ballad by one of Russ Hildebrandt’s favorite blues-men, Robert Johnson (he who legendarily sold his soul to the devil in exchange for learning to play the guitar), and to the youth group to which the Hildebrandt kids belong: Clem, whose relationship with his father is fraught; Becky, a high school beauty who knows it and thumbs her nose at her mother; Perry, a fifteen-year-old with a sky-high IQ who dangles on a knife’s edge; and Judson, a sweetheart of a child who helps sustain his mother at her most vulnerable.Each of these siblings undergoes a crisis and transformation that, when they come, leave you feeling they were both surprising and inevitable.How so? Mostly through Franzen’s apt juxtaposition between what characters are thinking and what they do or say, the ways in which their desires and disappointments come up against the strictures of family life or of their individual versions of “faith.” To be sure, as in Freedom and The Corrections, the author critiques them, but with humor and compassion as well as with a sharp eye.Consider how the dissatisfaction that dogs Russ Hildebrandt in his thirty-year marriage to Marion is described:It was unfair of him to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only now to feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty.Talk about unerring word choice: “unavailing“ as to makeup.Or, Marion’s revelation much later, when to fulfill her own long-nurtured fantasy, she pays a visit to a former lover on the West Coast:The man who answered was somewhat like Bradley but jowlier, sparser of hair, wider in the hips. He was wearing loose linen pants and an oversized sort of toreador blouse, halfway unbuttoned. Also a frightful pair of sandals. “My God,” he said. “It really is you.” She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. This led to a third and unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.Again, unerring word choice: the “frightful pair of sandals,” and then the “yellowed-toenails.”In addition, there is largely throughout the novel a careful balance of exposition, narrative thrust, and dialogue; time shifts that rarely jolt; and changes of scene that expand the characters‘ (and our own) perspective—from a contentious church retreat to Navajo territory, to a tawdry interlude in Rome, to a hard-scrabble jaunt to the Andes.Very little could I find to object to: perhaps one or two extraneous characters in Marion’s past in California; perhaps a tad too much on the bonding rituals of the church youth group. But these are minor quibbles.Since I’m also a novelist as well as a reader, I typically try to take a few notes about sentence structures, or tonal shifts, or transitions that work well in novels I read. I found something to ponder or emulate on almost every page of this one.Coming away from Crossroads, more enriched for sure, I keep wondering why this author hasn’t yet won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Ce que j'apprécie particulièrement dans ce livre, c'est la juxtaposition, parfois brutale, des façons souvent trés différentes, d'un personnage à l'autre, de percevoir les mêmes évènements et les mêmes personnes. Ce que Perry voit de ce qu'il fait, pense et dit, n'est pas ce que sa soeur, ni sa mère perçoivent de lui et ce qu'il aperçoit du monde est son monde à lui. Ces heurts de perceptions discordantes produisent, à la lecture, une espèce de vertige grisant, comme si la réalité objective était perdue au fond d'un abîme. Magnifique.